Léon Bonnat

Leon Bonnat was one of the most sought-after portrait painters of the French Third Republic. Presidents, writers, and bankers sat for him, and he gave them a sober, dark-grounded dignity, faces and hands crisply lit against shadow, that the establishment trusted completely.

His deeper mark was as a teacher. From his studio and later the Ecole des Beaux-Arts passed an astonishing range of students, among them Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustave Caillebotte, Edvard Munch, and the young Georges Braque, many of whom would break hard with everything Bonnat stood for.

He grew rich and spent it on art, assembling a superb collection of old-master drawings and paintings that he left to his home town of Bayonne in southwest France, where the museum still carries his name. He had learned his own trade partly in Spain, and the weight of Spanish painting, especially Ribera's deep shadows, never left him.