On Monday, 25 April 2005, a new curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings began work at the Louvre. Blaise Ducos (1975) has succeeded Jacques Foucart, who has retired after a tenure of many decades.

Ducos took his master’s degree at the Ecole du Louvre with a thesis on the Netherlandish presence in Cologne in the 16th century. He is working on a Ph.D. on the Flemish master Frans Pourbus the Younger (1569-1622). Ducos spent two months in 2002 at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden as part of his curatorial training at the Institut National du Patrimoine. He has just returned from the United States, where he was the Focillon Fellow at the Yale University Department of the History of Art.