Karen Wilkin notes that Bazille was "better at the male nude than the female." Among Bazille's female nude subjects was La toilette (1870), in which an unclad white woman is attended by a black female servant wearing only a skirt of foreign design and a turban. The mistress's hand rests lightly on the servant's shoulder.

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To their side another female servant, this one white and in modern dress, holds a shawl. Her presence situates an otherwise exotic scene in contemporary culture. Porterfield sees in this composition "a concentration of Orientalist clichés that connoted a lesbian encounter."

Because Bazille's career was so short and since he did not leave a large body of work--some sixty-five oil paintings dating from 1862 to 1870--it is somewhat difficult to assess his place in art history. Wilkin describes him as "a serious man . . . struggl[ing] to find an individual voice and method when possibilities were enlarging."

His work shows the influence of painters from the past, in particular the Venetian Old Masters, Delacroix, and Courbet, but also shares characteristics with the work of his contemporaries such as Monet and Renoir. He is generally considered a pre-Impressionist or early Impressionist and is remembered as a talented participant in the inner circle of the nascent movement.

Several artists and art critics of the nineteenth century achieved a self-aware homosexual identity that is expressed in both their lives and their works, but lesbianism is only rarely depicted in terms of identity during this period.

Throughout much of history, the nude male figure was virtually the only subject that could be used to articulate homoerotic desire in publicly displayed works of art, as well as those works of art intended for private "consumption."

Although his personal sexual orientation is uncertain, American painter, photographer, and teacher Thomas Eakins is solidly aligned in the history of art with a homophile sensibility, as expressed particularly in his celebration of the male form.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.