James Gardner is an art historian and art critic at the Weekly Standard. He has written regularly on Old Master Painting for the Wall Street Journal and Antiques magazine, where he is a contributing editor. He has been architecture critic for the New York Observer and New York Sun.
With its fast-moving and rich narrative, this truly excellent book needed to be written: the fascinating and turbulent story of the Louvre as a royal palace has been largely eclipsed by its much shorter and more famous life as a museum. Here both parts of its long history have been splendidly recounted. -- Philippe de Montebello, Director Emeritus, The Metropolitan Museum of Art