Balthus (1908-2001)

Polish-born French painter. He was famed for his enigmatic paintings of interiors featuring languid, pubescent girls, both clothed and nude, for example Nude with Cat (c. 1954). The studied, intense realism with which his self-absorbed figures are depicted lends his pictures a dreamlike quality.

Encouraged to paint by his parents - both artists - and friends such as Bonnard and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Balthus studied in Italy, in Florence and Arezzo, painting landscapes and absorbing the work of the Italian masters, particularly Piero della Francesca.

Although initially associated with the surrealists, his early paintings of street scenes, in which figures appear rigid and entranced, more closely ally him to magic realism, as in The Street (1933).