Sold privately during the latter part of the intervening decade, The Origin was masked with a specially constructed cabinet, topped by another Courbet painting of 1875, The Château de Blonay, a likable picture of a castle in snow. When next traceable, The Origin had come, cabinet and all, into the possession of the Baron Ferenc Hatvany, of Budapest. It was now the early twentieth century. Something—no one is sure what—happened to the painting during the Second World War. It was seized by the Red Army from the depths of a Budapest bank in 1945, and/or Baron Hatvany, who was Jewish and who benefited from a passport provided by Raoul Wallenberg, escaped with the painting concealed in the false bottom of a suitcase two years earlier, and/or the baron simply escaped at some time or another, perhaps as late as 1950, from behind the Iron Curtain, bringing the painting with him. What is known is that after the war Hatvany set up house on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, where he concluded his days writing a study of the influence of photography on nineteenth-century painting. The Origin appears in this learned text as an exemplary canvas; strangely, the baron misremembered its name, retitling it The Creation of the World. In 1958, he passed away.

The Origin had in fact resurfaced in polite French society some years earlier, in 1954, having been purchased, as if in a novel, by the celebrated psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The painting took up residence in Lacan’s country home at Guitrancourt, a space he shared with his second wife, Sylvia Bataille, née Maklès, the film actress and former spouse of Georges Bataille, author of Histoire de l’oeil, that major literary blossom of the slow death of French cultural dominance. At Sylvia’s request, the painting was masked again, now with a vaguely vaginal landscape daubed on wood by André Masson.

After Lacan’s death in 1981—he had suffered a car accident on the peripheral highway in 1978 and gone into decline—the painting disappeared again, or nearly. Lacan was rich and his two wives, along with their respective children, were at odds. Sylvia Lacan, formerly Bataille, would claim that it was she who had first noticed Courbet’s canvas in the 1950s, that it was she who had asked her husband to acquire it on her behalf, that perhaps they had split the cost. Sylvia—who had apparently removed The Origin from Guitrancourt in secret—was only discovered to be the clandestine owner by another woman, the perspicacious American curator Linda Nochlin. In 1988, after the painting traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was exhibited before the public for the first time, it was also properly reproduced in color. As the catalogue, Courbet Reconsidered, circulated, the painting at last entered into general notoriety. In 1995, in a final burst of glory, it was collected by the Orsay.

This is, at least, Clare’s understanding.