Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy

Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy, who signed his work Géo, lived above a small private school in Paris run by two teachers, Louis and Julie Girard, and the children below became his lifelong subject. From the late 1870s he illustrated children's books for the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and in 1882 he joined an official commission on pictures for schools and received a government order for five large paintings.

His scenes follow the classrooms, clinics and charities of the Third Republic. Visiting Day at the Hospital, painted in 1889 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, shows a hospital ward on visiting day and was seen both as a picture of poverty and illness and as a tribute to medical progress. He died in Paris in 1924 and left his collection to Julie Girard, the teacher from the school downstairs.