Franz von Stuck

Franz von Stuck rose from a Bavarian miller's son to a prince of Munich art in a single generation. In 1893 he showed a painting called Sin, a nude woman half-swallowed by shadow with a huge snake coiled over her shoulders, its eyes and hers fixed on the viewer. It scandalised and thrilled people, sold endlessly as a print, and made him famous.

He helped found the Munich Secession, the breakaway of modern-minded artists, and built himself a villa that was itself a work of art, every room designed down to the furniture in a heavy, gilded, half-antique style. The state made him a nobleman, and he added the aristocratic von to his name.

His most lasting influence, though, was as a teacher at the Munich Academy. Through his studio passed Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers, three of the artists who would go on to invent abstract and modern art, students who absorbed his craft and then left his dark Symbolist world far behind. He died in Munich in 1928 in the villa he had built.