Charles Le Brun was a French painter, physiognomist, art theorist, and a director of several art schools of his time. As court painter to Louis XIV, who declared him “the greatest French artist of all time”, he was a dominant figure in 17th-century French art and much influenced by Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun primarily worked for King Louis XIV, for whom he executed large altarpieces and battle pieces. His most important paintings are at Versailles.[citation needed] Besides his gigantic labours at Versailles and the Louvre, the number of his works for religious corporations and private patrons is enormous. Le Brun was also a fine portraitist and an excellent draughtsman, but he was not fond of portrait or landscape painting, which he felt to be a mere exercise in developing technical prowess. What mattered was scholarly composition, whose ultimate goal was to nourish the spirit. The fundamental basis on which the director of the Academy-based his art was unquestionably to make his paintings speak, through a series of symbols, costumes and gestures that allowed him to select for his composition the narrative elements that gave his works a particular depth. For Le Brun, a painting represented a story one could read Nearly all his compositions have been reproduced by celebrated engravers. In his posthumously published treatise, Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698), he promoted the expression of the emotions in painting. Le Brun’s view on emotions, which were known as “passions” at the time, drew heavy influence from the work of René Descartes. The facial expressions, which Le Brun outlined as a template for subsequent artists to follow, were believed to reveal the condition of the soul. It had much influence on art theory for the next two centuries. The Baroque ceiling in the Chambre des Muses at the Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte outside Paris, was “decorated by Charles Le Brun’s workshop”. Many of Charles Le Brun’s sketches and designs were later rendered into painting or sculpture by artists working under him. A restoration was completed in 2017 by the current owners, the de Vogüé family. The restored ceiling was unveiled to the public in March of that year. The Sacrifice of Polyxena, 1647, Metropolitan Museum of Art On 23 January 2013, artistic advisors for the Hôtel Ritz Paris, Wanda Tymowska and Joseph Friedman, announced the discovery of The Sacrifice of Polyxena, an early work of Le Brun. The picture, dated 1647, ornamented the Coco Chanel suite of the famous Parisian palace, and went unnoticed for over a century. Posthumously, Le Brun’s reputation suffered in the years surrounding the French Revolution and its aftermath, due to his close connection with Louis XIV. By the end of the nineteenth century, the academic values he personified were out of fashion, and it was only in 1963, when a major Le Brun exhibition was organized at Versailles, that his work was reevaluated. He is now considered one of the finest and most versatile French artists of his time.