Henri Leopold Levy

Henri-Léopold Lévy belonged to the generation of history painters who decorated the public buildings of the Third Republic. Born in Nancy in 1840, he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel and Eugène Fromentin among others. His largest commission was a series of scenes from the life of Charlemagne for the Panthéon in Paris, including the emperor's coronation, and he also painted ceilings for the town hall of Paris's 6th arrondissement.

His later career was harder. During the wave of antisemitism around the Dreyfus affair, the case of a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason, Lévy, who was Jewish, refused his dealers' demands that he sign his pictures under another name, and he lost an important outlet for his work. He died in Paris in 1904.