Why go
The Louvre and Musée d’Orsay make a useful pair: one holds works from earlier centuries, while the other concentrates on the later nineteenth century. That contrast helps you see how courtly rococo, revolutionary neoclassicism and Impressionism answered very different ideas about what painting should show.
The full story
French painting did not develop in isolation. Renaissance artists drew on Flemish and Italian work, and Italian painters helped shape the School of Fontainebleau. In the seventeenth century, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain worked in Italy, while the French court supported a more formal classicism. The mood changed in the eighteenth century: Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard made rococo scenes more intimate and playful. Jacques-Louis David's neoclassical painting belongs to the upheaval around the Revolution and Napoleon. The nineteenth century brought the emotional subjects of Delacroix, the everyday subjects of Courbet, and then the light and modern life explored by Monet, Degas and Renoir. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso later developed Cubism in Paris. Use these changes as a thread through the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, or look for French painting in the fine arts museums of Lyon, Lille, Rouen, Dijon, Rennes and Grenoble.