Ary Scheffer

The house on Rue Chaptal in Paris, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique, was for nearly 30 years the studio of Ary Scheffer, and on its evenings you might find Chopin at the piano, the composer Franz Liszt, the painter Delacroix, or a visiting Charles Dickens. Scheffer was born in Dordrecht in the Netherlands in 1795 and spent almost his whole career in France, taking French citizenship only in 1850.

His subjects came largely from books, from Dante and Byron and above all Goethe, whose Faust gave him the doomed lovers Faust and Marguerite that he painted again and again. He also grew close to the House of Orléans, employed to teach the children of Louis-Philippe, who became king of the French in 1830.

In his own century his sentimental religious pictures made him hugely popular and rich. Taste turned against that sweetness after his death in 1858, and today he is met most often in his old home on Rue Chaptal, kept as a museum of the Romantic age.