Brief Biography-Francois Lemoyne was from Paris. In 1701 he began studying at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which lasted for twelve years. He was a member of the Academy and became a professor when he was forty-five. At one stage he tutored François Boucher. In the last years of his life, he was First Painter to the King and worked in the Palace of Versailles, notably on the ceiling in the Hercules Drawing Room. Unfortunately, soon after finishing the ceilings, his wife died, and between the grief and high pressure he had to endure in the palace, he lost his sanity and stabbed himself to death in 1737.