This richly illustrated panorama of seventeenth-century French painting surveys the works of Poussin, Vouet, Le Sueur, de La Tour, Mignard, and other great and little-known artists. It places this art in relation to literary, political, philosophical, and social developments of the period; considers the foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting in 1648; discusses the influence of Mazarin on artistic developments; explores issues of status, patronage, and connoisseurship; and reexamines the notion of a "French School" of painting, first proposed by the theorist Roger de Piles in 1699.

Published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture