THE VAN LOO FAMILY
No fewer than five members of the Flemish Van Loo family, which flourished in France from about 1660 until the death of Julius Cæsar Van Loo in 1821, are represented in the Louvre collection. The most distinguished among them were Louis Van Loo’s sons, Jean-Baptiste and Charles André, better known as Carle. Both of them were brought up in the academic tradition; but their Flemish blood and the taste of a time that had seen the master-work of Watteau, gave their art more vigour and sensuousness than is to be found in the paintings of their academic precursors. Still it is unnecessary to linger over their historical and mythological compositions. The picture which does most credit to Carle Van Loo (1705–1765) is The Hunt Picnic (No. 899), which, in spite of a certain crudeness of colour, attracts by the science of the composition, the Watteau feeling of the landscape background, and by its fascinating reality as a record of contemporary life among the leisured, pleasure-loving classes.
François Le Moine (1688–1737) constitutes a link between the decorative style of the preceding generation, which had become dull and ponderous, and the art of Watteau and his followers. In this position he heralds his great pupil François Boucher, whose characteristics, deprived of his elegant grace and suave rhythm of design, are more than hinted at in the Juno, Iris and Flora (No. 536). The Olympus (No. 535), the sketch for a ceiling, recalls in its joyful decorative colour and bravura of brush work the art of Tiepolo and Ricci.