Narcisse Virgilio Díaz

As a boy in the woods outside Paris, Narcisse Díaz was bitten by a snake, the wound was badly treated, and he lost a leg. He spent the rest of his life on a wooden stump, tramping the Forest of Fontainebleau to paint it.

Born in Bordeaux in 1807 to Spanish parents and orphaned young, he began in an unlikely trade: decorating porcelain at the famous Sèvres works outside Paris, laying bright flowers and figures onto plates and vases. That love of thick, jewelled colour never left him. When he settled near the village of Barbizon in the 1830s, he fell in with Théodore Rousseau, the leader of a group of painters who had left the studio to work outdoors among the trees.

Díaz painted the forest as deep shade pierced by sudden light, the ground glittering, the sky a bright gap in the canopy. He also kept turning out small, glowing scenes of nymphs and bathers that sold well and paid the bills. Younger painters watched him closely, and the young Renoir, working nearby, took his advice on how to load a brush with colour. Díaz died in 1876 at Menton on the Mediterranean coast, where he had gone for his health.