orking in Paris, Tours,
Dijon, Moulins, Aix, and Avignon, were inevitably subdued by the
dominant and powerful masters of the north and south, and how far they
succeeded in impressing a local and racial individuality on their
works is, and long will be, a fruitful theme for criticism. The
collection of French Primitifs of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, exhibited in Paris in 1904, and the publication of
Dimier's[211] uncompromising and powerful defence of those critics
who, like himself, deny the existence of any indigenous French School
of painting whatsoever, have recently concentrated the attention of
the artistic world on a passionately debated controversy. Undoubtedly
most of the examples of the so-called Franco-Flemish school which
formerly hung unquestioned among collections of Flemish paintings, did
when massed together, as they were in 1904 in the Pavilion de Marsan,
display more or less well-defined extra-Flemish characteristics--a
modern feeling for Nature and an intimate realism in the treatment of
landscapes, a freer, more supple and more vivacious drawing of the
human figure--reasonably explained by the theory of a school of
painters expressing independent local feeling and genius. But even if
all the paintings which the patriotic bias of French critics now
attributes to French or Franco-Flemish masters[212] be accepted, the
continuity is broken by many gaps which can only be filled by
assuming, after the fashion of biologists, the existence of missing
links.

[Footnote 211: _French Painting in the Sixteenth Century_, by L.
Dimier. 1904.]

[Footnote 212: A more rational classification into schools would
perhaps, as Dimier has hinted, follow the lines of racial
division--French and Teutonic. For many of the Flemish artists were
French in race, as, for instance, Roger Van der Weyden, who was known
to Italians as Rogerus Gallicus, and called himself Roger de la
Pasture.]

We make our way to the small but increasing collection of French
Primitifs possessed by the Louvre, along the Grande Galerie as far as
Section D. and, turning R., enter Rooms IX.-XIII. Beginning with Room
X., devoted to fifteenth-century masters, on the L. wall is 995,
Martyrdom of St. Denis, ascribed to the Burgundian Jean Malouet, court
painter of Jean sans Peur, and owing its completion to Henri
Bellechose, after the former's death in 1415. To L. of the main
subject, the saint is seen in prison, receiving the sacred Host from