In Claude Lefebvre's 1670 ``Portrait of Louis XIV,'' the 38-year-old king is decked out in a big curly brown wig, thin upturned moustache, formal military armor decorated with gold fleurs de lys, lace kerchief at his neck and an imperious gaze at the viewer. It helps you understand why there was a revolution in France a century later.

The painting is a highlight of ``Spared From the Storm,'' an exhibition of 87 works from the New Orleans Museum of Art, now on view at Stanford University in California. (The Louisiana museum is being renovated after flooding by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the art was saved by the staff.)

The show, a survey of four centuries of European and American works, is perfect for a university, almost an introductory art history course in itself. Standouts range from Giovanni Martinelli's ``Death Comes to the Banquet Table'' of 1630 -- in which a skeleton rudely interrupts a lavishly costumed wedding party at a table groaning with wine, fruit and a half- eaten tart -- to a Jackson Pollock drip painting of 1948.

In between are several impressive portraits, including Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun's gigantic 1788 canvas of a seated Marie Antoinette in blue-and-white dress and feather-plumed hat and John Singer Sargent's 1898 ``Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer,'' pretty regal herself in a lace- and pearl-trimmed ivory gown.

Impressionists

The show is strong in impressionist and early 20th-century works, with big names including Degas (a New Orleans resident in 1872-73), Renoir, Gauguin and Picasso. And there are some unusual pictures from these familiar artists.

Monet is represented by two utterly different images. The muscular ``House on the Old Bridge at Vernon'' (1883), in dark blues, greens and browns, almost could have been painted by Van Gogh. In the more ephemeral ``Snow at Giverny'' (1893), the light blue houses in the distance seem to merge with the snow-covered landscape.

George Braque's intensely colored ``Landscape at L'Estaque'' is another surprise. The 1906 view of a house in a valley, painted in blues and oranges and browns, seems like hallucinatory impressionism, a detour into fauve ideas before the artist became a co-founder of cubism.

``Spared From the Storm: Masterworks From the New Orleans Museum of Art'' runs through Oct. 5 at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; +1-650-723-4177; http://museum.stanford.edu. The traveling exhibition benefits the New Orleans Museum of Art's Katrina Recovery Fund.