Galerie d'Apollon

Known as the Galerie des Rois, it was decorated by artists of the Second School of Fontainebleau, including Toussaint Dubreuil, Jacob Bunel and his wife Marguerite Bahuche, according to designs by Martin Fréminet.

The gallery had not been completed by the time of Louis' death in 1715, and subsequent generations of artists continued to improve the room, such as Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, and Thomas Regnaudin.

[3]: 76  It was eventually restored and completed in the mid-19th century under architect Félix Duban, with painter Eugène Delacroix contributing Apollo Slays the Python for the center of the ceiling, Joseph Guichard painting Triumph of the Earth or Cybele, and Charles Louis Müller supplying Aurore.

Having seen the Gallery in 1856, a 13-year-old Henry James wrote: the wondrous Galerie d'Apollon...drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and seeming to form, with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet, a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by little, that is again and again, a general sense of glory.

The glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression.