Editing French Directory (section)

=== Painting – The Salon and the Louvre ===
The artists of Paris were in a difficult situation during the Directory, as their most important patrons, the aristocracy, had been executed or had emigrated; however a new wealthy class was just being formed. Before the Revolution a half-figure portrait could be commissioned from a less-known artist for three hundred livres. During the Directory, the price fell to forty-eight livres.{{sfn|de Goncourt|1864|p=268}} Nonetheless, the [[Salon (Paris)|''Salon'']] took place in the Louvre in 1795 as it had since 1725, before the Revolution, and each year thereafter. The most prominent artist of the Revolution, [[Jacques-Louis David]], closely connected with the Jacobins, was in seclusion in his studio inside the Louvre. At the end of the period, in 1799, he produced one important work, the ''[[Intervention of the Sabine Women]]''. However, a new generation of artists, inspired by David, showed their works; [[François Gérard]]; [[Anne-Louis Girodet]], a pupil of David, renown for his romantic paintings, particularly a 1797 painting of the prominent actress [[Anne Françoise Elisabeth Lange|Mademoiselle Lange]] as [[Venus (mythology)|Venus]]; [[Carle Vernet]], the son and father of famous painters; the portrait painter and [[Portrait miniature|miniaturist]] [[Jean-Baptiste Isabey]], known as the "painter of the kings" or "portraitist of Europe",<ref>[http://www.napoleon-empire.net/personnages/isabey.php ''Napoléon & Empire: Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767–1855)]</ref> who painted Queen [[Marie-Antoinette]] and Empress [[Joséphine de Beauharnais|Joséphine]], and remained active until the [[Second French Empire|Second Empire]]; the genre painter [[Louis-Léopold Boilly]]; [[Antoine-Jean Gros]], a young history and landscape painter, who soon achieved fame and a government position in 1796 with a heroic portrait of Bonaparte at the [[Battle of Arcole]]; the romantic landscapes of [[Hubert Robert]]; [[Pierre-Paul Prud'hon]], whose work combined [[Neoclassicism]] and [[Romanticism]]; and a major neoclassical sculptor from the earlier generation, [[Jean-Antoine Houdon]], famous for his busts of [[George Washington]] and [[Voltaire]].{{sfn|de Goncourt|1864|p=268}}

Making the Louvre into an art museum had first been proposed in 1747 by [[Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne]] and supported by [[Denis Diderot]] in 1765 in the article on the Louvre in the ''[[Encyclopédie]]''. The idea was accepted by Louis XVI who, in 1789, began work on converting the ''[[Grande Galerie]]'' of the Louvre to a museum space. The Revolution intervened, and on 27 July 1793 the Convention decreed the creation of a Museum of the Republic (''Musée de la République française''), which opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the [[10 August (French Revolution)|storming of the Tuileries]].{{sfn|Fierro|1996|p=1004}}

In 1797, at the end of Bonaparte's triumphant first Italian campaign, convoys of wagons began arriving in Paris, carrying bronze horses, Greek antiquities, tapestries, marble statues, paintings and other works of art taken from Italian cities under the terms of peace agreed by the Austrians. They included works by [[Raphael]], [[Leonardo da Vinci]], [[Titian]], [[Paolo Veronese]] and other masters. Other convoys arrived from the Netherlands and Flanders. The more famous works were displayed on wagons in a festive victory parade through the center of Paris. The rest was crammed, unwrapped, into the corridors, galleries and stairways of the Louvre. Work began to rebuild the ''[[Galerie d'Apollon]]'' and other galleries to provide a home for the 'newly acquired' art.{{sfn|de Goncourt|1864|pp=283–287}}

<gallery mode="packed" heights="200px" caption="Art during the Directory">
File:Louvre-peinture-francaise-p1020324.jpg|''Imaginary view of the gallery of the Louvre as a ruin'', by [[Hubert Robert]] (1796), [[Louvre]], [[Paris]]
File:Gerard FrancoisPascalSimon-Cupid Psyche end.jpg|''Psyche et l'Amour'' by [[François Gérard]] (1797), Louvre
File:Girodet-Trioson - Mademoiselle Lange as Venus, 1798.jpg|''[[Mademoiselle Lange as Venus]]'', by [[Anne-Louis Girodet]] (1798), [[Museum der bildenden Künste]], [[Leipzig]]
File:The Intervention of the Sabine Women.jpg|''[[The Intervention of the Sabine Women]]'' by [[Jacques-Louis David]] (1799), Louvre
</gallery>