Jean-Baptiste Greuze

In the 1760s the most talked-about pictures at the Paris Salon were tearful domestic dramas by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. He painted ordinary families at emotional peaks, a father's deathbed, a bride leaving home, a spoiled child, staged like scenes from a play and loaded with moral lessons.

The critic Denis Diderot, the era's most powerful voice on art, adored him and held him up as proof that painting could make people better. Greuze also traded in a softer, sly kind of picture, pretty girls with symbols of lost innocence, most famously a young woman clutching a shattered jug in The Broken Pitcher.

His reputation did not survive the change in taste. As the cooler Neoclassical style took over and then the Revolution swept away his aristocratic buyers, Greuze fell out of fashion and lost his money. He died in Paris in 1805, largely forgotten, in rooms in the Louvre where the state let poor old artists live.