Following the example of some of these artists, Lévy-Dhurmer admired Italian Renaissance art, evidence of which can be seen in pastels such as Woman with a Medal, Medusa, Circes and Florence.

Starting with his Bathers, the picture that Lucian Freud first saw at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, Courbet’s tremendously important series of nudes poses questions to us about the male artist’s relationship to his models (as it certainly also did to Manet), as experienced through the paintings. The story involved a 1945 shipment of paintings east to Russia, a sick military commander, a stop in Slovakia, and the reward of Femme Nue Couchée for successful treatment by a local physician, who passed away in 1989.All credit card payments are processed by Paybox, the trusted leader in payment processing for international businesses. He became involved in the Intimist movement, along with Ernest Laurent, Charles Cottet, Henri le Sidaner and René Ménard, whose pastels presaged the Classicism of the 1930s. Femme Nue Couchée resurfaced in 2000, in the hands of a Slovakian art dealer, who of course had no true title to the work, but the advantage of possession. Several decades later the exhibition Around Lévy-Dhurmer ( Autour de Lévy-Dhurmer) at the Galeries du Grand Palais in Paris in 1973 revealed a tendency in art which had been largely unknown until then and which remained on the margins of the great innovative movements of the 20th century, but which was nonetheless of a quality which could not be ignored.

Over the course of this year, Picasso created a battalion of monumental plaster busts based on her striking, classical physiognomy, and as 1932 dawned, her image flooded uncontrollably into his painting. An exhibition at Tate Modern four years ago was devoted to Picasso’s output in 1932, in particular his intense portraits of Walter. Basel, Kunstmuseum; London, The Tate Gallery; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Cubism, 1987-88, no. It was shown to the public for the first time since the 1930s in a 2007 Courbet exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Manet was a great admirer of Courbet but a major competitor also, a truly reflective practitioner of avant-garde painting. Although he was principally a sculptor, Rodin was also proficient in watercolours, enjoying the freedom and the lack of strict control that the medium affords. In an interior decorated with a green checked wall hanging, Gabrielle reclines on a couch covered with a white sheet, and leans on a large cushion. This now celebrated work has an important place within a series of pivotal paintings of nudes, spanning the early 1850s to the late 1860s, that both engaged but also challenged the male gaze: pivotal within the trajectory of his career, and pivotal in facilitating the breach in French painting of the 1860s. Together with the rest of Hatvany's collection, the painting was looted from a Budapest bank vault during the 1945 Soviet conquest of the city in World War II.