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Galerie d’Appollon au Louvre

Eugène Rouyer

Framed size: 16 in. (h) x 18 in. (w) x 2 in. (d)

$395.00

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About the work

Eugène Rouyer was a French architect. He was called to Paris by his great-uncle, the famous hydrographer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, where he studied and worked under the famed architect Victor Baltard. (Baltard became the Architect of the City of Paris in 1849.) Rouyer and was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1846.

Rouyer was a very successful architect, participating in the design and building of numerous important Paris structures.

Rouyer was also an accomplished draftsman, particularly enamored of drawing French Renaissance monuments. In 1863 he published his drawings in the form of plates grouped in a book entitled L’Art architectural en France depuis François Ier jusqu’à Louis XIV. (The text of the book was authored by conservationist Alfred Darcel.) Rouyer and Darcel noted that contemporary writing on French Renaissance architecture was extravagantly sycophantic; their work consisted of elegant drawings with analyses unencumbered by obsequious prose.

The fortress of Philip Augustus was built in Paris in the Twelfth Century. King Francis I razed the fortress in 1546 to make way for the building of a new royal residence called the Louvre. The small portion built by Francis is just a part of the Cour Carrée; the structure was added to regularly by the Kings of France in the years that followed. In 1661 a fire destroyed the beautiful Petite Galerie; King Louis XIV replaced it with a magnificent gallery. The theme of this new gallery was the sun, which Louis had selected as his emblem, and the gallery was named after the Greek god of the sun and the arts, Apollo. In 1682 Louis moved the royal residence to Versailles. In 1850 Eugène Delacroix was enlisted to paint the monumental ceiling of the gallery. In 1793, the building was opened to the public as the Musée Central des Arts in the Grande Galerie with Delacroix’s “Apollo Slaying the Serpent Python” on the ceiling.

This work portraying a part of the vault which frames Delacroix’s painting was engraved by A. Zretter and printed by Drouart, Paris.