Vue de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruine

1796

Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 × 57 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Louvre's long gallery as it might look once fallen in: the new museum imagined as a ruin.

Look at

One-point perspective runs the eye down the long gallery to a distant arch, so the depth of the room is the subject.
The vault is broken open, so daylight falls from above onto warm brown stone and a dark statue.
Fallen blocks and broken sculpture fill the whole foreground, framing the view at both lower corners.

Its pendant at the 1796 Salon proposed lighting the gallery through the vault; this canvas was listed as that design's ruin.
Probably bought for the Russian imperial collections and hung at Tsarskoye Selo; it left Russia after 1917 and reached the Louvre in 1975.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (photo Musée du Louvre)