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.

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.