This week’s picture is Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) by Henri Matisse. Painted in 1935, the work was purchased the following year by Miss Etta Cone, one of two wealthy sisters whose collections were to form the nucleus of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Yesterday it went on display at the Royal Academy in London as part of “The Triumph of French Painting”, a loan exhibition from Baltimore which demonstrates just what formidable collectors the Cone sisters were. By the end of their lives they had, between them, amassed no fewer than 42 paintings, 18 sculptures, 36 drawings and 155 prints by Matisse.

For his part, the painter regarded the Cones as friends as well as patrons. He encouraged Etta to buy The Pink Nude, successfully tantalising her with various black-and-white photographs of the picture taken at different stages of its evolution. The work occupies an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, restating the theme of a sensual, languorous nude which preoccupied him for so much of his life; but it can also be read as an intriguing document of Matisse’s affection for one of the most fruitfully acquisitive American collectors of the twentieth century.

The Cone sisters - “Miss Etta and Dr Claribel”, as their friends called them - were lifelong spinsters who inherited considerable fortunes from their father, a wholesale grocer of German-Jewish descent. Dedicated connoisseurs, they travelled the world together visiting galleries and churches and acquiring en route a multitude of antiques, curios and works of art. They were introduced to Matisse in Paris by their friends and fellow Baltimoreans, Leo and Gertrude Stein.

“There were two of them, they were both women, they were sisters, they were together,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her characteristically mannered and oblique “word portrait” of the pair. “They...

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