Jean-Jacques Henner

In 1871 France had just lost Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, and Jean-Jacques Henner, born in an Alsatian village, answered with a single figure. L'Alsace, elle attend shows a young woman in mourning black, the region itself waiting for France to come back. The picture struck a national nerve and fixed his name.

Henner built the rest of his reputation on something quieter: female nudes and nymphs with pale skin and long red hair, rising out of dark, smoky backgrounds. He worked in sfumato, the soft blurring of edges he admired in the old Italian masters, so his figures seem lit from within against the shadow.

He is one of only a handful of 19th-century French painters, alongside Gustave Moreau, to have a whole Paris museum given over to his work. The Musee national Jean-Jacques Henner fills a townhouse in the 17th arrondissement with the red-haired figures he painted until his death in 1905.