François Bonvin

François Bonvin knew the poor lives he painted from the inside. Born in Paris in 1817 to a policeman and a seamstress, he lost his mother to tuberculosis at four and was left with a woman who underfed him. He had almost no formal training. For years he earned his living as a clerk at Paris police headquarters and painted in whatever time was left.

In 1849 he showed three pictures at the Salon and won a medal, and the next year he exhibited alongside Gustave Courbet, the combative leader of the new Realism. Bonvin belonged to that movement in his own quiet way, insisting that the plain business of ordinary life was worth a serious painting. He worked mostly in still life and domestic genre: kitchen coppers, bread, a servant at a task.

Behind that was a deliberate revival. Bonvin loved the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Siméon Chardin, whose modest still lifes had gone out of fashion, and he helped bring that kind of work back into esteem. France made him a member of the Légion d'honneur, the national order of merit, in 1870.