Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin

Henri Martin is the painter who took the hard science of Pointillism and made it soft. Born in Toulouse in 1860, he studied there and then in Paris under the history painter Jean-Paul Laurens, and a Salon prize sent him to Italy. It was in Rome that he found his manner: he broke his colour into small strokes the way the Neo-Impressionists did, but instead of exact dots he used loose, comma-like dabs, so his fields and gardens shimmer rather than vibrate.

Around 1900 he bought Marquayrol, an old farmhouse above the village of Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot valley of southwestern France, and painted the same terrace, orchard and hillsides for the rest of his life, following them through every season and hour. At the same time he was one of the Republic's favourite muralists. For the Capitole, the town hall of his native Toulouse, he painted large decorations of country labour, among them a scene of mowers and the banks of the Garonne, turning ordinary harvest work into calm allegory.

He died at Marquayrol in 1943, in the house he had painted more often than any other subject.