Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry

If you stand in the grand foyer of the Paris Opéra and look up, the ceiling and its long painted panels are the work of Paul Baudry. Charles Garnier, the architect of the new opera house, handed him the whole scheme, and Baudry spent about eight years, from 1866, filling it with allegories of music, muses, harmonies and figures from myth strung along the vault. He even offered to paint the central ceiling itself for no extra fee.

Baudry was one of the polished academic painters the Second Empire loved, trained in Rome and fluent in the smooth, idealised nude. Before the Opéra he had made his name with 'The Pearl and the Wave', a reclining sea-nymph shown at the Salon in 1863 that went to the Spanish royal collection.

He painted other grand interiors too, among them the Court of Cassation in Paris, but the opera foyer took the best part of a decade. The panels run through the whole story of music, from antique lyres to modern harmony, which is why the room reads almost like a picture gallery you look at overhead.