Former palace of the Kings of France, the Louvre Museum presents vast and rich collections: in all, more than 38.000 works of the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean, the arts of Islam and Western art from the Middle Ages to 1848. The most famous artworks include the Mona Lisa, the Victory of Samothrace or the Venus de Milo, but also the squatting Scribe, the Code Hammurabi, or Vermeer’s Lacemaker.
Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), one of the most famous pupils of the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), is rightly considered a precursor of romanticism. Even more than his paintings, his drawings fairly quickly show a progressive distance from his master's classical teaching, until the definitive break with neoclassical aesthetics and the affirmation of a style that heralds this new artistic trend....
The last representative of an illustrious dynasty of print dealers, admitted as a "free associate" at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) is an engraver and draftsman, translator and art critic, tireless letter-writer and above all one of the most formidable collectors of drawings that ever lived. Following Pierre Rosenberg's publication in 2011 of the French...
The legacy made to the national museums by the engineer and heir to the firm Grimaud Georges Marteau (1851-1916) lies at the crossroads of three worlds: playing cards, Japonism and the art of the Persian book. They are also three parts of the collection nowadays dispersed between different institutions. Linked to their owner's unique itinerary and reflecting the spirit of an era that was enthusiastic about the arts...
