It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

But a lesser known work by him—a salacious painting of a nude New York socialite—ended up taking the spotlight on Thursday’s episode of the FX TV series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (streaming on Hulu), which traces the manipulative friendships between the writer Truman Capote and the moneyed Manhattanites in his circle.

One of those Manhattanites was C.Z. Guest, a debutante turned actress who married Winston Frederick Churchill Guest. Played by Chloë Sevigny in Feud, Guest is remembered for having remained friends with Capote much longer than the other women he claimed to adore.

When it comes to art history, Guest played a bit part, posing for famed artists of her era. The Surrealist Salvador Dalí painted her in one of his dreamy landscapes, coolly seated before galloping equines—an allusion to Guest’s own love for horseback riding and her husband’s career as an international polo champion. Pop artist Andy Warhol photographed Guest playing out that passion, seated atop one of her horses.

But it is a 1945 Rivera painting of Guest that became the most well-known—and ended up sealing her fame.

That painting, titled In vinum veritas, features Guest reclining in the buff, her body fully on display for the viewer. (Images of the work are hard to come by, but one appears in a Christie’s press release from 2015.) She lies amid flowers draped across her, and her cheeks are rosy. If its Latin title, which translates to “In wine, there is truth,” is to be heeded, she may already be drunk.

In vinum veritas was painted after Guest had already found a following in New York, having appeared in the Broadway show Ziegfeld Follies, and gone to Mexico to raise her profile further. It worked, and the painting became her calling card abroad. The New York Times even mentioned it in her obituary in 2003, and a remembrance published in the Times the following day quotes fashion critic Cathy Horyn: “Pity the poor socialite today. She will never know what it’s like to be painted in the nude by Diego Rivera.”

The nearly-9-foot-long painting initially hung in a Mexico City bar called Ciro’s, located at the Hotel Reforma. But once Guest married in 1947, her husband, a prominent polo player with a sizable family steel fortune, saw fit to remove In vinum veritas from public view.

According to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, which ran an extensive article on the painting in 2005, Winston Frederick Churchill Guest proceeded to buy the painting. It remained stowed away in private for many years, only to reemerge in 1986, four years after he died. The painting then headed to auction at Sotheby’s, where it was reportedly valued at $1.5 million.

Nineteen years later, the owners of Mexico City’s Avril Gallery saw the work in a Miami home. With the journalist Sondra Schneider, they researched the painting and even put it on view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in 2005. The painting reappeared in 2015 at a selling exhibition held by Christie’s.

Still, as Rivera’s works go, this one is a deep cut. But in the lore about Guest, it has occupied a central place. Capote himself wrote of the work, referring to it as “a honey-haired odalisque desnuda.” And Guest even spoke highly of Rivera, noting that he “was very kind, and I became famous.”