Comparatively few mediæval French works of art have been preserved to us. The Hundred Years’ War, the devastations of the League, and the Great Revolution made a clean sweep of them with fiendish thoroughness. With the châteaux, abbeys, and monasteries, their contents so far as works of art were concerned also perished. What survived has up to now appeared to a pre-conceived idea scarcely native. One historian of art wrote after another, that, up to the period of the Renaissance, the plastic artists who worked in France came partly from the Low Countries, partly from Italy, but were only quite exceptionally, if at all, Frenchmen. From a geographical standpoint, we might speak of a French mediæval art; but from the nature and form of the work, on the other hand, we should admit only a Flemish or Italian, but no French art. This view is no longer defensible. France, too, had, in the Middle Ages, her own artists and schools of art, and if she also offered hospitality to foreign talent, she was not dependent on it. The strong, creative genius that developed in Northern France from the prosaic semi-circular arch of the Byzantine style the pointed-arch poetry of the Gothic, knew also how to make use of the chisel and paint-brush as means of expression, and to satisfy by painting and carving its impulse for depicting form. The mediæval art of France is not inferior to any other. It must no longer be treated as a mere appendage of art development in the Low Countries and Lombardy. To be sure, if the learned compilers of the Exhibition Catalogue—George Lafenestre, Henri Bouchot, Leopold Delisle and other academicians or directors of museums and libraries—claim to have discovered, in the pictures and statues, a particular French national feature which distinguishes them clearly from other contemporary works, they are led astray by patriotic prejudice. The works bear the stamp of a period, not of a people. Nothing is more like a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century French work of art than a Flemish or Italian, and _vice versâ_. It is noticeable that people have taken Bourdichon’s masterpiece, one of the gems of the collection—the portrait of the little Dauphin Charles Roland, to be a work of Memling; and of the most beautiful paintings of one and the same painter—des Moulins—have long ascribed one to Van der Goes, the other to Ghirlandajo.