Théodore Chassériau

At eleven years old, in 1830, a boy from the Caribbean was taken into the Paris studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the strict master of classical line, and quickly became his favourite pupil. Théodore Chassériau had been born in 1819 in Samaná, in what is now the Dominican Republic, and brought to France as a small child.

Ingres expected him to carry the pure-drawing tradition forward. Then Ingres left for Rome in 1834, and the teenager fell under the spell of Eugène Delacroix, leader of the rival Romantics, with his heat and colour. Chassériau spent the rest of his short career trying to hold both at once, Ingres's precise line wrapped around Delacroix's warmth, and that mix became his signature. You can see it in the Two Sisters of 1843, in the Louvre, where his own sisters stand stiff and linear yet glow with deep reds and golds.

A trip to Algeria in 1846 filled his later work with Orientalist subjects. His largest undertaking was a set of murals for the grand staircase of the Cour des Comptes, a government audit court in Paris, finished in 1848. A fire during the Commune uprising of 1871 destroyed most of them. The surviving fragments are now in the Louvre. Chassériau himself was long gone by then, dead in Paris in 1856 at just 37.