The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement and home to some of the most canonical works of Western art, including the Mona Lisa,Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French kings.
François Boucher was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes. He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.
Gustave Moreau was a French artist and an important figure in the Symbolist movement. Jean Cassou called him "the Symbolist painter par excellence". He was an influential forerunner of symbolism in the visual arts in the 1860s, and at the height of the symbolist movement in the 1890s, he was among the most significant painters. Art historian Robert Delevoy wrote that Moreau "brought symbolist polyvalence to its highest point in Jupiter and Semele." He was a prolific artist who produced over 15,000 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Moreau painted allegories and traditional biblical and mythological subjects favored by the fine art academies. J. K. Huysmans wrote, "Gustave Moreau has given new freshness to dreary old subjects by a talent both subtle and ample: he has taken myths worn out by the repetitions of centuries and expressed them in a language that is persuasive and lofty, mysterious and new." The female characters from the Bible and mythology that he so frequently depicted came to be regarded by many as the archetypical symbolist woman. His art fell from favor and received little attention in the early 20th century but, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, he has come to be considered among the most paramount of symbolist painters.
Charles-François Daubigny was a French painter, one of the members of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of impressionism.
Suzanne Valadon was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.
Alphonse Legros was a French, later British, painter, etcher, sculptor, and medallist. He moved to London in 1863 and later was naturalized as British. He was important as a teacher in the British etching revival.
The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form.
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The range of his works includes historical paintings, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects. He is considered one of the most important painters from the academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.
Raoul Dufy was a French painter associated with the Fauvist movement. He gained recognition for his vibrant and decorative style, which became popular in various forms, such as textile designs, and public building decorations. Dufy is most remembered for his artwork depicting outdoor social gatherings. In addition to painting, he was skilled in various other fields, including drawing, printmaking, book illustration, scenic design, furniture design, and planning public spaces.
Jean-Marc Nattier was a French painter. He was born in Paris, the second son of Marc Nattier (1642–1705), a portrait painter, and of Marie Courtois (1655–1703), a miniaturist. He is noted for his portraits of the ladies of King Louis XV's court in classical mythological attire.
Jean-Jacques Henner was a French painter, noted for his use of sfumato and chiaroscuro in painting nudes, religious subjects and portraits.
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat was a French painter, Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur, art collector and professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Armand Guillaumin was a French impressionist painter and lithographer.
Augustin François Guille, called Archiguille was a French painter.
The Museum of Grenoble is a municipal museum of Fine Arts and antiquities in the city of Grenoble in the Isère region of France.
The Musée Magnin is a national museum in the French city of Dijon in Burgundy, in the Côte-d'Or department, with a collection of around 2,000 works of art collected by Maurice Magnin and his sister Jeanne and bequeathed to the state in 1938, along with the hôtel Lantin, a 17th-century hôtel particulier in the old-town quarter of Dijon where it is now displayed as an amateur collector's cabinet of curiosities and as the Magnin family home.
Albert Lebourg, birth name Albert-Marie Lebourg, also called Albert-Charles Lebourg and Charles Albert Lebourg, was a French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape painter of the Rouen School. Member of the Société des Artistes Français, he actively worked in a luminous Impressionist style, creating more than 2,000 landscapes during his lifetime. The artist was represented by Galerie Mancini in Paris in 1896, in 1899 and 1910 by : Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 1903 and 1906 at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, and 1918 and 1923 at Galerie Georges Petit.
The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper is an art museum located in Quimper, Brittany, France. It was founded after Jean-Marie de Silguy (1785-1864) left a legacy of 1200 paintings and 2000 drawings to the town of Quimper on condition that the town build a museum to accommodate them. Today, it is one of the principal art museums in western France, presenting rich collections of French, Italian, Flemish, and Dutch paintings from the 14th century to present day.
The 136 museums in the city of Paris display many historical, scientific, and archeological artifacts from around the world, covering diverse and unique topics including fashion, theater, sports, cosmetics, and the culinary arts.
