Henri Gervex

Henri Gervex (10 December 1852 – 7 June 1929) was a French painter who studied painting under Alexandre Cabanel, Pierre-Nicolas Brisset, and Eugène Fromentin.

He was the son of Joséphine Peltier and Félix Nicolas Gervex, a piano maker. When he was 15, a friend of the family helped him get admitted to the atelier of Pierre-Nicolas Brisset. Three years later, he served in the 152nd Battalion of the National Guard. In 1871 he was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, where he studied for five years along with Jean-Louis Forain, Fernand Cormon, and Eugène Damas, a landscape painter. He also apprenticed himself to the Orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin.

His early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as an excuse for the painting of the nude, but not always in the best of taste. His Rolla of 1878, based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client.