Project for the Transformation of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre

Hubert Robert showed this at the Salon of 1796 under a long title, a project to light the museum's gallery through its vault and to divide it without cutting off the view down its length. The Louvre had opened to the public three years earlier, its paintings hung in the Grande Galerie, then lit by side windows, and he had been drawing up plans for that hall since the 1780s. Here he opens glass panes in the vault and breaks the space into bays with pairs of columns. The painter at the easel on the right is Robert himself. Between 1805 and 1810 the architects Percier and Fontaine did divide the hall into bays with columns and arches. This canvas later spent many decades at the Russian imperial palace of Tsarskoye Selo, and today it hangs in the Sully wing, far from the gallery it pictures.