François Lemoyne

For three years François Lemoyne lay on his back on scaffolding under the ceiling of a great new salon at Versailles, painting the largest single composition in the palace. When the Salon d'Hercule was unveiled in 1736, its ceiling carried more than 100 figures swirling up toward the god Hercules being received among the gods of Olympus. It had no join and no break, one vast painted sky.

Louis XV was delighted and named Lemoyne First Painter to the King, the top of the profession in France. Lemoyne had spent his career reaching for exactly this, admired as a colourist and called by some a new Le Brun, after Charles Le Brun, who had decorated Versailles for Louis XIV two generations earlier.

The triumph did not steady him. His wife had died, he was exhausted and increasingly troubled, and on the 4th of June 1737, barely a year after the unveiling, he locked himself in his Paris apartment and killed himself with his sword. His finest pupil, François Boucher, would go on to define the lighter, softer taste of the years that followed. The Hercules ceiling is still in place, the last thing Lemoyne finished.