IN the history of art the reign of Louis XIV. does not begin in the year 1643, when he actually ascended the throne at the age of five years, but at the foundation in 1663 of the so-called Manufacture Royale des Meubles de la Couronne, better known under the name of the Gobelins, which preserves the memory of the former possessor of the Parisian mansion in which it was installed four years later. This institution, founded by the great minister Colbert, the pupil and successor of Mazarin, was really the development of an idea conceived by Henri IV. at the beginning of the century, of collecting in the Louvre artisans and experts in different handicrafts, to encourage art all over the country and to give a healthy impulse to the manufacture of all manner of beautiful work, the sale of which might augment the wealth of the country. It was, in fact, intended to promote the minor arts, such as the making of tapestry and jewellery, and those in which the materials were wood, metals, and precious stones of every variety, just as the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which had received its letters patent in 1655, encouraged the more important branches of art-production. The two establishments soon became great art centres, thanks to the Royal protection, which raised their members above all the petty rules of corporations and kept them supplied with an unbroken succession of commissions, lavishing on them larger sums of money than any sovereign had ever before spent on luxuries.

For the twenty years during which the prosperity of the Grand Roi lasted, the eclat of these two establishments was so great throughout the whole of Europe as to eclipse all other schools or to convert them into mere reflections of themselves. It is from this moment that the world-wide supremacy of French art really dates, and if at the present day it has been compelled to give way before the ever-increasing strength of its adversaries, it is because the democratic principles now applied to art are in direct contravention to those of Colbert's conception. That great man recognised with remarkable acuteness that the French character, with its rare aesthetic gifts, needed, if it were to reach its highest development, a lofty ideal on which to concentrate its efforts and a liberality that gave full play to its imagination. It was thus that the wonderful artists of the Middle Ages may be said to have been the outcome of the religious enthusiasm of their time, and to have turned to account the inexhaustible treasures of the Church. The great minister of the seventeenth century in his turn set before his contemporaries the ambition to emulate the splendour of the sovereign who said Letat cest moi, and lavished upon them half the revenues of the kingdom in a constant stream. "Sire," he wrote to Louis XIV., "a useless meal costing three thousand livres afflicts on me incredible suffering, for I consider it essential to refrain from all unnecessary expense so as to have millions to lavish whenever it is a question of promoting your glory and that of France." He therefore grudged nothing to the artists of the Academy, still less to the army of men of talent collected in the Gobelins manufactory or who still lived in rooms in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. The double result of this wise prodigality was that the artistic eclat of the reign remains to this day its highest title to glory, and that money flowed in in immense quantities from without, to enrich what was then called the "magnificent" nation which supplied all civilised races with beautiful things.

Louis XIV. was fortunate in that Colbert was in power from the very beginning of his reign, for that minister was the man best fitted to assure his greatness; whilst Colbert himself was no less happy in having placed almost at once at his disposal a talented, industrious, and prolific artist, gifted in the highest degree with the genius for organisation necessary to carry out the lavish designs of his master, as well as to develop the industrial system he himself had in view. This was Le Brun, whom Colbert had seen at work in the celebrated Chateau of Vaux, the all too royal luxury of which had aroused the jealousy of the sovereign, and caused the fall of its owner, Fouquet, then Minister of Finance. Colbert knew that the painter, who was already very well known, had contended zealously for the privileges of the Academy, and that he had had considerable practice in the administration of affairs, not only at Vaux, but also as director of the tapestry manufactory that the minister had founded at Maincy. In 1660 Le Brun received the commission to paint for Fontainebleau the picture known as the "Clemency of Alexander"; in 1662 he was appointed Chief Court Painter to Louis XIV., immediately after which he designed and partly executed the decorations of the Apollo Gallery, receiving a little later the appointment of Director of the new Manufacture Royale des Meubles de la Couronne. The influence exercised by Le Brun over the art of his time, thanks to the power given him by the constant favour of Colbert and of Louis XIV., was without doubt immense.

Certain critics, especially at the present time when naturalism is very much in vogue, choose to look only on the pernicious side of the sort of academic tyranny which was the result of the artist's inordinate admiration for classic style after the Bolognese manner. This is, however, unjust, for Le Brun did but share the universal convictions of a period still impregnated with the results of two centuries of exclusive infatuation for Italian work; and, without having any special predilection either for his composition or his colouring, we know how to recognise that he had the really sterling merit of giving to the works he issued from the Gobelins manufactory, in spite of their want of grace, a decided grandeur and dignity of style, quite unlike the involved and incongruous confusion of Italianism, or the somewhat heavy simplicity borrowed by second-rate designers from the North. This is, perhaps, a less obvious though more natural cause than is generally supposed for those French imitations of Roman models, which were first generally disseminated by the Jesuit Martel-lange, under Henri IV. But the artistic breadth of view of a Le Brun was needed to give to the style a genuine beauty and thus enable it to triumph over foreign rivalry.