Jean-Paul Laurens

A French king sits slumped on his throne in an empty hall, the crown still on his head, a dropped candle smoking on the floor where the bishops have just walked out. This is Jean-Paul Laurens's Excommunication of Robert the Pious, shown at the Paris Salon of 1875, the moment the medieval Church cut a monarch off from God and, with him, every subject who obeyed him. Laurens staged it as a piece of cold theatre, and it made his name.

He meant the chill. Born near Toulouse in 1838, Laurens was a fierce republican and anticlerical, and he sought out moments in history where the Church or the crown crushed someone, painting them with hard realism so that a 19th-century viewer would take the point. It was a message the young Third Republic liked, and the state kept him busy.

Laurens became one of the last great names of French academic history painting, the grand manner the Impressionists were then pushing aside. He decorated the Panthéon in Paris with the life of Saint Geneviève, its patron saint, and the town hall of his native Toulouse, and he taught a generation at the Académie Julian, the private art school that took the students the official academy turned away.