Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes spent his career covering walls. While the Impressionists were chasing sunlight on the boulevards of Paris, he was up on scaffolding painting vast, pale murals for town halls and museums in Lyon, Amiens, and Marseille, and for the Panthéon in Paris, where his scenes of Saint Genevieve watching over the city still line the nave.

His pictures look almost the opposite of fashionable 1880s painting. The colours are chalky and muted, the figures simplified and set in shallow, frieze-like space, and nothing moves quickly. He wanted the calm of a Greek relief, painted to sit quietly on architecture rather than punch through it. Critics of his day found it cold. Younger painters found it liberating.

Gauguin kept a photograph of a Puvis mural pinned up for reference, and the flat colour and dreamlike stillness of Symbolism, and of Seurat's large figure compositions, owe him a real debt. In 1890 he helped found the breakaway Salon, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and served as its president. He married the Romanian princess Marie Cantacuzène late in life, in 1897, after nearly 40 years together, and the two died within months of each other the following year.