Young and Jackson Hotel

This pub on the corner of Swanston and Flinders has been pouring beers since eighteen sixty-one, but the real attraction is upstairs. In a room on the first floor hangs a painting called Chloe, a life-sized nude by French academic painter Jules Lefebvre. She has been watching over Melbourne drinkers since nineteen oh nine, and her story is one of the strangest love affairs between a city and a painting you will ever hear.

Chloe debuted at the Paris Salon in eighteen seventy-five, where critics praised her. She came to Australia for the Sydney International Exhibition in eighteen seventy-nine and then the Melbourne International Exhibition. A local doctor named Thomas Fitzgerald bought her for eight hundred and fifty guineas. In eighteen eighty-three, Fitzgerald loaned Chloe to the National Gallery of Victoria, which had just started opening on Sundays. The painting of a naked woman on display on the Sabbath caused an absolute uproar. The press went wild. Public opinion split right down the middle.

When Fitzgerald died in nineteen oh eight, Henry Figsby Young, the pub's owner, snapped Chloe up at auction and hung her in the saloon bar. And here is where it gets genuinely moving. During World War One, World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam, soldiers heading overseas would come to say goodbye to Chloe. They wrote letters to her from the trenches in Turkey, France, and Papua New Guinea, promising to come back. Many did not. In nineteen eighty-eight, the National Trust and Heritage Victoria declared that Chloe must remain part of the hotel forever. She is heritage-listed. She is not going anywhere. And neither, it seems, are the people who love her.