Jean Broc

Around 1800 a knot of young painters in the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David decided their master was not pure enough. They wanted the outlines of ancient Greek vases and nothing later, so they grew their hair and beards, wrapped themselves in tunics, and were mocked as les Barbus, the Bearded Ones, or the Primitives. Jean Broc was one of them.

You can see the creed in his best-known picture, The Death of Hyacinth of 1801: the god Apollo cradling the dying Spartan youth he loved, killed by a stray discus in their game, the two pale bodies drawn in clean line against a bare landscape, like figures lifted off a vase. Broc had taken the subject from Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses.

The fashion faded, and Broc spent much of his later life as a portraitist in the provinces around Poitiers and in Italy. Born in 1771, he lived until 1850, working quietly as a portrait painter long after the Bearded Ones had disbanded.