This volume brings together over 100 paintings and drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries from the Musee des Beaux-Arts at Lille, one of the greatest of the French provincial museums. It demonstrates the diversity and richness of French art of this period and provides an important overview of the major movements and stylistic developments that flourished then. The revolutionary Neo-Classicism of David, the Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericault, and the Realism of Courbet are seen against a background of traditional academic history and religious painting in a survey that, unusually, does not begin or end at 1800. It discusses exhibiting and selling art in France, the educational ideals, and the market which shaped the nature of French painting in those years. The catalogue entries supply commentary both on works by major artists and on those by lesser figures greatly esteemed by their contemporaries and now again receiving the recognition they deserve.