Portrait of a lady, seated in a parc (La dame de Francfort)

In 1858 Gustave Courbet spent months in Frankfurt, where the art academy lent him a studio, and he came away with about a dozen paintings. This is the grandest of them, a wide canvas of a wealthy woman seated at a table on a tree-lined terrace above a stretch of water. Who she was, and who paid for the picture, has never been established, though she plainly belonged to the Frankfurt high society that opened its doors to the visiting French star. Courbet gives her the ease of someone used to being looked at, the fan and flowers at hand, the garden dropping away behind. It has hung in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne since 1958.