Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Plein Air painting, Impressionism – these are still the main stylistic labels attached to French painting of the 19th century. The artists working in those styles – figures such as Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, Monet and Renoir – turned their backs on the officially sanctioned painting of the era, with its academic and neoclassicist style. Highly controversial in their day, these artists are now hailed worldwide as the ‘precursors of Modernism’. But 19th-century French painting offers a profusion of other equally important artists who, at that time, enjoyed greater recognition and the praise of art critics and audiences alike. Artists such as Delaroche, Couture, Meissonier, Cabanel, Gérôme and Bouguereau were in some instances highly innovative. However, these outstanding artists came to be sidelined from the canon of French painting from that period. This exhibition brings together these various and hotly debated approaches in French painting.