Léon-François Bénouville's splendidly modelled figure of Achilles intrudes into the space of the viewer. He literally steps beyond the surface of the canvas. Thus, in the painting's careful attention to the human form and in the precision of its modelling of paint, it fulfils ideally the task of the painted academic figure studies required of Prix de Rome winners.

Bénouville's painting of Achilles, a popular subject for nineteenth-century painters, shows the Greek hero at the moment where, after quarrelling with his leader, Agamemnon, he retreats from battle to his tent in a rage. Humiliated, Achilles refuses to continue fighting with the Greeks, who subsequently suffer a series of catastrophic defeats. As Agamemnon's envoys enter Achilles' tent, in the hope of convincing him to return to battle, Achilles springs to his feet, launching into a tirade. With a dramatic realism, Bénouville renders this precise, violent moment.

Due largely to the fact that he spent much of his adult life working outside of the country, and because of the very flexible nature of his work, which often shifted dramatically between styles and themes, Sébastien Bourdon’s work has often been ignored in France. Bourdon was, it was thought, a chameleon, whose skill was more in mimicry than innovation.

But as the comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Musée Fabre in 2000 demonstrated, Bourdon’s career is now regarded somewhat differently. Painted in the last years of his life, The Lamentation brings forward many of the painter’s fine attributes: dense, clear colours, emphatic modelling of form, and a dynamic composition that crystalises a series of often competing references, including Nicolas Poussin. As Bourdon often instructed his students, great innovation could be achieved by casting one’s interests far and wide.

Nicolas Poussin is one of France’s greatest painters. Venus and Adonis is an important example of the mythologies he painted in Rome during the 1620s. In Rome, the artistic centre of Europe, Poussin absorbed the lessons of classical antiquity and the Italian masters. Poussin’s innovation was to merge these influences with an often astonishing realism, refined through extended on-site study of nature and the figure.

Venus and Adonis presents an idyllic depiction of the ancient world. Seen at sunset, Venus and Adonis share their love in a landscape peopled with cherubim. Both landscape and figures are painted with a free and light touch. In this way, nature weaves all together: the humid haze of the Italian summer evening, the vibrant sun that dances indiscriminately over and warms foliage and bodies, and the lovers.

However, scholars have determined that the original painting was cut in two, the left hand side showing a river god in a landscape is now in a private collection. This might account for the enigmatic nature of the Musée Fabre’s painting and its narrative, where a series of figures, seemingly lost in worlds of private pleasure, are both entangled in the richly described landscape yet isolated from each other.

Simon Vouet’s Allegory of Prudence is one of the Musée Fabre’s most significant paintings. It is remarkable as much for its formal bravado – its contorted arabesque lines, its statuesque forms, its dramatic lighting effects – as for its historical importance.

Allegory of Prudence was painted for the recently widowed Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, as part of a large commission to decorate the Palais Royal, Paris (1643–1647). The ambitious Regent – at the time the subject of a series of scandals, including a rumour that she had secretly married the powerful, scrupulous Cardinal Jules Mazarin – is depicted as the figure of Prudence, one of the four Cardinal Virtues from classical and religious texts. The beautiful, virtuous Regent is seen untroubled by the effects of the material world, whether the passage of time personified by the old man at her feet or politics and skulduggery, which she is literally above.

Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Alphonse Leroy is widely recognised as among the painter’s greatest portraits. In its sobriety, its scientific attention to surface effects and details, and its effort to produce an image of its sitter as psychologically complex, it forms a direct line to his many later, exceptional depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte.

David’s portrait of Leroy says as much about the social identity of the figure of the artist as it does about its subject. In his sparsely furnished study, wearing a turban, and taking notes from his copy of Hippocrates’ The Diseases of Women, the gynaecologist is seen as something of an ascetic genius. So, in turn, is the artist; he is, as the contemporary definition of genius asserted, one gifted with powers of close observation and the ability to imitate nature above those of ordinary men and women.

Jean-Louis Demarne’s career was not that of a powerful Academician. He was instead a painter who actively sought out and capitalised on the taste of middle-class collectors. Influenced by the highly finished landscapes and genre scenes of Dutch painters currently in vogue among Parisian collectors, Demarne’s landscapes and genre scenes found an eager audience in France and abroad.

A Ferry and Boats on a Canal is an excellent example of Demarne’s picturesque depictions of everyday rural life. It uses the compositional convention of a central vanishing point that became something of a trademark for the painter. The landscape itself is quite generic, it could be Holland, Flanders or Northern France. Demarne is an important example of a commercially-minded artist who generally resisted participation in contemporary politics in favour of the private patronage of the burgeoning middle class.

François-Xavier FABRE, The Dying Saint Sebastian [Saint Sébastien expirant] 1789, oil on canvas 196.0 (h) x 147.0 (w) cm

In Florence to avoid revolutionary Paris, François-Xavier Fabre circulated in largely English aristocratic circles and generated a prominent reputation as a painter of portraits and landscape souvenirs for tourists. In the face of this commercial activity, he struggled to produce work that accorded with his academic training.

The Death of Narcissus provides a compelling response to this conundrum. It recounts the mythological narrative of Narcissus, a handsome youth who, indifferent to the affection of others, is condemned to fall in love with his own image in a forest pool. Narcissus fades away, losing both his senses and his beauty, as he desperately attempts to possess his own image.

While the work is suggestive of the Academic genre of history painting, it represents an early historical landscape. Fabre had just read Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s famous Elements of Perspective (1799–1800), which sought to elevate the landscape genre to an Academic status similar to that of history painting. Valenciennes argued for landscape painting that was both highly learned and paid close attention to the study of nature. Fabre’s canvas represents an important example of an historical landscape, painted two years before the Académie in Paris created a special Grand Prix for the genre.

Louis Gauffier’s Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino is a landscape that brings together a series of often competing influences and sources: close attention to the details of nature; Neo-classicism’s mathematical description of space; ‘nature’ as it was described at the time by the poet and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, in turn, the Romantic ideal of man and nature in harmony.

By bringing these disparate sources together, Gauffier produces a theatricalised landscape. The terrace in the foreground acts as a stage, beyond which the landscape is both warm and awesome, a place to wander and find one’s self, as the monk on our left indicates. The landscape unfolds in a series of layers, where men might come to recognise their democratic sensibility and their individualism.

Jules Laurens undertook an incredible three-year journey throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor to Persia in the late 1840s, as part of a scientific and geographical expedition. Despite incredible hardship, Laurens drew every day. These drawings and the journey provided the basis for a significant career as an Orientalist painter and illustrator, and as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.

This work was painted almost twenty-five years after the journey. Based on his meticulous drawings, the painting depicts a mosque near Tabriz in present-day Iran. The imposing building stands in an austere, snow-covered landscape. The painting depicts the desolate conditions of a journey marked by weather extremes and ever-present danger. The snow, while beautiful in the painting, made the journey extremely treacherous and the expedition’s leader was temporarily snow-blind.