The movement to create a national gallery of art in eighteenth-century France

Abstract

This study will attempt to assess the content, nature, and accessibility of the royal collections during the eighteenth century prior to the Revolution and to trace and to analyze the ever-growing movement for a national museum of art during the decades before 1789. This examination of the attempts made in pre-Revolutionary.France to bring the crown collections to the people is an effort to make a contribution, however. small, to the cultural history of France generally, to the history of the Louvre as a museum peripherally, and to the cultural and intellectual history of the Old Regime particularly.