A sightly, olive skinned curvaceous young woman, who leads a dissolute life, lounges on a couch wearing little more than a pair of cream stockings. One is supported by a black garter, the other has lost its elasticity. She is also wearing a pair of black suede loafers with a silver buckle.

Gustave Courbet Femme nue couchée, 1862 Private collection

She is shielded by heavily hung crimson-coloured drapes which have been partially parted to reveal a prevailing storm; perhaps a metaphor for an evening of passion.

For six decades, this erotic chef-d'oeuvre by the French realist Gustave Courbet, one of the great painters of the female nude who played an important role in the Impressionist Movement, went missing. It was believed to be stolen either by the Nazis or the Red Army.

The canvas, Femme nue couchée, has now resurfaced. This curious saga of what happened to the painting and how it came to be recovered, is only just beginning to emerge. Courbet's missing masterpiece is believed to have spent most of the past 60 years hanging in the home of a country doctor in Slovakia. Just how it came to be there and how it came to be returned to the heirs of its wealthy Hungarian-Jewish owner, is a convoluted and bewitching tale.

In the early months of 1945, as the Red Army advanced across Eastern Europe, a group of Russian soldiers knocked on the door of a doctor who lived in a village adjacent to Bratislava. At gunpoint, the doctor treated one of their wounded comrades and accepted payment by way of a rolled-up painting. This must surely be the most expensive consultation in history if the story is authentic. The Femme nue couchée and the scandalous L'Origine du Monde had been bought in 1913 by Baron Ferenc Hatvany, head of a Hungarian-Jewish banking and sugar-making family. From 1908, he became a coveted art collector in Europe, collecting more than 2,500 works.

By 1946, Hatvany skillfully managed to buy back Courbet's scandalous nude, L'Origine du Monde from the Soviet Union. The painting was later acquired by the French philosopher-psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Then after his death it went to the French state as part payment of death duties. It is now housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Hatvany make it his mission to trace the whereabouts of the Femme nue Couchée but to no avail. Then in 2000, it appeared at Christies in London, and finally after a lengthy legal battle the painting was returned to Hatvany's heirs two years ago shrouded in secrecy.

Gustave Courbet Self-Portrait / Le Desespere (c. 1843, private collection) Courtesy of Conseil Investissement Art BNP Paribas

Jean Désiré-Gustave Courbet was born on 10 June 1819 in Ornans, France, a rugged area in the Franche-Comté region near the Swiss border. His father Régis Courbet was a landowner with vineyards in Flagey, a small village about eight miles from Ornans.

In 1831 Courbet attended the nearby seminary in Ornans. While there, Courbet's explosive temper and lack of respect for authority came to the forefront. From an early age he was out to shock. Before taking confession he drew up an audacious list of sins. They were from the trifling peccadillo to the darker side of life. He scandalized to point that no priest was willing to grant him absolution.

"I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime, except for the régime, of liberty." (1)

(1) Extract from one his letters published in Letters of Gustave Courbet 1992 University of Chicago Press, cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Courbet#cite_note-letters-0