[4] The model who posed for the painting has been the subject of much speculation and mythologising, with many accounts depicting her as having had a love affair with Lefebvre, and committing suicide after he declined to marry her.

[2] An ardent admirer of Chloé since its debut at the 1875 Paris Salon, American journalist Lucy Hamilton Hooper travelled to Lefebvre's studio to ask him about the painting.

She quoted him as saying that, after completing the painting, he traveled abroad for a few months, and on his return learned that the model had died:[2] She was a girl of more refinement and elevation of sentiment than is usually to be found among persons of her position, and, being in the hands of a gang of low confederates, they had attempted to force her into a way of life from which her soul revolted.

Thus driven to despair, the poor child poisoned herself by washing phosphorus from friction matches, and then swallowing the decoction.The only other first-hand account of the model, and her possible identity, is Irish writer George Moore's in his 1886 memoir Confessions of a Young Man.

[2] Mention was made in The Argus on 5 March 1887 of another painting of Chloé at the second annual exhibition of the Australian Artists' Association at Buxton's art gallery in Swanston Street; Mr. J. C. Waite sends in a ... half-length figure entitled Chloe, which is stated to be a portrait of the young lady who sat to M. Lefebvre as a model for the picture of the same name.

It is a charming head and face, with the roundness, freshness, and bloom of youth in the countenance, and a look of innocence and simplicity, which is not always associated with the female models of Parisian artists.