Antoine-Jean Gros

Antoine-Jean Gros trained under Jacques-Louis David, the stern high priest of Neoclassicism, and then found a subject his teacher never had, Napoleon. Travelling in Italy in the late 1790s he met the young general and fell into his orbit, and over the next decade he produced the images that built the Napoleonic legend. In Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken of Jaffa he showed the commander calmly touching a sick soldier's sore, unafraid of infection, like a healing king. In the Battle of Eylau he painted the frozen aftermath of a slaughter, the emperor riding through a field of the dead and dying.

Those pictures, full of movement, warm colour, and real feeling, pointed straight toward the Romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix, both of whom admired him. When David went into exile in 1816, he left Gros his studio and told him to bring French painting back to the pure classical path.

That charge broke him. Gros spent his last years labouring at cold mythological subjects the critics disliked, convinced he had betrayed both his master and his own gift. Unhappy in his marriage and in poor health, in 1835 he walked into the Seine near Meudon and drowned himself, a note found on him saying that, tired of life, he had ended it.