Musidora

In late-18th-century England, a painter who wanted to show a naked woman needed a respectable excuse, and literature supplied it. Gainsborough took his from a poem nearly everyone then knew, James Thomson's Summer, part of The Seasons, where a young man named Damon comes upon Musidora bathing and turns away out of love. That literary cover let the nude pass as English verse rather than mere flesh. It was the only nude Gainsborough is known to have attempted, and he never finished it. The canvas was still in his studio, incomplete, when he died in 1788. It came to the nation in the Vernon gift of 1847, and you can still see the loose, unresolved handling of a picture its maker never signed off.