Apollo Advent Calendar: Day 19

Apollo is counting down to Christmas by celebrating some of the greatest acquisitions, gifts and bequests of 2013. We’ll take a closer look each day at one of the outstanding objects, works of art or collections shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Acquisition of the Year.

National Gallery, London
The Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve, c. 1870
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875)
Oil on canvas, 73×59cm
Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of Lucian Freud and allocated to the National Gallery, 2012

Corot is best known as a landscape painter, but this striking portrait is a key example of his late figurative work, which came to dominate his output as illness confined him to his Paris studio. The unknown sitter adopts a pensive attitude common to many of his female subjects. Lucian Freud left the painting to the British nation in lieu of tax, in gratitude for the acceptance he and his family found there when they fled Nazi persecution in 1933. Freud became a British citizen in 1939 and remained in the UK until his death in 2011. This work he intended specifically for the National Gallery, which holds 20 Corots, most of them landscapes. Three further gifts – bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas – have been allocated to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the National Museum of Art, Cardiff, and (jointly) the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery.

Corot is often cited as a precursor to Impressionism and modernism. This painting was obviously of importance to Freud – he discussed the bequest with National Gallery director Nicholas Penny before his death, anxious that it should remain on display in the national collection. He wasn’t its only famous owner: it was once the property of Hollywood actor Edward G. Robinson.