The Triumph of French Painting: Apotheosis of Poussin, Le Sueur and Le Brun

Look up. The painting above you was ordered in February 1820 for the entrance of the royal museum, as the Louvre then was. Five years earlier, after Waterloo, the Allies had taken back thousands of the works Napoleon's armies had brought here, and under the restored Bourbon kings the museum's rooms began to receive painted ceilings.

Meynier's subject is the French school itself. At the centre Apollo hands crowns to three painters of the age of Louis XIV, Nicolas Poussin, Eustache Le Sueur and Charles Le Brun. Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo look on from above, and Clio, the muse of history, writes their names down.

The painted border around it came later, ordered in 1828 under Charles X, with medallion portraits of eight French painters. One of them is Jacques-Louis David, who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI and had died in exile in Brussels three years before. In February 2026 a leak from a heating pipe tore the ceiling canvas in two places.