Martin Drolling

In April 1817 the Paris Salon opened with a small kitchen scene on its walls, and the man who painted it had died a few days earlier, aged 64. Martin Drolling's Interior of a Kitchen shows two women at work beside an open window and a child playing with a cat among the pots, painted in the careful manner of the Dutch 17th-century masters he admired. That June the Louvre bought it from his son for 4,000 francs.

Drolling came from Alsace, from the village of Oberhergheim near Colmar. He learned from a local painter, enrolled at the Academy school in Paris in 1779, and for years sold small pictures to a dealer for a few coins apiece. He showed at the official Salon from 1793, and between 1802 and 1813 he also painted decoration for the porcelain factory at Sèvres, just outside Paris. Two of his children, Michel Martin and Louise-Adéone, became painters too.

One story about him is hard to pin down. During the Revolution the embalmed hearts of French royals were removed from Paris churches, and tradition says Drolling bought some of them to grind into mummy brown, a pigment then made from mummified remains. It has never been confirmed, and the same tale is told of another painter, Alexandre Pau de Saint-Martin.