Snow, oxen and a stone calvary, painted by a man living under palm trees. In Christmas Night, Gauguin looked back from the far side of the world to a Breton winter he had known years earlier.

In the summer of 1869 two poor friends set up easels at a floating restaurant on the Seine. Their paintings of La Grenouillère are often called the birthplace of Impressionism.

Blood-red walls, a sour green ceiling, four lamps buzzing with yellow halos and a few lonely drinkers. Van Gogh stayed awake three nights to paint The Night Café in Arles, and wanted it to feel like a place where you could go mad.

Fragonard's The Swing (1767) hides a lover in the bushes and sends a shoe flying. Who commissioned it, what the details mean, and why it defines the Rococo.

Socrates reaches for the cup of hemlock without looking at it, one finger raised, still making his point. Jacques-Louis David's 1787 painting turned a death scene into a lesson about thinking, courage and dying for what you believe.

Édouard Manet painted his wife Suzanne at the piano in 1868: a small, quiet picture of a trained musician at work, and very likely his answer to a Degas portrait he had cut in half.

Paul Gauguin painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? between December 1897 and February 1898 in his Tahiti studio at Punaauia, after the September 1897 death of his beloved daughter Aline at age 19 in Copenhagen and the subsequent four-month-long depressive episode that culminated in Gauguin's attempted suicide by arsenic on the afternoon of the painting's completion.

Between 1863 and 1907 — forty-four years across three French regimes and one global imperial network — six paintings produced the formal vocabulary of Western modernism. Manet's 1863 Olympia, Monet's 1872 Impression Sunrise, Cézanne's 1890s still lifes, Van Gogh's 1889 Cypresses, Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases, and Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon form the load-bearing sequence in which European painting moved from academic-Salon convention to abstract formal modernis

Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in 1503 in Florence on a poplar-wood panel approximately 77 × 53 cm. The sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the 24-year-old wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo worked on the painting for sixteen years across his moves from Florence to Milan to Rome to France — he carried the panel with him from 1503 until his 1519 death in the French Loire-valley castle of Clos Lucé, and he never delivered the painting to its com

Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise in ~1 morning session in late autumn 1872 from a Le Havre hotel window. 48 × 63 cm oil on canvas shows the rising sun over the industrial harbour. Exhibited April 1874 at the first Impressionist Exhibition where critic Louis Leroy mocked it as 'mere impression' — and the insult became the movement's name.

Paul Cézanne painted ~270 still lifes between 1865 and his 1906 death — the largest still-life corpus of any 19th-century European painter. The c.1893 Paris-collection canvas shows seven apples and a small jug on a tilted brown tabletop. The painting carries Cézanne's specific contribution: deliberate flattening of pictorial space that Picasso and Braque would extend into Cubism 14 years later.

Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in autumn 1849 in his studio at Ornans, a small village in the Doubs valley of eastern France. The 165 × 257 centimetre oil-on-canvas showed two figures breaking stones beside a country road for the construction of the Ornans-Pontarlier rural highway. The painting was the central exhibit in Courbet's 1849-50 Paris Salon and was the inaugural document of the French Realism movement.

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People between October and December 1830, three months after the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution (27-29 July 1830) that overthrew King Charles X of France. The 260 × 325 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs in the Paris collection that purchased it from the Salon of 1831 for 3,000 francs.

Jacques-Louis David painted The Death of Marat in approximately three months between July and November 1793, immediately after the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in his Paris bath on 13 July 1793. The 165 × 128 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs Marat dead in the green-curtained wooden tub he used to soothe his chronic skin disease, the murder weapon — Charlotte Corday's small kitchen knife — visible on the floor.

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.