Wmpearl · Public domain

Soutine, born to a poor Jewish family in Belarus, arrived in Paris with almost nothing and became one of the defining Expressionist painters of the School of Paris, working directly from carcasses and portraits with a thick, agitated brush that prized texture and distortion over likeness. Drawing on Rembrandt, Chardin, and Courbet, he pushed figurative painting toward abstraction decades before Abstract Expressionism had a name, influencing painters including Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning.