Laura Leroux-Revault

At the Paris Salon of 1894, a 21-year-old painter from Lorraine showed a canvas called Anne and Jehanne. It entered the state's collection, and in 1896 it was deposited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, where it still hangs.

Laura Leroux grew up inside painting. Her father, Hector Leroux, was a successful painter of scenes from ancient Rome, and he was her first teacher. She went on to the Académie Julian, a private Paris school that took women students, and studied with Jules Lefebvre and Jean-Jacques Henner, two academic painters who were friends of her father. A love of Shakespeare and the Middle Ages runs through her pictures, which often show women in medieval dress, as in her Salon entry Jehanne Ire de Naples, about a queen of Naples.

In 1898 she married Louis Revault, a chocolate manufacturer who later became a deputy for Paris. That same year Henner painted her full-length portrait, which belongs to the Musée d'Orsay and is on loan to the museum in Angers.