truck terror
everywhere. I am that great minister, etc." By Largilliere, who lacks
the psychological insight of his contemporary, is, L. wall, 483,
Portrait of the Comte de la Chartre. He was a master of the
accessories and upholstery of portraiture and painted some 1500
sitters during his long career, part of which was passed in England as
court painter to Charles II. and James II. A third successful
portraitist was Jean Marc Nattier (1685-1766), whose ingenious and
compliant art aimed at endowing a commonplace sitter with distinction
and grace, and who generally was able to strike a happy medium between
flattery and truth. Better represented at Versailles, he is but poorly
seen here in 657, R. wall, A Magdalen, and 661A, L. wall, Unknown
Portrait. 441 is an interesting portrait of Fagon, Louis XIV.'s
favourite physician, by Jean Jouvenet (1644-1717), known as Le Grand,
a talented and docile pupil of Lebrun, whose four large compositions
executed for the church of St. Martin des Champs, 432-435, are hung in
this room. 434, R. wall, Resurrection of Lazarus, is perhaps the best.
His works are a connecting link between the pompous spread-eagle
manner of the _Siecle de Louis XIV._ and the gay abandonment and
heartless frivolity of the reign of Louis XV. We pass from this room
to the Collection of Portraits in

ROOM XV.

of which some few possess artistic importance and many historical
interest. We bestow what attention we may desire and pass direct to

ROOM XVI.

devoted to seventeenth-century art. Chief among the painters who
interpreted the refined sensuality and more pleasant vices of the age,
yet not of them, was Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), the melancholy youth
from French Flanders, who began by painting St. Nicholases at three
francs a week and his board, but who soon invented a new manner and
became famous as the _Peintre des Scenes Galantes_. These scenes of
coquetry, frivolity and amorous dalliance, with their patched,
powdered and scented ladies and gallants, toying with life in a land
where, like that of the Lotus Eaters, it seems always afternoon, he
clothes with a refined and delicate vesture of grace and fascination.
He has a poetic touch for landscape and a tender, pathetic sense of
the tears in mortal things which make him akin to Virgil in
literature, for over the languorous and swooning air and sun-steeped
glades the coming tempest lours. His success, as Walter Pater
suggests, in painting these vain