The next room, in the Pavillon Denon, a connecting passage, contains =Portraits of Painters=, chiefly by themselves, a few of which are worthy of attention. Among them is the famous and touching =**=portrait by =Mme. Lebrun= of herself and her daughter, which, in spite of some theatrical sentiment here and there obtruded, is a charming realisation of maternal feeling amply reciprocated. Beyond it we come to the =French Gallery of the 18th century=, reflecting for the most part the spirit of the Regency and the Louis XV period. Much of it is meretricious; much of it breathes the atmosphere of the boudoir. The flavour of Du Barry pervades it almost all. It scents of musk and powder. The reader will pick out for himself such works as he admires in this curious yet not wholly unpleasing mass of affectation and mediocrity. Indeed, as opposed to the purely official work in the preceding French room, the growth of the =rococo= spirit, to be traced in this gallery, is by no means without interest. The one set of works sets forth the ideal of monarchy as a formal institution; the other displays its actual outcome in royal mistresses and frivolous amusements. Here too the ornate French taste—the Dresden china and Sèvres taste—finds its first faint embodiment. _Greuze’s_ famous =*=Cruche Cassée (263), is the chief favourite with visitors to this room. It has about it a certain false simplicity, a pretended virginal innocence, which is perhaps the highest point of art this school could attain. _Drouais’s_ child portraits (187), are more entirely characteristic, in their red-and-white chubbiness, of the ideas of the epoch. The pastoral scenes by _Watteau_ and _Vanloo_, represent nature and country life, as they envisaged themselves to the painted and powdered great ladies of the Trianon. _Coypel’s_ Esther before Ahasuerus is a not unfavourable specimen of the inflated quasi-sacred style of the period. Some good portraits redeem the general high level of mediocrity in this room, but do not equal those of the daintily aristocratic English School of the end of the 18th century. Two _Greuzes_ (267 and, still more, 266), reveal the essentially artificial methods of this superficially taking painter. Most observers begin by admiring him and end by disliking his ceaseless posing. _Boucher’s_ artificial pink-and-white nudities (as in 24 and 26), have the air of a man who painted, as he did, in a room hung round with rose-coloured satin. He is perhaps the most typical of these rococo artists: he imitates on canvas the coquettish ideals of the contemporary china-painters. _Fragonard_, again, throws into this school the love of display and bravado of a southern temperament. At the far end of the room we find in _Greuze’s_ later moralising pictures faint indications of the altered and somewhat more earnest feeling which produced the revolutionary epoch, still closely mixed up with the ineradicable affectation and unreality of the painter and his period.