Already in the preface to his Entretiens (1666), Andre Felibien made clear the pre-eminent place that should be accorded to Nicolas Poussin, the 'gloire de notre nation':

J'aurai . . . cet avantage de parler avec eloge d'un peintre francais qui a ete l'honneur & la gloire de notre nation, & qu'on peut dire avoir enleve toute la science de la Peinture comme d'entre les bras de la Grece & de l'Italie pour l'apporter en France, ou les plus hautes sciences & les plus beaux arts semblent s'etre aujourd'hui retires.'

In 1994 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired a splendid painting attributed to Greuze entitled A lady reading the letters of Heloise and Abilard (Figs.8 and 9), which was published by Martha Wolff in this Magazine two years later.' There the matter might have ended, but for the exhibition Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, organised by Richard Rand, which brought together a fine group of masterpieces by Greuze.' For the first of the two authors of this article, the attribution of the Chicago painting to Greuze had always been problematic; after seeing the work at the Toledo venue of Rand's exhibition, he was convinced that it was indefensible on stylistic grounds.3 The second author, previously untroubled by the attribution to Greuze but alerted to his colleague's doubts, made the following discovery concerning its authorship almost by accident.

I have been intrigued for some time by the resemblance between David's Horatii (Fig.21) and the Roman copies in Naples of the early fifth-century B.C. statues of the two Athenian tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristogeiton (Figs. 22-24). It is now possible to suggest a connexion through which David may have used the Aristogeiton as a source for his oath-taking triplets, and the Harmodios and another Roman copy, probably of a triumphant Perseus (Fig.25) as a model for their rejoicing father. The missing link is these statues' conversion in the late sixteenth century into a group of the Horatii and Curiatii.

An accomplished pastellist, Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694-1752) used the medium not just for finished works, but frequently as a preparatory step in developing his painted compositions. In a number of instances, the expressive heads of the major figures in his history paintings were first resolved in pastel on paper. Examples of this practice can be cited in connexion with Rinaldo abandoning Armida of 1725 (Fig.37),' Joseph accused by Potiphar's wife of 1737 (Fig. 38),' and The sultan accompanied by his wives of c. 1752.3 Now, the discovery of a pastel head of Medea (Fig.33) in the Metropolitan Museum, long sheltered under an incorrect, but understandable,attribution to Charles Le Brun,4 allows us to establish this practice as part of his working method from the very outset of his career.

Dieppe gained a reputation as a fashionable resort when the duchesse de Berry, daughter-in-law of the king of France, went bathing there in the 1820s, but its hey-day as a playground for the monied classes of Paris came after 1848, when a rail link between Paris and Dieppe, the closest seaside town to the capital, was completed. Delacroix, who took five holiday breaks in the town between 1851 and 1860, marvelled that his train reached Paris from the coast in a mere four hours and twenty minutes. On the other hand, he deplored the influx of modish holidaymakers, bores and time-wasters who took advantage of the new rapid transport. In jaundiced mood on his first stay, he wrote, for example: 'Les elegants me gatent un peu ce sejour, j'avoue meme que c'est la vue de ces tailles pincees et de ces poupees, males et femelles, qui m'avait donne envie d'aller dans un lieu plus ignore de ces animaux-la." But he could also enjoy the company of some of his acquaintances from Paris: in 1854, for example, he was evidently glad to spend time chatting with his old sparring partner, the failed and disenchanted painter Paul Chenavard, whose dogmatic views on the decadence of modern art he found both challenging and depressing.