The Marriage of Saint Catherine

The canvas reached Montpellier with François-Xavier Fabre, a painter born in the town who spent decades in Italy and bought it out of the Gerini collection in Florence. He handed his pictures to his birthplace in 1837, and that gift is how the museum began. In 1863 a medical student from Montpellier called Frédéric Bazille set up in front of this painting and copied it at almost exactly its own size, 125 centimetres square. He soon gave up medicine for painting in Paris, where he shared studios with Monet and Renoir. In November 1870 he was killed in the fighting at Beaune-la-Rolande, three weeks short of 29, and the year after that his father gave the copy to the church of that village, where it hangs still.