you had better form some conception of the circumstances and conditions under which that school arose. The artists whom François I^{er} invited to Fontainebleau had little influence on French art, except in sculpture (where we shall see their spirit abundantly at work when we come to examine the Renaissance sculpture in this collection). Primaticcio and his followers, however, left behind them in France, as regards painting, scarcely more than the sense of a need for improvement. Succeeding French artists took up the Italian Renaissance in the stage represented by the later decadents and the eclectic Caracci. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is the first Frenchman to attain distinction in this line; he throws something of French sentimentality into the affected mythological scenes of contemporary Italy. Claude of Lorraine, again, is almost an Italian by training and style; his artificial landscapes, not copied direct from nature, but built up by arbitrary and often impossible conjunctions, represent the prevailing tendencies of Italian art in the 17th century. On the other hand, the influence of Rubens, many of whose greatest works were painted for French kings, or came early to France, and still more of Philippe de Champaigne, a Brussels master who settled in Paris and painted much for Richelieu and Marie de Médicis, introduced into France a strain of Flemish influence. On these two schools—decadent Italian and later Flemish—then, modern French art at first based itself; the final outcome is a resultant of the two, transmuted and moulded in spirit and form by the innate, though at first unrealised, French tendencies. Also, before you proceed to examine the subsequent specimens of the development of French art, you had better return to the Salon Carré to inspect the portraits by Philippe de Champaigne, as well as the Jouvenet, the Rigaud, and other French works there, which I purposely passed by on our previous visit, as out of harmony with the Italian masterpieces. On your way back, glance at the later Italian pictures in the First Compartment of the Long Gallery (particularly at Bronzino’s odiously vulgar Christ and Mary Magdalen, and Rossi’s Doubting Thomas, both skied, on your R) as conspicuous examples of the sort of thing admired at the time when the French School took its first flights and made its earliest experiences. Then observe once more the works of the School of Fontainebleau; and, finally, inspect the pictures in Baedeker’s Room IX; after which, you will be in a position to start fair in Room XIII, with the French School in the 17th century. This Small Room beyond the St. Brunos contains more favourable specimens of _Le Sueur’s_ faculty (such as 559, 556, and 551), in which a distinctive French tendency still more markedly announces itself. The Ganymede, in 563, in particular, faintly foreshadows at a distance the classic painters of the Empire. We see in this room, in a very vague way, an early stage in the evolution of a David.