Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/600

 570 Painting school from the circumstance of his birth. To judge him justly, and to appreciate the loss art sustained in his early death, occasioned by the excesses of a fiery temperament, we must be acquainted with his better and nobler works, which show thought and reflection ; the Martyrdom of S. Lawrence in the Museum of Madrid, and the Martyrdom of S. Processo, in the Vatican. Sebastien Bourdon (1616 — 1671?), another of the French disciples of Italy, was born at Montpellier, and received his first education from his father, who was a painter on glass ; and when still a boy was taken by his uncle to Paris, where he studied art for some years. At eighteen years of age he went to Italy, and worked both at Rome and Venice. He afterwards returned to Paris, and painted his celebrated picture of the Crucifixion of S. Peter. In 1652 he was prevailed upon to visit Sweden, and there he executed several important works for Queen Christina. He again returned to Paris, where he died. Eustache le Sueur (1617 — 1655), the son of an artisan, studied under Vouet, and became famous ; but driven from the court by Le Brun, he entered the convent of the Car- thusians, and there produced his best works, which are all in Paris. Though he lived but few years, he displayed brilliant qualities, grandeur, power of expression, depth of thought, and a touching sensibility and tenderness which sometimes raise him to the sublime. The Louvre has fifty of his finest paintings. There he may be seen from his austere and studious youth to his early death ; from the dark and fantastic History of S. Bruno to the gay and laughing History of Love, which was his last work. But between the two extremes required by the subjects of a series of pictures for a Carthusian convent, and for the