The naturalism of Caravaggio was introduced into France by two of his followers, Jean de Boulongne, called Le Valentin (1591-1634), and Simon Vouet (1590-1649), who was also slightly influenced by the Venetians. Valentin spent the best part of his life in Rome, where he died in 1634. The Louvre owns, among eight pictures from his brush (not all of which are exhibited), his masterpiece, _The Innocence of Susannah recognised_ (No. 56), which has the vigorous handling and bold chiaroscuro of the Neapolitan school. Simon Vouet, who came to England at the age of fifteen, and subsequently travelled in Turkey and Italy, where he remained until his appointment as Painter to the King took him back to Paris in 1627, tried to combine the naturalism of Caravaggio with the colouring of the Venetians, an endeavour in which he was only partially successful, as he was not equipped by nature with a sensuous appreciation of beautiful colour. The Louvre owns a dozen Scriptural subjects and allegorical figures by Vouet; but even the best of them, _The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple_ (No. 971), is but a dull and heavy performance; whilst his _Portrait of Louis XIII._ (No. 976) is wholly devoid of artistic merit. Perhaps he owes his fame chiefly to the fact that he was the master of the absurdly overrated Le Sueur and of that art despot of the Louis XIV. era, Charles Le Brun. THE BROTHERS LE NAIN Of far greater artistic significance are the three brothers, Antoine, Louis, and Matthieu Le Nain, who were born at Laon, and flourished in Paris during the first half of the seventeenth century. Antoine and Louis died in 1648, and Matthieu in 1677. Very little is known of their history, but the splendid array of their works in Gallery XIII. proves them to have had close affinities with the contemporary Dutch and Flemish schools, even if their manner of composition suggests close acquaintance with Spanish art. Their subjects, too, like those of many of the Northern masters of their time, are taken from the daily life of the people, which is rendered with naïve honesty, and at times with a real appreciation of beautiful pigment. So far it has been impossible to distinguish between the works of the three brothers, as even the signatures “LE NAIN, fecit 1647,” on the _Portraits in an Interior_ (No. 543), and “LE NAIN, fecit anno 1642,” on the _Peasants at their Meal_ (No. 548, La Caze Gallery), afford no clue to the solution of the problem. The striking differences in brushwork and colouring, which are to be noticed in the eleven Le Nain pictures at the Louvre, would certainly suggest that the three brothers did not, or did only rarely, collaborate on the same pictures. The painter of _The Return from Haymaking_ (No. 542), with its prophetic suggestion of the _plein-air_ effects of late nineteenth-century art, cannot have had much in common with the painter of the dull and dingy _Denial of St. Peter_ (No. 547).