Gabriel Ferrier

Gabriel Ferrier's longest influence came through his students. Among those who passed through his classes were Roger Bissière, later an abstract painter, and Albert Lynch, the illustrator of fashionable Parisian women, and at the École des Beaux-Arts he eventually succeeded Jean-Léon Gérôme as a teacher.

Born in Nîmes in 1847, the son of a pharmacist, Ferrier trained at the École under Ernest Hébert and Isidore Pils, won the Prix de Rome with a scene of the Flood, and spent the mid-1870s at the French Academy in Rome. He painted Orientalist and history subjects and became a busy society portraitist. In 1906 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.