David Maskill Of the three conditions that could lead to the liberation of a Louvre lodging—death, bankruptcy and madness—the third was the least common, if the most poignant. The enamel painter André Rouquet was forced to leave his lodging in August 1758 when he was taken under guard to…
Noémie Etienne In 1772, Pierre-Antoine Demachy painted the entrance of the Louvre, known as La Grande Colonnade (Fig. 1). Just in front of the Palace, the old buildings, which were being dismantled, and the Cloître Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois are shown in shadow. A large street, which still exists today as the rue…
Jacqueline Riding In the early 1730s the painter Joseph Highmore (1692-1780; Fig. 1) made two foreign journeys. His voyage in 1732 to the Low Countries was his first visit to continental Europe and, as stated by Highmore’s son-in-law John Duncombe, was undertaken chiefly to view the Elector Palatine’s Gallery…
Mark Ledbury One of the many pleasures of the recent Hubert Robert exhibition[1] was to contemplate again that marvelous and mysterious series of paintings Robert devoted to the Grande Galerie at the Louvre. Historians since Marie-Catherine Sahut’s pioneering work have investigated in detail what might have inspired Robert’s imaginative…
Pierre-Édouard Latouche Jean-François Bédard In November 1894 an album of drawings of the Louvre was auctioned in Paris. It formed part of the vast collection of architectural documents assembled by the French architect, collector, and art historian Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-1893). The sale catalogue singled out the exceptional quality of…
Esther Bell In his Idée du peintre parfait (1699), Roger de Piles declared that one must possess three abilities in order to truly understand the art of painting: the ability to determine what is good and bad, the ability to make a correct attribution, and the ability to distinguish…
Anne Higonnet Two régimes overlapped in the Louvre between about 1790 and 1805. The Salon exhibition, held in its Salon Carré, was democratically open to all artists, and so was the first modern museum, in its Grande Galerie. Yet artists were still living and working in the apartments awarded…
Dominique Poulot Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Yannick Lintz, Françoise Mardrus, Guillaume Fonkenell, dir. Histoire du Louvre (Paris: Fayard et Louvre éditions, 2016), 3 volumes reliés sous coffret. Vol. 1 : 768 pages ; Vol. 2 : 776 pages ; Vol. 3 : 448 pages, 2016. ISBN: 978-2-21367-111-6 D’après les publicités de l’éditeur il s’agit d’un…
Anne Perrin Khelissa, ed., Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des Lumières, Études sur le XVIIIe siècle 43 (Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015), ISBN: 978-2-8004-1585-7 In Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Norman Bryson examines still life—that much-maligned form of painting that art…
In an 1880 edition of L’art du dix-huitième siècle, Edmond de Goncourt mentioned a pair of allegorical pendants (1769; Figs 1 and 2) by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780), which are now in the collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) in Salt Lake City.[1] Subsequent scholarship on the…