Bernard Dufour (1922-2016) studied agricultural engineering before becoming a painter in 1945. His early work tended towards abstract landscape, but by the late fifties he was painting more figurative self-portraits, male heads of tragic intensity and female nudes. These last add an erotic dimension to work where reality is always seen through the lens of memory or dream: blurred lines, mirror images, everyday objects in eerily unfamiliar surroundings.

This same sensuality pervades his Mouton Rothschild label for 1963: grapes and a recumbent human figure, with a line from Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune -“Ainsi, quand des raisins j’ai sucé la clarté… ” (Just so I sucked once the lustre from the grapes).