Nicolas François Octave Tassaert

At the Salon of 1850 Octave Tassaert showed a picture of a mother and daughter dying together in a bare attic, killed by the fumes of a charcoal brazier they had lit to end their lives. It was the kind of scene that made his name in the 1850s, tender and grim, with sick children and abandoned wives, and it earned him the nickname the Prud'hon of the poor, after the softer classical painter Prud'hon.

Born in Paris in 1800 into a family of engravers, Tassaert trained as a printmaker and painted portraits, religious and sentimental subjects, and, more quietly, sensual nudes that sold discreetly. The critic Baudelaire admired him and the novelist Alexandre Dumas collected his work, yet he grew poorer and more bitter, drinking heavily and withdrawing from the art world he had come to despise.

His eyesight failing and his health gone, in 1874 he killed himself in his Paris lodgings with charcoal fumes, the same method he had painted a quarter of a century before.