Henri Gervex

In the spring of 1878 the Salon jury in Paris threw out a painting by the 26-year-old Henri Gervex before the public could see it. The picture, Rolla, illustrated a poem by Alfred de Musset: a young man who has gambled away everything stands at a window at dawn, about to take his own life, while the woman he has spent his last night with, a courtesan, sleeps naked on the bed behind him.

Salons were full of nudes, so the naked body was not the problem. What the officials found indecent was one small, precise detail in the lower corner, the heap of clothes flung on a chair, a corset and a discarded dress, which made it unmistakable what had just happened in that room. Barred from the Salon, Gervex hung Rolla in a private gallery nearby, the newspapers filled with the affair, and the crowds came. The rejection made him famous.

He spent the rest of a long and comfortable career as a fashionable painter of Paris society and official ceremonies, the scandal well behind him. He died in 1929.