Louis Hector Leroux (27 December 1829, Verdun-11 November 1900, Angers) was a French painter in the academic style, affiliated by critics with the Néo-Grecs movement in art.

[1] In 1849, at the age of twenty, he entered the École des beaux-arts de Paris and for eleven years studied in the atelier of François-Édouard Picot, where he won medals for drawing, landscape, and historical composition.

After his copy of Titian was completed and sent to Paris, Leroux stayed on in Rome, supporting himself, alongside Henner, by painting picturesque scenes for the foreign tourists.

"[3] Leroux lived seventeen years in Rome, with excursions across Italy and beyond to Greece, Asia Minor, Turkey, and Egypt, as well as some return trips to France.

[11] In 1863, at the age of 33, Leroux debuted at the Paris Salon with two paintings: Croyantes ("Believers," also known as Invocation to the Goddess Hygieia) and Une Nouvelle Vestale.

Croyantes shows two women helping an ailing supplicant to approach a statue of a goddess in hopes of obtaining a divine cure, while Une Nouvelle Vestale depicts a candidate for the chaste life of a keeper of the holy flame of Vesta, protector of the city of Rome.

I collected the scattered fragments of their lives as I found them in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tacitus, Suetonius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Justus Lipsius, and other authors who have since become my only companions.

He shows them to us in the performance of all the functions of their virginal priesthood, sometimes rekindling the symbolic flame on the burning altar; sometimes invoking the goddess; sometimes sitting on the steps of their temple; and sometimes walking in white processions in the countryside with vast horizons...I love these chaste and proud girls of the great Roman aristocracy, charged with watching over the eternal fire of their goddess, and smothering in their marble bosoms the flames of all mortal love.

"[15]His final painting submitted to the Paris Salon, in 1899, the year before his death, closed the long series devoted to Vestals with a grim finis.

)[16] Besides Vestals, Leroux painted a number of other images inspired by the ancient world, almost invariably centered on women, including paintings of Sappho, Messalina, the Lesbia of Catullus,[17] the mythical Danaïdes, a Sibyl, and women at worship at sacred shrines, usually in groups, but in one case a lone supplicant seeking vengeance on a faithless lover or a rival by making sacrifice to Eros Ultor (Avenging Eros).

[20]While living in Italy, he followed the work of pioneering archaeologists and collaborated with them; Pietro Rosa, excavating the House of Livia on the Palatine Hill in 1869, commissioned Leroux to make watercolor copies of the ancient wall paintings "before they faded.

"[21] For the library of the École des beaux-arts de Paris he was commissioned to produce a meticulous study of antique costume embellished with numerous sketches, a work which survives in manuscript form.

"I will not examine whether this composition is exactly consistent with historical data," wrote Marius Chaumelin in his review of the Paris Salon of 1863; "I will only point out that the novice seems to have far exceeded the upper age limit (10 years), below which the new priestesses of Vesta were chosen from the patrician families.

[16]In a similar vein, an American contemporary of the artist, Lucy H. Hooper, described Leroux's paintings as "dream-children; they come from the past; they are born of the mythical atmosphere that envelopes the regions of antiquity.

While Leroux is "attentive and respectful of these women who are graceful and serious, holders of a secret about the past," he also see in the Vestals' "condemnation to a long chastity" and in the punishments meted out to them "the victims of a cruel religion.

Leroux himself expressed an equivalency between Christian and pagan miracles in explaining how he came to paint two different versions of the miraculous arrival of the statue of the goddess Athena atop the acropolis of Athens.

The final version of Minerve Poliade sur l'Acropole d'Athènes, shown at the Paris Salon of 1878, depicts the statue appearing amid clouds of vapor, and, writes Hooper, three young girls, the sole witnesses of the miracle.

There is more than one link between the nuns of John Everett Millais digging the graves of The Vale of Rest or the white shadow embarking on Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and the Vestals of Leroux.

A profile of the artist in Gil Blas published on his birthday in 1886 describes his home and atelier at 26 Rue Lemercier:The workshop is on the second floor.

One climbs a staircase whose steps are covered with Aubusson carpets; earthenware from Delft, Saxony, Rouen, drawings by all modern masters, among whom we notice wonderful sketches by Detaille and Henner, adorn the walls; lamps from Judea and Palestine, hanging from long chains and burning a fragrant oil, throw a strange light onto the stairs, where, thanks to the thickness of the carpets, not a step is heard.

Let's enter the workshop....On the grayish walls you can see drawings and paintings executed according to the decorations, frescoes and sculptures that adorn the houses of Pompeii, ornamental studies, bronze and marble statuettes.

Paintings include his earliest known work, Jésus guérissant un paralytique (1850); Coriolan chez les Volsques, submitted for the Prix de Rome in 1859; Une nouvelle Vestale and Croyantes or Invocation à la déesse Hygie,[28] his debut pieces at the Paris Salon of 1863; Frère et soeur, depicting the artist's children, Nicolas and Laura, in ancient Roman costume, shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris; and Trois lectrices (1891).

The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris holds Philoclès dans l'île de Samos (1855) and Homère demandant l'hospitalité (1855), two studies painted while Leroux was a student;[41][42] a number of student drawings made in the 1850s; and two commissioned copies, L'amour sacré, L'amour profane (1860, after Titian) and L'Aurore (c. 1864, after Guido Reni).