The Limbourg brothers' illuminated calendar for the Duc de Berry, c. 1415: peasants sow and lords feast beneath jewel-blue skies and real French châteaux. Medieval France's most luxurious self-portrait.

Enguerrand Quarton's Christ mourned against a blank gold heaven, c. 1455 — grief carved in Provence's pitiless light. Widely held to be the greatest French painting of its century, now in the Louvre.

Jean Fouquet painted the Virgin Mary with the face — and famously bared breast — of Agnès Sorel, the king's mistress, c. 1452. Sacred and scandalous at once: very French, five centuries early.

Two women in a bath, one delicately pinching the other's nipple: the Fontainebleau School's cryptic portrait of Henri IV's mistress, c. 1594, likely announcing her royal pregnancy in courtly code.

Georges de La Tour lit a repentant Magdalene with a single candle, her hand resting on a skull — silence, flame, and shadow doing the work of a sermon. Forgotten for centuries, now France's Caravaggio.

The Le Nain brothers painted poor farmers around bread and wine, c. 1642, with the gravity reserved for saints — no mockery, no picturesque poverty. French realism starts here, two centuries early.

Poussin's shepherds trace an inscription on a tomb in paradise: even in Arcadia, I — death — am here. Classical order holding mortality at arm's length: the founding statement of French classicism.

Claude Lorrain painted harbours dissolving into golden haze, daring to stare at the sun itself — light as the true subject. Turner asked to hang beside him; landscape painting never recovered.

Charles Le Brun's chancellor rides beneath silk parasols carried by pages, c. 1660 — the Grand Manner as state software. Le Brun ran Versailles' entire visual identity; this is its mission statement.

The 1701 state portrait: ermine robes thrown open over red-heeled dancer's legs, aged 63 — the Sun King performing eternal majesty. The template for every official state portrait painted since.

Watteau's lovers drift toward — or away from — Venus' island in a golden melancholy haze, 1717. The fête galante was invented for this canvas; the Academy invented a whole category to admit it.

A life-size clown stands arms dangling, gazing out with unbearable openness while the comedians below ignore him. Painted as a theatre sign, c. 1719; now the saddest, most human face in the Louvre.

A gutted ray hangs like a crucifixion above oysters and a startled cat — kitchen still life painted with cathedral seriousness, 1728. Diderot, Cézanne, and Matisse all bowed to this fish.

Madame de Pompadour reclines in seafoam silk among books, letters, and roses, 1756 — the royal mistress branding herself as the Enlightenment's patron. Soft power, painted in exactly that register.

A slipper flies, skirts billow, and a hidden lover enjoys the view his patron literally commissioned: The Swing, 1767, is the Ancien Régime's frivolity distilled — twenty years before the deluge.

Greuze staged a dowry handover as moral theatre, 1761 — trembling bride, sober father, even a hen with her chicks underlining the lesson. Diderot wept; sentimental narrative painting was born.

Hubert Robert painted the Louvre's Grande Galerie as a future ruin, 1796 — open to the sky, the Apollo Belvedere standing among rubble. France inventing heritage by imagining its own destruction.

Vigée Le Brun's 1783 damage-control portrait: after critics raged at the queen painted in a simple muslin gown, she was hastily repainted in proper blue-grey silk, rose in hand. Image politics, in oil.

Vigée Le Brun's self-portrait embracing her daughter, 1786, showed the painter smiling with parted lips — a breach of decorum that scandalised the Salon. A woman painting her own joy: radical then.

A man slides the bolt; a woman half-resists in a swirl of bedclothes; an apple waits on the table like Eden's receipt. Le Verrou, c. 1777 — desire and its consequences in one diagonal of light.

Three brothers salute three swords held by their father while women collapse in grief, 1784. David's stern Roman geometry electrified Paris and handed the coming Revolution its visual language.

David painted his murdered friend as a secular pietà, 1793: the wound, Charlotte Corday's deceitful letter still in hand, the darkness above. Revolutionary propaganda — and an unbearably tender picture.

Bonaparte on a rearing stallion, cloak like a flag, his name carved beside Hannibal's in the rock, 1801. He actually crossed on a mule in fine weather — and personally ordered the myth instead.

Ten metres wide: Napoleon crowning Joséphine in Notre-Dame while the Pope merely blesses, 1807. David edited reality throughout — the emperor's mother, who boycotted, presides serenely from the gallery.

Gros painted Napoleon fearlessly touching a plague victim's sore, 1804 — a healing-king gesture covering an ugly truth: he had suggested poisoning these same sick soldiers. Propaganda at its most gorgeous.

Girodet's moonlit burial of Chateaubriand's virgin heroine, 1808 — Christianity, doomed love, and the American wilderness in one candlelit grave. Romanticism arriving inside a classicist's technique.

Ingres rendered the emperor as a Byzantine god-icon, 1806 — frontal, marmoreal, encrusted in ermine and gold, closer to Jupiter than to a man. Even Napoleon's circle found it disturbingly inhuman.

Géricault's cavalry officer twists backward on a rearing horse, 1812 — glory glancing over its shoulder as the Russian campaign collapses. Empire's doubt enters painting at full gallop.

Prud'hon's murderer flees a moonlit corpse while Justice and Vengeance sweep down on silent wings, 1808 — painted for a Paris courtroom, so every accused faced allegory before facing the judge.

Meissonier's Napoleon rides through 1814's grey mud at the head of exhausted marshals — the legend deflating in real weather. Painted in 1864, when France again needed to look its myths in the eye.

Géricault interviewed survivors, studied morgue flesh, and built the raft to scale — then painted the state scandal of 1816 at history-painting size: the dying spotting a sail that may not see them.

Delacroix's Assyrian king watches his world destroyed at his own command, 1827 — a crimson avalanche of horses, treasure, and bodies. The Salon was appalled; Romanticism had its manifesto.

Delacroix painted the Ottoman massacre of Greek civilians in 1824 while the event was still news — art as front-page witness. Critics called it 'the massacre of painting'; the crowds came anyway.

Courbet painted his village's funeral at the size reserved for kings and gods, 1850 — fifty real townspeople, muddy boots, a bored dog. 'The burial of Romanticism,' and realism's birth certificate.

Young Courbet grips his hair and stares out wild-eyed — a self-portrait as pure adrenalin, c. 1845. The most modern face of the nineteenth century, now the internet's favourite art meme.

Three women bend for leftover wheat under a golden harvest they will not share, 1857. The bourgeois press smelled revolution in their bowed backs; Van Gogh saw scripture. Both were right.

Two peasants pause at dusk as the church bell rings across the fields, 1859. Reproduced onto millions of French walls, obsessed over by Dalí — piety, toil, and twilight fused into a national icon.

Daumier painted the railway poor — a nursing mother, a grandmother, a sleeping boy — with Rembrandt's light and a journalist's eye, c. 1864. Public transport enters art, dignity intact.

Rosa Bonheur's oxen lean into the furrow across a canvas of state-commission size, 1849 — painted by a woman who needed police permission to wear trousers to study animals. She outsold every man anyway.

Corot's silver-misted lake and feathered trees, 1864 — not a place but the memory of one, painted from the studio of the mind. The bridge between classical landscape and Impressionism's dawn.

A nude woman picnics with two dressed men and stares straight at you, 1863. Rejected by the Salon, mocked at the Salon des Refusés — and the starting gun of modern painting's independence.

A Parisian courtesan in Venus' pose, black ribbon at her throat, meeting the viewer's eye as a business equal, 1863. Guards protected the canvas from umbrellas; painting's old contract was void.

Monet's orange sun over Le Havre's misty harbour, 1872 — a 'sketch' a critic mocked as mere 'impression', accidentally naming the movement that ended academic painting's monopoly on truth.

Renoir hauled his canvas up to Montmartre's open-air dance hall and painted a whole Sunday afternoon, 1876 — dappled light on straw hats, working-class joy at masterpiece scale.

Degas watched dancers scratch, slump, and stretch while the master taps his cane, c. 1874 — the backstage truth of grace, framed like a stolen photograph from the wings.

A woman and a man sit side by side in a café, together and utterly alone, a glass of green absinthe before her, 1876. Urban loneliness gets its founding image — London critics called it a lesson in vice.

Caillebotte's umbrella-carrying Parisians cross Haussmann's brand-new boulevards in silvery drizzle, 1877 — the rebuilt city painted with a photographer's lens and a flâneur's detachment.

A mother gazes at her sleeping infant through a veil of gauze, 1872 — Berthe Morisot's tender, technically dazzling entry in the first Impressionist exhibition, and its only work by a woman.

From one hotel window Pissarro painted the same boulevard fourteen times, 1897 — morning, mist, night, Mardi Gras — proving a city street holds as many paintings as light has moods.

Manet's last great picture, 1882: a barmaid faces you, but the mirror behind her tells a different story — her reflection leans toward a man standing where you stand. Painting as impossible geometry.

Cézanne painted his Provençal mountain over sixty times, rebuilding it from planes of colour until landscape became structure. Picasso and Braque read these canvases like blueprints — Cubism did too.

Two Provençal farmhands face off over cards with the gravity of a summit, c. 1892 — Cézanne's monument to concentration. One version became, for years, the most expensive painting ever sold.

Seurat spent two years placing millions of dots so Parisian Sunday strollers would freeze into a silent frieze, 1886 — science applied to leisure, and the calmest revolutionary picture ever made.

Working-class men cool off in the Seine while factory chimneys smoke behind them, 1884 — Seurat giving labourers the monumental stillness classical art saved for gods. Rejected by the Salon, naturally.

Van Gogh carried candles on his hat brim to paint Arles' gaslit quay under the Great Bear, 1888 — the night sky's first great portrait from life, now one of the Musée d'Orsay's most loved rooms.

A yellow awning blazes against a cobalt star-filled sky on Arles' Place du Forum, 1888 — Van Gogh painting night without using black, as he proudly wrote to his sister. The café still trades on it.

Breton women in white coifs watch Jacob wrestle the angel on a field of impossible red, 1888 — Gauguin abandoning nature for inner vision, and opening the door every Symbolist walked through.

Toulouse-Lautrec seats you at a cabaret table among friends — La Goulue fixing her hair, a green-lit face looming at the frame's edge, the artist himself tiny in the background, c. 1892.

Douanier Rousseau, the self-taught Paris toll collector, painted a moonlit jungle he never saw, 1907 — every leaf from the Jardin des Plantes' hothouses. The avant-garde adored his impossible sincerity.

Half-blind and grieving, Monet spent his last decades on the Giverny pond — no horizon, no bank, only water, sky, and flowers merging. The Orangerie's oval rooms were his gift to postwar France.

Matisse borrowed Baudelaire's refrain and Signac's dots for a beach of pure colour at Saint-Tropez, 1904 — the hinge canvas where Pointillism's discipline melts into Fauvism's freedom.

Matisse painted his wife's face in green, mauve, and vermilion, 1905 — critics christened the room 'the cage of wild beasts', and Fauvism took the insult as its name. The Steins bought it immediately.

One 1905 summer in a Catalan fishing port, Derain and Matisse squeezed colour straight from the tube — orange seas, pink boats, vermilion hills. Fauvism was born on Collioure's quay.

Braque reduced a Provençal hillside to ochre blocks and green wedges, 1908 — the critic Vauxcelles sneered at its 'little cubes' and named Cubism by accident. Cézanne's lesson, taken to its limit.

Five fractured figures stare from a Barcelona brothel scene painted in a Montmartre studio, 1907 — Iberian and African masks shattering five centuries of perspective. Even Picasso's friends recoiled.

Delaunay painted the tower again and again — crimson, fragmented, bursting through Paris rooftops, 1911 — turning Eiffel's iron into modernity's totem and colour itself into the subject. Orphism begins.

Duchamp froze a figure's movement into overlapping mechanical frames, 1912 — rejected by his own Cubist brothers, mocked in New York as 'an explosion in a shingle factory', and famous ever since.

Billboards, scaffolds, stencilled letters, and robot-smooth citizens interlock in Léger's 1919 panorama — postwar Paris as a gleaming machine, painted with a poster's punch. Pop art, forty years early.

A two-faced man, a parachutist, a cat with a human face — Chagall's 1913 window looks at the Eiffel Tower with one eye and Vitebsk with the other. The immigrant's double vision, painted honestly.

Almond eyes, a swan neck, tenderness stretched into style — Modigliani painted Jeanne Hébuterne over twenty times in their brief Montparnasse years before their double tragedy in 1920.

Thirty canvases of one Gothic façade, 1892–94 — Monet painting not the cathedral but the light striking it, hour by hour, until stone dissolved into weather. Series painting's supreme statement.

Monet set his easel inside a working railway station, 1877, and painted steam, iron, and glass as cathedral light — modernity's noise transformed into atmosphere. The station still serves his suburbs.

A mother and child wade through a red-flecked field under summer clouds, 1873 — Monet's suburban idyll from the Argenteuil years, when the Impressionists made the Paris fringe their open-air studio.

Sisley painted the Seine's 1876 flood as silver serenity — a wine shop becoming Venice, poplars standing in their own reflections. Disaster transfigured by the most modest of the Impressionists.

The chalk arch and needle of Étretat drew Courbet, then Monet, who painted the cliffs in gales and slanting light through the 1880s — Normandy's coast becoming French painting's proving ground.

Boudin painted crinolined vacationers pinned under vast Norman skies through the 1860s — the new seaside leisure class observed with affection. Corot crowned him 'king of the skies'; Monet called him master.

Signac sailed his yacht into a sleepy fishing village in 1892 and painted its port in mosaic dots of rose and gold — then invited Matisse down. Saint-Tropez's myth begins in Pointillist confetti.

Vlaminck squeezed vermilion and cobalt straight onto the riverbank canvases of Chatou, c. 1906 — the boating suburb Renoir had painted gently now roaring in Fauve colour. Same river, new century.

Nice's promenade in shorthand — cobalt sea, calligraphic palms, regatta flags — painted by Dufy with a joy so fluent critics mistook it for ease. The Riviera's official colour scheme ever since.

Painted from postcards in his 'white period', c. 1910, Utrillo's plastery Montmartre streets — Sacré-Cœur, the Lapin Agile — fixed the village-in-the-city image every visitor still comes looking for.

David posed the celebrated salon hostess barefoot on an antique daybed, 1800 — Directoire chic distilled to white muslin and empty space. Left unfinished, and the sofa has borne her name ever since.

The press baron sits coiled like a spring, hands planted on his knees, 1832 — the July Monarchy's bourgeoisie captured in one impatient pose. Manet called it 'the Buddha of the middle class.'

Ingres gave his 1814 odalisque several extra vertebrae — critics counted — stretching anatomy into an impossible, unforgettable line. Beauty as deliberate distortion: modern art took careful notes.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist painted a young Black woman with quiet monumental grace in 1800, six years after France first abolished slavery — a woman painting a woman into the Louvre's permanent memory.

Manet painted his fellow painter Berthe Morisot in mourning black with a bouquet of violets, 1872 — one great artist seeing another, in what many call the finest portrait of the Impressionist circle.

Fantin-Latour grouped the future around Manet's easel in 1870 — Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Zola — a class photo of Impressionism taken before the name existed. Bazille died in the war months later.

Cézanne built his housekeeper from cylinders and verticals beside her coffee pot and spoon, c. 1895 — a domestic worker given the permanence of architecture. Quiet labour, monumentalised.

Van Gogh painted his melancholy Auvers physician leaning on a fist beside a foxglove, 1890, weeks before the end — 'the heartbroken expression of our time,' he wrote. Later, briefly, the world's costliest painting.

Ninety sittings in Montmartre, then Picasso wiped the face and repainted it from memory as an Iberian mask, 1906. Told she didn't resemble it, he replied: 'She will.' He was right.

Matisse split his wife Amélie's face with a stripe of green, 1905 — warm light one side, cool the other, likeness rebuilt from colour temperature alone. A portrait of seeing, more than of a face.

David began the Revolution's group portrait — deputies swearing never to disband, 1789 — but politics devoured its own heroes faster than he could paint them. The vast canvas remains unfinished at Versailles.

In the Panthéon, Puvis de Chavannes painted Paris' patron saint keeping watch over the sleeping city — pale, still murals whose calm influenced Picasso's Blue Period and half of Symbolism.

Conscripts sleep in a bivouac while the armies of past glory charge across the dawn sky, 1888 — Le Rêve gave a France humiliated in 1870 its longing in one image. The state bought it instantly.

Monet leaned from a balcony over the national fête of 30 June 1878 and painted a canyon of tricolores as pure flickering strokes — the Republic's colours dissolving into collective joy.

Searchlights, gas clouds, and fire slice the battlefield into cold geometric beams, 1917 — Vallotton, official war artist, concluding no human figure could carry Verdun's truth. Abstraction as honesty.

In 1964, a Vitebsk-born Jewish immigrant repainted the ceiling of the Palais Garnier with Mozart, Bizet, lovers, and the Eiffel Tower — France crowning its opera house with an adopted son's dream.

After a floodlit France–Sweden match at the Parc des Princes in 1952, de Staël painted footballers as slabs of pure colour in motion — the national game entering high art at full sprint.

Yves Klein reduced painting to a single patented ultramarine — International Klein Blue — and filled canvases with nothing else, 1957 onward. French audacity: owning a colour and calling it the void.

Pierre Soulages spent seventy years painting black — grooved, raked, polished — until it reflected light instead of absorbing it. 'Beyond black': France's postwar master, honoured with a Louvre show at 100.

Bare-breasted Marianne strides the 1830 barricade, tricolore aloft, a street kid at her side — Delacroix's Liberty is the painting France sees in the mirror: the Republic as a woman, forever mid-stride.