La Chartreuse (now in the Louvre) of which
Horace Walpole speaks so ecstatically in the preface to the last volume
of the _Anecdotes of Painting_. "The last scene of S. Bruno expiring"
(he writes) "in which are expressed all the stages of devotion from the
youngest mind impressed with fear to the composed resignation of the
Prior, is perhaps inferior to no single picture of the greatest master.
If Raphael died young, so did Le Sueur; the former had seen the antique,
the latter only prints from Raphael; yet in the Chartreuse, what airs of
heads! What harmony of colouring! What aerial perspective! How Grecian
the simplicity of architecture and drapery! How diversified a single
quadrangle though the life of a hermit be the only subject, and devotion
the only pathetic!"

PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE was another of the original members. He was born
at Brussels in 1602, and did not come to Paris till 1621, where he was
soon afterwards employed in the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace. But
he was chiefly a portrait painter, his principal works being the fine
full-length of Cardinal Richelieu, and another of his daughter as a nun
of Port Royal, both of which are in the Louvre. There are four in the
Wallace Collection, but perhaps the most familiar to the English public
is the canvas at the National Gallery (No. 798), painted for the Roman
sculptor Mocchi, to make a bust from, with a full face and two profiles
of Richelieu. As a portrait this is exceedingly interesting, the more so
from having an inscription over one of the heads, "de ces deux profiles
cecy est le meilleur." The full length of the Cardinal presented by Mr.
Charles Butler in 1895 (No. 1449), is a good example, which cannot
however but suffer by juxtaposition with more accomplished works.

But it was not until the close of the seventeenth century that portrait
painting in France became anything like a fine art, and even then it did
not get beyond being formal and magnificent. The two principal exponents
were HYACINTHE RIGAUD and NICOLAS LARGILLIERE, both of whose works have
a sort of grandeur but little subtlety or charm.

Rigaud was born in 1659, at Perpignan in the extreme south of France,
and studied at Montpelier in his youth, then at Lyons on his way to
Paris--much as a Scottish artist might have studied first at Glasgow,
then at Birmingham on his way to London. On the advice of Lebrun he
devoted himself specially to portrait painting, which he did with such
su