Joseph Frans Nollekens

This London-born sculptor spent his life carving marble so smoothly that his busts looked like living people frozen in time. He’d lock himself in his studio for months, only emerging when the light hit his latest piece just right. Nollekens once charged a nobleman £5,000 for a portrait bust—about half a million today—because he knew his work would outlast the subject. His sculpture of a Roman sacrificial victim still sits in a quiet corner of the British Museum, where you can see the way he turned cold stone into warm flesh.