Alfred Philippe Roll

In 1887, near his summer house on the Normandy coast at Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer, Alfred Roll painted a young farmwoman from the village, Manda Lamétrie, who was barely 20. The portrait, now in the Musée d'Orsay, was hailed as the most important picture of the exhibition when it was shown in 1888, and it was reproduced in large numbers.

Roll was a committed republican who gave working people the scale usually kept for history painting. His Miners' Strike of 1880, now in the museum at Valenciennes, made his name, and he became one of the official painters of the Third Republic, trusted with large public commissions. He was among the founders of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the breakaway exhibiting society set up in 1890, and he was elected its president when the portraitist Carolus-Duran left to direct the French Academy in Rome.