Jean-Joseph Weerts

Joseph Bara was a teenage drummer boy of the French Republic, killed in 1793 during the royalist uprising in the Vendée and made a martyr of the Revolution. Jean-Joseph Weerts painted his death in 1883, when the Third Republic was honouring the heroes of the Revolution, and the picture, now in the Musée d'Orsay, earned him the Legion of Honour the following year.

Weerts was born in Roubaix in 1846 into a family of Belgian origin and studied at the local academy before a grant from the town sent him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to the studio of Alexandre Cabanel. He produced some 700 works, portraits as well as history and religious paintings, and decorated public buildings including the Hôtel de Ville, the Sorbonne and the Paris Mint. A street in Roubaix is named after him.