François-Auguste Biard

Most Salon painters imagined their far-off scenes from the comfort of a Paris studio. Francois-Auguste Biard actually went to the places. In 1839 he joined a scientific expedition to Spitsbergen, high in the Arctic, bringing along a young woman named Leonie d'Aunet, whom he later married and who would in time become the mistress of the writer Victor Hugo. His icebound paintings from that voyage, shown at the Salon of 1841, drew huge crowds.

He was already popular for comic and dramatic genre scenes, the sort of crowded, storytelling pictures the public loved. In his late fifties he set off once more, this time up the Amazon and its tributaries in Brazil, among the first European painters to record the indigenous peoples he met there.

Biard also turned his brush to slavery. Around 1833 he painted 'The Slave Trade', a wide, unsparing scene of captives on the African coast. It was later shown in Britain in support of the abolition cause, and today it hangs at Wilberforce House in Hull, the birthplace of the campaigner William Wilberforce.