France

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

Clearing the way for women

Albert Gleizes

The man who brought cubism to the masses

Alexandre Cabanel

Creativity vs the Académie

Alfred Sisley

Why did we forget about Alfred Sisley?

André Breton

A psychiatrist releases his mind and invents Surrealism

André Derain

In the shadow of brighter colors

Anne Genevieve Greuze

Anne Vallayer-Coster

Anne-Louis Girodet

A phenom works himself to death

Berthe Morisot

The soul of Impressionism

Camille Pissarro

Peaceful anarchist, advocate of the working man

Claude Cahun

“Under this mask, another mask”

Claude Monet

Painting nature from a small boat

Constance Mayer

Edgar Degas

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."

Édouard Manet

A rebellious painter shocks the French Salon and courts his brothers wife

Élisabeth Chaplin

A life's worth of paintings dedicated to Florence

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Painted for Marie Antoinette and never made a dime

Émile Bernard

Losing the art-fight with Gauguin

Eugène Delacroix

Drama, movement and a search for the exotic

Félix Nadar

Photographer, novelist... balloonist?

Fernand Henri Léger

Cubism for the common man

François Auguste René Rodin

“Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump”

François Boucher

François-Thomas Germain

A disgraced silversmith, last of a dynasty

Georges Braque

Picasso's better half

Georges de La Tour

A Caravaggisti embraces silence

Georges Seurat

Manipulating emotion with color

Gustave Courbet

Status quo — what's that?

Gustave Doré

Father of Horror, Father of Fantasy

Gustave Moreau

A hermit explores the dreamscape

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Too many prostitutes and too much absinthe

Henri Matisse

100% artist

Henri Rousseau

Painting dreams with a child's brush

Henriette Browne

Herrad of Landsberg

A French abbess creates the first female-authored encyclopedia

Hippolyte Bayard

The second person to invent photography

Jacques-Louis David

Virtuoso painter, political chameleon, complete jerk

Jean Metzinger

The third cubist

Jean-Antoine Watteau

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Guardian of the old ways

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Nudes teach you everything you need to know (to paint landscapes)

Jean-François Millet

A peasant I was born, and a peasant I will die

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

We're all young and hot — let's make out

Jean-Léon Gérôme

A merciless teacher trains 2000 young artists

Joseph Ducreux

Renaissance painter wins the internet

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre

Visionary promoter of photography

Louise Moillon

The original peaches-as-butts emoji

Madeleine Lemaire

Marcel Duchamp

Giving art a cheerful middle finger