Jean Jouvenet

In 1713 Jean Jouvenet, by then the leading religious painter in France and nearly 70, was struck down by a stroke that left his right arm useless. Rather than stop, he taught himself to paint with his left hand, and in that way finished a large Visitation for the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris and a ceiling for the law courts of his native Rouen.

He had come up the hard way from Rouen, a Norman town with its own painting tradition, before making his name in Paris under Charles Le Brun, the artist who ran the whole decoration of Louis XIV's Versailles. Jouvenet specialised in grand, dramatic scenes from scripture, full of strong gesture and deep shadow, and he supplied altarpieces and church decorations across the capital.

One of his best-known works, a Descent from the Cross admired for its stark lighting, dates from 1697, well before the paralysis. On the Notre-Dame canvas he signed off the rest of the story himself, adding to his name that he, paralysed in the right hand, had painted it with the left.