As it happens, the earliest mention to be made of painting in France is the arrival of Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise in 1516, whither he had come from Milan in the train of the young king Francois I. Unfortunately he was by this time sixty-four years old, and in less than three years he died. At about the same time there was a court painter in the employment of Francois--under the official designation of _varlet de chambre_--named JEHAN CLOUET, who is supposed to have been of Flemish extraction. Nothing very definite is known about him or his work, but he had a son FRANCOIS CLOUET, who seems to have been born at about the time of Leonardo's arrival, and who succeeded to his father's office. At the funeral of Francois I. in 1547 he was ordered to make an _effige du dict feu roy_, and he continued to be the official court painter to Henri II. (whose posthumous portrait he was also ordered to paint), Francois II., and Charles IX. He died in 1572. Every portrait of this period is attributed to him, just as was the case with Holbein in England. Neither of the two examples at the National Gallery can be safely ascribed to him. The little head of the Emperor Charles V., king of Spain, at Hereford House, is identical in style and in dimensions with that of Francis I., king of France, in the Museum at Lyons, which is attributed to Jean Clouet. Both may have been painted when Charles V. passed through Paris in 1539, but whether by Jean or one of his disciples cannot be said with certainty. Not until the very end of the sixteenth century were born Claude Gellee and Nicholas Poussin, the only two Frenchmen who were painters of considerable importance before the close of the seventeenth. Nor did either of these two contribute anything to the glory of their country by practice or by precept within its confines, both of them passing most of their lives and painting their best works in Italy and under Italian influence. NICHOLAS POUSSIN was born at Villiers near Les Andelys on the banks of the Seine, in 1594, where he studied for some time under Quentin Varin till he was eighteen. After this he was in Paris, but in 1624 he went to Rome where he lived with Du Quesnoy. His first success was obtained by the execution of two historical pieces which were commissioned by Cardinal Barberini on his return from an Embassy to France. These were _The Death of Germanicus_ and _The Capture of Jerusalem_. His next works were _The Martyrdom of S. Erasmus_, _The Plague at Ashdod_, of which a replica is in the National Gallery, and _The Seven Sacraments_ now at Belvoir Castle. By these he acquired such fame that on his return to Paris in 1640, Louis XIII. appointed him royal painter, and in order to keep him at home provided him with apartments in the Tuileries and a salary of L120 a year. Within two years, however, Poussin was back in Rome, and after twenty-three years' unbroken success died there in 1665 in his seventy-second year.