Augustin Théodule Ribot

Ribot was 38 before the Paris art world took much notice of him. He had come up from Saint-Nicolas-d'Attez in Normandy, trained at a trade school in Châlons, reached Paris in 1845, and earned his living decorating gilt picture frames. His Salon debut came in 1861, with four paintings of kitchens. Collectors bought them, and medals followed at the Salons of 1864 and 1865.

Kitchens stayed his subject far longer than a career-minded painter would have allowed. Cooks at work, a boy scrubbing at a pot, families reading aloud by lamplight, often posed by his own household. The lighting came out of the Spanish and Dutch painting he studied in the Louvre, Ribera above all, with Rembrandt behind him, faces and hands lifted from a nearly black ground. He used the same handling on religious subjects, and his Saint Sebastian of 1865 hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, showing a late moment in the story, two women washing the wounds, a broken arrow on the ground.

The Legion of Honour reached him in 1878. His health was already going by then. He gave up painting, moved out to Colombes on the edge of Paris, and died there in 1891. One of the early kitchen pictures, a boy at work from 1864, is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.