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.