The Seventeenth Century French Paintings
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery possesses an outstanding collection of French seventeenth-century paintings, in part a reflection of the enthusiasm with which British collectors once acquired the works of Poussin and Claude, thirteen of whose paintings were in the collection within ten years of the Gallery's opening in 1824. These included such well-known works as Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula and Poussin's Bacchanalian Revel before a Term. In more recent years other important works by these two French masters have been added, for example Poussin's Annunciation and Claude's Enchanted Castle. 

Since 1957, when Martin Davies published The French School, an unprecedented amount of research has been undertaken on French seventeenth-century artists. Taking account of this, Humphrey Wine has written afresh on the seventeenth-century paintings in Davies's catalogue; he has also written detailed entries on all subsequent acquisitions in this field. These include, as well as paintings by Claude and Poussin, major pictures such as La Hyre's Allegory of Grammar, the Le Nain brothers' Adoration of the Shepherds and Le Sueur's Alexander and his Doctor. 

New research and information based on the re-examination of each picture are combined with full-page colour illustrations of every painting, as well as details, technical photographs and comparative illustrations. The introductory essay provides an account of the collecting of French paintings of the seventeenth century in England from that time until the recent past. An invaluable reference for seventeenth-century French painting, this catalogue also provides the opportunity for a closer look at some of the most beautiful paintings in the Gallery's collection. 

These catalogue entries are the result of a pilot project to set up a process that takes the desktop publishing files that were sent to press, converts them to a more flexible digital format, and transforms them into web pages and other formats. This is a complicated process, as we are dealing with large and complex texts: these five trial entries alone come to 111,250 words.

We have tried to stay as close to the original texts and arrangements as possible, whilst also creating online entries that are self-contained: everything you need to understand the entry should be in that page, so sections like bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, glossaries, appendices and the explanation of how the catalogue works have been brought into the entry webpage from elsewhere in the catalogue. Because of the conventions followed in the original texts regarding references, we have had to assemble bibliographies from various sources: this is why entries may be formatted differently, or be briefer or more discursive than you might expect. We are investigating how we might improve this in the future.

Editorially, we have corrected obvious typos. We have also acquired new versions of the various images, which means that the credit lines have had to be updated to match the image suppliers' current requirements. Current collection images are temporary derivatives, which we hope to replace with a more refined system allowing access to higher-resolution or zoomable version in due course. Images, which often fell in the middle of running text in order to sit well on the page, have been moved to the next paragraph break after their original position - with the exception of the main image of the painting in catalogue, which has been moved to the head of the entry. (This explains why the page numbering may indicate empty pages.) Otherwise, we have not updated the texts to reflect current opinion: they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they were written. However, we are investigating ways in which curators can add a supplementary update.

Following assessment of this pilot, we hope to continue work on more entries, and to further develop our online publishing pipeline. In the meantime we hope you find them useful, and would welcome any feedback you might have.