In May 1900, on the inauguration of the _Exposition Universelle_, the opportunity was taken to rehang a large part of the collection, and the Galerie de Médicis (Room XVIII.) and the eighteen small cabinets built round it were first used for the better exhibition of a large proportion of the Flemish and Dutch pictures. Shortly afterwards, by the death of M. Thomy Thiéry, an Englishman who had become a naturalised Frenchman, over 100 paintings, mostly of the school of Barbizon, became an exceedingly valuable addition to the Louvre, and filled a void in the history of French painting in the nineteenth century. During the last two years the most memorable purchases by the Government have been that of Chardin’s _Child with a Top_ (No. 90A), which was acquired together with the same artist’s _Young Man with a Violin_ (No. 90B) for £14,000, and Hans Memlinc’s _Portrait of an Old Lady_ (Plate XVII.) for £8000. The national collection of the Musée du Louvre now includes in its Catalogue nearly two thousand eight hundred oil and tempera paintings, about four hundred of which have not been exhibited for many years. EARLY SIENESE SCHOOL This school of painting, one of the earliest in the history of art in Italy and probably the earliest with which the ordinary student of art in Italy will concern himself, was affected throughout the whole range of its history by the influence of the miniaturists. It was characterised by naïveté, and in the hands of its earliest painter, Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319), strove to realise an effect of hieratic sumptuousness, its precision and grace being that of “a sanctuary swept and garnished.”