"The Maid Of Honer" By ~ Jean-Francois Raffaelli ~ 1867 - 1924.

Jean-François Raffaëlli was a French realist painter, sculptor, and printmaker who exhibited with the Impressionists. He was also active as an actor and writer, mostly during the first half of the 20th century.

Raffaëlli was born in Paris. He showed an interest in music and theatre before becoming a painter in 1870. One of his landscape paintings was accepted for exhibition at the Salon in that same year. In October 1871 he began three months of study under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris - he received no other formal training. Raffaëlli produced primarily costume pictures until 1876, when he began to depict the people of his time—particularly peasants, workers, and rag-pickers seen in the suburbs of Paris—in a realistic style. The rag-picker became for Raffaëlli a symbol of the alienation of the individual in modern society.