ccess that in 1700 he was elected a member of the Academy. He painted
Louis XIV. more often than Largilliere or any other painter, and in his
later years (he lived till 1743) Louis XV. his great-grandson. He is
said to have shared with Kneller the distinction, such as it may be, of
having painted at least five monarchs.

Rigaud is best known in these days by the fine prints after his
portraits by the French engravers. Of his brushwork we are only able to
judge by the two doubtful versions at the National Gallery and the
Wallace Collection respectively, of the fine portrait at Versailles of
_Cardinal Fleury_. The group of _Lulli and the Musicians of the French
Court_, which was purchased for the National Gallery in 1906 is not by
him, and it is difficult to understand why the public money should have
been wasted on it, or at least on the inscription attributing it to
him.

Nicolas de Largilliere was three years older than Rigaud and survived
him by another three. He was born in Paris in 1656 and died six months
before completing his ninetieth year. Early in life he went as a pupil
to Antwerp, under Antoine Goubeau, and he is said to have worked in
England as an assistant to Sir Peter Lely during the later years of that
master. On his return to France he was received into the Royal
Academy--in 1686.

In the Wallace Collection is an interesting example of his work, the
large group of the French Royal Family, in which four living generations
are portrayed and the bronze effigies of two more. Henri IV. and Louis
XIII., the grandfather and father of the reigning monarch, Louis XIV.,
the Dauphin his son, the Duc de Bourgogne his grandson, and the Duc
d'Anjou, his great-grandson--afterwards Louis XV., are all included in
this formal group, which is a useful lesson in history as well as in
painting.

II

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ANTOINE WATTEAU was born at Valenciennes in 1684, and died near there
about thirty-seven years later of consumption. Valenciennes really
belonged to Flanders, and had only lately been annexed to France, so
that Watteau owed something of his art to Flemish rather than to French
sources. At the same time it cannot be said that his development would
have been the same if he had gone to Brussels or Antwerp instead of to
Paris to study, for though the works of Rubens and Van Dyck were from
his earliest years his chief attraction, the influence of the French
artist Claude Gillot, as well as that