Jean-André Rixens

In the spring of 1874, while the painters later called the Impressionists held their first group show in a former photographer's studio in Paris, the official Salon hung a canvas nearly three metres wide by Jean-André Rixens, then 27. It showed the death of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, and it remains the picture his name is known by. Today it hangs in the Musée des Augustins, the fine arts museum of Toulouse.

Rixens came from Saint-Gaudens, at the foot of the Pyrenees, and trained in Toulouse and then in Paris, in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the leading academic painter of the day. In the 1880s he turned from history subjects to portraits, and in 1890 he was among the founders of the National Society of Fine Arts, a breakaway exhibiting society led by the painter Meissonier. Between 1896 and 1904 he painted three military scenes for the Salle des Illustres, the great hall of the Toulouse town hall.