Henri-Paul Motte

Henri-Paul Motte trained in the Paris studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the most exacting of the academic history painters, and he took from his teacher a habit of treating the past like a reconstruction, with armour, ships and costumes researched down to the buckle.

His debut at the Salon in 1874 was 'The Trojan Horse', the great wooden animal hauled toward the city walls at dusk. The picture that made his name came a few years later: the Siege of La Rochelle of 1881, showing Cardinal Richelieu in armour on the sea-wall he had built to starve the Protestant port into surrender, his cloak snapping in the Atlantic wind.

Motte kept painting these historical set-pieces, ancient sieges and druids and Carthaginian brides, through decades when younger painters had turned to Impressionism. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1892. Today his meticulous reconstructions live on mostly as book and magazine illustrations, the kind of vivid history-picture that shaped how readers pictured the ancient world.