Pierre-Narcisse Guérin

Pierre-Narcisse Guerin was a strict Neoclassical painter whose studio, by accident, helped launch the Romantic movement that would overturn his own style. He believed in clear line, noble subjects from antiquity, and controlled drama, and his 1799 Return of Marcus Sextus, a stoic Roman finding his family destroyed, made him famous overnight in a France exhausted by revolution.

But it is his pupils who are remembered best. Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix, the two painters who broke Neoclassicism apart, both learned their craft in Guerin's atelier, along with Ary Scheffer and Leon Cogniet. Guerin later ran the French Academy's outpost in Rome, the Villa Medici, where the state sent its prize-winning young artists. He died in Rome in 1833.