Exhibition placed under the High Patronage of Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic, and Mr. Horst Köhler, President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Exhibition organised by the Kunstund Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich and the Haus der Kunst Foundation, Munich. It will be shown at the Haus der Kunst (Munich) from 5 October 2005 to 8 January 2006 and at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn) from 3 February to 30 April 2006.

In 1982, the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais presented an exhibition of the finest seventeenth century French paintings held in public collections in the United States. The same principle has been applied to Germany for this exhibition, which brings together 168 French paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held in German museums, some of which are known for the size and quality of their French collections, in particular those in Munich (Alte and Neue Pinakothek), Karlsruhe (Staatliche Kunsthalle), Dresden (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister), Potsdam (Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten), Bremen (Kunsthalle), Hamburg (Kunsthalle) and of course Berlin (Gemäldegalerie). Most of the works are grouped by genre (religious and mythological painting; portraits, landscapes, still lifes…), but one section is devoted to oil sketches and another exclusively to paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
Other French masters are well represented in the exhibition: Simon Vouet, Valentin, Largillierre, Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Greuze…

As a complement to the catalogue published by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and its German partners, a complete inventory of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French works in German public collections will be published in Germany to coincide with the exhibition. This is a sound piece of scholarship which will be useful to art historians as well as art lovers interested in French painting from Henri IV to Napoleon I.