The works of Jean-Baptiste Greuze's early maturity, from his first Salon submissions of 1755 to the brilliant success of L'Accordee du village at the Salon of 1761, developed a new kind of modern subject, between genre and history painting, that set expressive goals for painters in the second half of the eighteenth century. A picture of this period recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, A lady reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard (Fig.5),' seems not to have been exhibited at the Salon nor is it mentioned in the literature on Greuze; yet it belongs among those most ambitious of his works in which the sentiment of his day is distilled and transformed through the evocation of revered pictorial traditions.

Gustave Courbet's The meeting of 1854 (Fig. 10) has widely and justifiably been seen as an unequivocal statement on the position of the nineteenth-century artist in society. Representing himself in the company of the art collector Alfred Bruyas of Montpellier and Bruyas's servant, Courbet appears as an independent, sovereign figure in full command of his relationship with his patron. While it has been common to see the image as a flagrant challenge to the hierarchy between patrons and artists in nineteenth-century France, little has been said about how this picture actually functioned within Bruyas's art collection, for which it was originally produced.

When the Beheading of St John the Baptist by Puvis de Chavannes (Fig. 16) entered the National Gallery with the Lane Bequest in 1917, it was hailed as a major acquisition. Yet, in spite of its imposing size, the picture had not been exhibited during the artist's lifetime. It was the smaller version of this subject, now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (Fig. 18), that Puvis had shown at the Salon of 1870 and which became one of his most famous easel pictures. By contrast, the status of the National Gallery's painting has never been clear. Described in the early literature as an unfinished early work, it has sometimes been referred to as a study for the smaller, definitive picture in the Barber Institute, which is signed and dated 1869. Although most scholars have dated it to the same period as the Birmingham version, the London picture is very different in style and offers a rather different interpretation of the subject.'