Seated Nude

A canvas of 128 by 90 centimetres, a studio model in a pose held long enough to be drawn properly, and no signature anywhere on it. In his sixties Bernard painted a great many nudes, singly and in groups, and copied nudes by Titian and other Venetians to learn how they built a figure up from a dark ground. He wanted to be counted as a classical painter. In the 1920s that ambition had already produced two sets of very large canvases on the history of mankind, both called the Cycle humain, and work of this kind fed them. The picture came to Amsterdam in 1989 with a group of late Bernards given by a Swedish couple, Bengt and Elin Ekström of Uppsala.