Anne-Louis Girodet

Anne-Louis Girodet trained under Jacques-Louis David, the stern master of French Neoclassicism, and then quietly began to pull away from him. His 1791 'Sleep of Endymion' shows the beautiful shepherd asleep in a strange silvery moonbeam that slips through parted branches, a dreamy, sensual mood David never aimed for.

He went on to grand literary and political subjects, among them a misty vision of dead French soldiers received by the ancient bard Ossian, painted for Napoleon. His colour and lighting keep tipping toward the coming Romantic taste.

Girodet was famously difficult and worked slowly, often through the night by lamplight. In his later years he wrote poetry and painted less.