John Collier

In late-Victorian London the fashionable painting was the 'problem picture', a scene that hinted at a scandal and let the viewer guess the story. John Collier made a career of them, canvases like 'The Prodigal Daughter' where a woman in evening dress faces her stunned parents and nothing is spelled out.

He was also one of the most sought-after portraitists of his day, painting Darwin, Kipling and half the House of Lords. Science ran close to home: he married two of the daughters of Thomas Huxley, the biologist who defended Darwin in public, and he wrote a plain-spoken manual on the craft of painting.

His best-known picture strips the formality away. His 'Lady Godiva', the medieval countess riding naked through Coventry to spare its people a tax, shows her slumped and downcast on a richly draped horse, the town around her deliberately empty.