It is thought to depict the painter's lover Lise Tréhot as the Roman goddess Diana, although the exact identification of the model in the painting is disputed by art historians.

According to the painter, he added the attributes of Diana because "the picture was considered pretty improper", and turning it into a mythological subject would make it more acceptable.

Details such as the blood coming from the deer's mouth and the moss on the rock's surface, as well as the use of a palette knife to apply paint, show influences from the Realist painter Gustave Courbet.

[4] Diana was in private collections until 1963 when Chester Dale, who had bought it in 1933 from Etienne Bignou, bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

[1] Peter H. Feist has called the painting "a beautifully accurate nude, without the coarseness of Courbet's Bathers 14 years before" and "far more healthy and realistic than—as Zola put it—the pampered, lustful nudes, powdered with rice flour, of the fashionable painters of that time".