Jules Lefebvre

Jules Lefebvre won the Prix de Rome in 1861 and spent the next half-century as one of the safest names in French painting, a maker of smooth, idealized nudes and society portraits that the official Salon rewarded year after year. His Truth of 1870, a nude woman holding a gilded mirror above her head, was the kind of picture that defined respectable academic taste.

His deeper mark was as a teacher. At the Academie Julian, the private Paris school that took students the state academy turned away, Lefebvre instructed hundreds of painters from across Europe and America, women among them at a time when the official Ecole barred them. Many who later broke with academic style learned their drawing from him first. He kept exhibiting and teaching until his death in 1911.