Léonce Bénédite

Léonce Bénédite (14 January 1859 – 12 May 1925) was a French art historian and curator. He was director of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris before becoming first curator of the Musée Rodin.

Bénédite was born in Nîmes. He founded the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in 1893 with Alphonse-Étienne Dinet. He also founded the Abd-el-Tif prize for bursaries at the Villa Abd-el-Tif together with the then French governor of Algeria. He died in Paris, aged 69.

Bénédite was the first art historian to explicitly acknowledge the similarities between Manet's Olympia and Titian's Venus of Urbino.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léonce_Bénédite