Thomy Thiéry was a rich man of the formerly French, but afterwards English, island of Mauritius, who lived and died in Paris, and left his art collection, consisting of paintings, Barye bronzes, and some Gobelins, to the Louvre. Thomy Thiéry was a man of a single passion and a single thought; he loved only the Barbizon School and some of its artistic contemporaries who, in his opinion, stood in an elective affinity to it; but he loved them with unshaken fidelity and constant self-sacrifice. And in contrast to other more eclectic amateurs, he did not perform his heroic deeds of an undaunted purchaser in auction rooms and art-shops, but carried his money to the studios of the living and struggling as long as he was able, and appeared on the market as an ordinary collector only when the brush had slipped from the hand of the creators. In this way his gallery got the warmth and unity of an organic being, and besides its beauty, gave joy through the idea that it was not the result of _parvenu_ vanity, or of that cruel fancy that takes satisfaction in a work without troubling about the originator, but that a grateful patronage, which not only wishes to purchase art treasures, but also to lighten and beautify the artist’s earthly pilgrimage, had created it. As a legacy to the Louvre, the collection has from a fraction become an integral section that methodically dovetails into its place in the frame of this incomparable museum, in which the history of art is made to live before our gaze in select examples. The management has added the pictures which it formerly possessed of Thomy Thiéry’s favourites, so that the three halls of the collection now afford a good survey of the fruitful movement, which, about 1830, took place in French painting, and diverted it from the degraded classicism then dominant into the path pursued at present. The School of Barbizon! A convenient, but, for that very reason, a meaningless, expression. The men comprised in this commonplace designation have not much in common. In age not far apart, they were bound to each other by personal friendship, and partly inhabitants of that Fontainebleau wood, in which some of them experienced Nature’s revelation. They were, however, very different in temperament, genius, and impulse, and they strove for personal ideals with dissimilar modes of expression. Only one peculiarity belongs in like degree to all, viz., the burning longing with which they yearned to get out of the stupid hole-in-the-wall of the academic studio that had become to them a goal into freedom and life.