Henri Matisse, "Reclining Nude" (1938)

"In my first five years here I was a junior curator and didn’t have a lot to do with acquisitions," says Elderfield. "Then, when I was in the drawings department, there was a very geometric Matisse drawing from the ’30s ["Reclining Nude"] which I had a really hard time persuading them to buy because they said, 'It doesn’t look like a Matisse.' It was eventually bought in 1985 for $35,000. It’s now worth around $2 or $3 million."

© 2008 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York