This is the most precisely drawn but also the most sensual of Cézanne's three copies (see Chappuis, Adrien. The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, nos. 1096, 1098) after the Hellenistic marble known as the Venus of Vienne, which was discovered in that city in 1878 and put on view in the Louvre the following year. Cézanne's choice of it as a model reflects the same taste for full, fleshy female figures that informs his numerous copies after Rubens; the Crouching Venus has in fact been called "a type which might be compared to Rubens's nude women" (Bieber, Margarete. The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age. Rev. ed. New York, 1981, p. 83). Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 54.