Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize

Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize's Gallic Women is a canvas more than six metres wide. It shows an episode of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in which Gallic women kill their own children rather than let them fall to the Romans, and Glaize made them defiant figures. Painted in 1851, it was shown at the Salon of 1852, bought by the state, and spent more than a century at the museum in Autun in Burgundy before coming to Paris and the Musée d'Orsay.

Glaize, born in Montpellier in 1807, trained with the brothers Achille and Eugène Devéria, Romantic painters. Much of his career went into the great church-decoration campaigns of Second Empire Paris, at Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Eustache and Saint-Gervais. He also taught his son Léon Glaize, who became a history painter as well.