​It's hard to imagine a world without French art. France has a rich history of art that dates back to the Middle Ages when it created some of art history's best examples of Romanesque and Gothic art.  Later, the French Renaissance was represented by the court painter Jean Clouet.  By the mid-17th century, Nicolas Poussin was leading the French classical tradition. The charming frivolity of Rococo, which for many was the first purely French art, duly gave way to the age of Enlightenment and the emergence of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism introduced to the world artists of the stature of Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Courbet. At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris had become to modernism what Florence had been to the Renaissance. The French capital was the stage for the greatest period of experimentation in art history and the bohemian café life of Montmartre acted as a magnet for avant-garde artists from around the world. Under this environment, Impressionism duly became Post-Impressionism, Fauvism gave way to Cubism, while Dada evolved into Surrealism. And through this monumental period in art history, the pantheon of world artists would induct French names including Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Marcel Duchamp into its hall of fame. ​