Woman Seated in Bed

Toulouse-Lautrec painted this woman sitting up in bed in 1897, on a sheet of cardboard, and the picture's later life runs straight through 20th-century Germany. By 1913 it belonged to the Paris critic Théodore Duret, an old friend of Manet's, who lent it to exhibitions in Munich and Copenhagen. Then it went to Berlin, to the publisher Bruno Cassirer, and by 1931 to the banker Jakob Goldschmidt, whose Danatbank had collapsed that summer in the German banking crisis. Goldschmidt signed his art collection over to the bank as security for his debts but kept the pictures in his house.

He was Jewish, and he left Germany in the 1930s. In 1941 the Nazi Finance Ministry confiscated what he had left behind, and on 25 September that year this painting was sold at auction in Berlin, the proceeds going to the regime. It was returned to Goldschmidt, by then living in New York, in 1955. The Cambridge collector Arthur K. Solomon later bought it, and his collection gave it to the museum in 2004.