Alexandre Cabanel

The Paris Salon of 1863 came to be called the Salon of the Venuses, for all the nudes on its walls, and the one everyone agreed on was Alexandre Cabanel's. His Birth of Venus shows the goddess adrift on the foam in a pose more languid than modest, and Emperor Napoleon III bought it on the spot for his private collection. Cabanel was 40, and in the same year he was made a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts and elected to the Institut de France, the body that ran the Salon itself.

He also sat on the jury that season, the jury that rejected so many painters, Manet among them, that the outcry pushed the state into opening a separate Salon des Refusés for the refused works. Two years on, Manet's Olympia, a real woman staring back from that same reclining pose, hung to open ridicule. History has largely sided with Manet, and Cabanel became shorthand for the academy the modernists were pushing against.

That reputation flattens him. He was one of the most sought-after portraitists and teachers of the Second Empire, and his Paris studio trained hundreds of painters, including the naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage. He kept winning Salon medals and state commissions until his death in 1889.