portraits of Mother Catherine Agnes Arnauld and his own daughter, Sister Catherine (No. 1934), painted for the famous convent. He is perhaps better known for his portraits of Richelieu. Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), the best known and most appreciated of the seventeenth-century masters, and the greatest of the early landscape painters, is seen in sixteen examples. [Illustration: LANDING OF CLEOPATRA AT TARSUS. CLAUDE LORRAIN.] [Illustration: A SEAPORT. CLAUDE LORRAIN.] Rarely has the numbing and corrupting influence of royal patronage of art been more clearly demonstrated than in the group of painters who interpreted the hollow state, the sensuality and the more pleasant vices of the courts of Louis XIV., of the Regency, and of Louis XV. But among them, yet not of them, Watteau (1641-1721) stands alone--Watteau the melancholy youth from French Flanders, who invented a new manner of painting, and became known as the _Peintre des Scènes Galantes_. These scenes of coquetry, frivolity and amorous dalliance, with their patched, powdered and scented ladies and gallants, toying with life in a land where, like that of the Lotus Eaters, it seems always afternoon, he clothes with a refined and delicate vesture of grace and fascination. He has a poetic touch for landscape and a tender, pathetic sense of the tears in mortal things which make him akin to Virgil in literature, for over the languorous and swooning air and sun-steeped glades the coming tempest lours. His success, as Walter Pater suggests, in painting these vain and perishable graces of the drawing-room and garden comedy of life with the delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil, was probably due to the fact that he despised them. The whole age of the Revolution lies between these irresponsible and gay courtiers in the _scènes galantes_ of Watteau and the virile peasant scenes in the "epic of toil" painted by Millet. Among the dozen paintings by Watteau in the Louvre may be especially noted his Academy picture, the Embarkation for Cythera (No. 982). His pupils, Pater and Lancret, imitated his style, but were unable to soar to the higher plane of their master's idealising spirit.