Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) was born Jean Frédéric Bazille on 6 December 1841 in Montpellier, in the south of France, into a wealthy Protestant family. He went to Paris in the early 1860s to study medicine, but he soon gave it up for painting, and there he met Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.
Thanks to his family’s wealth Bazille had a larger studio than most of his friends and supported Monet and Renoir in their early years. He was above all a figure painter, placing his models in sunlit landscapes painted outdoors. His best-known work is Family Reunion (1867–68), painted on the terrace of the family estate at Méric near Montpellier and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
In August 1870, a month after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Bazille joined a Zouave regiment. He was killed in action on 28 November 1870 at Beaune-la-Rolande, aged 28, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday. His first retrospective was held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1910.