This sensual painting, by Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton depicts a languorous long-limbed female beauty barely clothed in sheer see-through orange and curled up asleep on a couch drenched by the rays of the setting Mediterranean sun.

It is one of the most memorable and reproduced images in the history of British art, was painted by Leighton in 1895 and sold during the 1970’s, a very bad time to sell Victorian art, to an art gallery in Puerto Rico for around £900. Today it would sell for millions.

Flaming June is featured in an exhibition of five of Leighton’s paintings – Flaming June: the Making of an Icon – which runs at Leighton’s studio and residence in Holland Park, London, now the Leighton House Museum, until April 2.