Constant Troyon

Constant Troyon grew up inside a porcelain works. He was born in 1810 in Sèvres, just outside Paris, where his father worked at the famous royal manufactory, and as a boy he was set to painting the tiny flowers and scrollwork onto plates and vases. He spent his twenties at that patient decorative work before he broke away to paint landscapes out of doors.

For years he followed the lead of the Barbizon painters, the group who had left Paris to work in the forest of Fontainebleau. The turn came in 1847, when Troyon travelled to Holland and studied the 17th-century Dutch masters, above all Paulus Potter, famous for painting cattle at life size. Troyon came home an animal painter. His big canvases of oxen hauling a plough at dawn, or cows standing in the wet morning light, sold across Europe and made him for a while the most sought-after animal painter of his century.

He died in 1865, only 54, his mind failing in his last years. His mother outlived him, and used the money he left to found a prize for animal painting at the Paris art school.