Edmund Blair Leighton

Edmund Blair Leighton painted a Middle Ages that never quite existed, polished, gallant and free of dirt. His best-loved picture, 'The Accolade', shows a queen in white laying a sword on the shoulder of a kneeling knight, and it has been reproduced on countless prints and covers.

Working in London around 1900, he specialised in these tidy scenes of knights, maidens and Regency courtship, each carefully costumed and finished to a high academic gloss. Critics of the day filed him among the pleasant, minor storytellers.

He exhibited steadily at the Royal Academy for decades but was never made a member. Much of his popularity today comes from reproductions rather than the original canvases, which are scattered in private hands.