Albert Bartholomé

In the Musée d'Orsay, Albert Bartholomé's painting In the Conservatory, shown at the Salon of 1881, has an unusual companion. It portrays his wife Prospérie, known as Périe, standing in the doorway of a glasshouse in a white summer dress printed with violet stripes and dots, and the museum also owns that very dress, given the year after the painting arrived in 1990.

The couple's Paris home was a meeting place for artists, where Edgar Degas set the tone. When Périe died in 1887, Bartholomé gave up painting and, on Degas's advice, turned to sculpture. His first work in the new medium was her tomb at Crépy-en-Valois, north of Paris.

He went on to a celebrated career as a sculptor. His Monument to the Dead, a great stone wall with mourners approaching a doorway, was inaugurated in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris on 1 November 1899.