Louis La Caze

As he found himself in no want of fortune, he drew his practice from among the poor, pro bono, and lived a life of extreme simplicity and privacy.

For decades La Caze, who was an amateur painter himself, had haunted minor dealers in second-hand bric-a-brac, paying modest prices for paintings that were not in the mainstream of fashion and were not easily nursed through the cumbersome vetting process that led to official purchases for the Louvre.

As the rest of the art world caught up, La Caze was to be seen haunting the Paris auction houses.

La Caze's salon in the rue du Cherche-Midi was open to progressive artists such as Degas and Manet or François Bonvin, who were training their manner on close examination of painters like Velázquez, whose Portrait of the Infanta Marie-Therese (1653) was in La Caze's collection, and Jusepe de Ribera, at a time when the Spanish school of painting was largely ignored in French official circles.

Some 250 of La Caze's paintings were retained at the Louvre, while the rest were distributed among the provincial museums of France.