France produced more major Western painters between 1700 and 1900 than any other country. Ten of them — Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec. The two-century arc from the court at Versailles to the cabarets of Montmartre.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted pleasure on purpose. Through the 1870s and 1880s he built some of his largest and most ambitious canvases around lunches, gardens, and dances, treating an ordinary Paris afternoon with the seriousness earlier painters reserved for history and myth. Three works show the idea at full strength: The Umbrellas, The Swing, and Dance at Bougival. Read together, they form a short portrait of modern life at rest. Each looks casual at first glance and turn

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was twenty-five when he painted Canto XXX of the Inferno — Schicchi biting Capocchio, a winged demon hovering above. The 1850 canvas is the outlier of his career and a fixed image in dark academia. Reading the painting, the canto, and where it belongs on the wall.