French Paintings in the Louvre

The French paintings in the Louvre represent well over half the Museum's entire collection; their quality and fame make them by far the most important extant collection of such works. It was therefore decided to divide the Louvre's great paintings into two parts, and that the first of them should be devoted solely to the French School. It should, however, be emphasised that the Museum's other collections, such as the Italian, could well have merited this preeminence, since chronologically the scope of these two parts does not go much beyond the middle of the nineteenth century and, therefore, excludes the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The second part, European Paintings in the Louvre, covers the Museum's wealth of works from countries other than France and with the first provides for the reader a balanced view of the collection as a whole. In the following pages we shall trace the history of the Louvre itself and of its unique range of French paintings from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Apart from Watteau in the Wallace Collection in London and in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and Bourdon in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, there is scarcely any French artist that can be more fully studied elsewhere than in the Louvre.