Barrie Cooke always painted the women I have shared my life with, adding that I've always painted the people I've been sexually involved with. In this powerful, intimate painting the woman is not named but her relaxed pose suggests an extraordinarily private relationship between artist and subject, between man and woman, between him and her. If being naked suggests being vulnerable and being belittled, being what Shakespeare calls the thing itself . . . . a poor, bare forked animal, nude suggests a dignified elegance, a beauty, a confidence, a feeling in this instance, especially, of being at ease with oneself. A nude is also a portrait but Cooke has said that to think about the character before you is a disaster: You have a fact in f...