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Writing about the history of art in Paris in less than a 1000 words is like the Monty Python skit in which game show contestants have to summarize Marcel Proust’s 4000-page novel In Search of Lost Time in 15 seconds or less. But here we go.

Today, the city might seem like the bedrock of art history. There’s the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. There was the great Salons and the Royal Academy. There was Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Art Deco, Abstract art, and so much more. To name every famous Parisian artist—well, we have only so much time. But just five centuries ago, French artists looked elsewhere for inspiration. At the turn of the 16th century, Late Renaissance, Mannerism, and early Baroque art ruled the Western world, and it was being innovated in places like Florence, Venice, Rome, and Tuscany. Under Louis XIII’s rule (1610–1643), French art mostly took its cues from its neighbors to the east. This all changed when Louis XIII died and his son, Louis XIV, took the throne.

Military might, artistic heights

Unlike his father, who was fine with following Italy’s lead, Louis XIV saw art as a kind of foreign policy. He would go on to prioritize art in France, establish the role of the official court painter (starting with Charles Le Brun, whom he called “the greatest French artist of all time”) and, eventually, see Paris eclipse Rome as the epicenter of Western painting. Under his rule, many of the earliest notable Parisian painters were employees of the king, and their most important duty was to glorify their boss (never mind that a good deal of them—including Le Brun, Nicolas Poussin, and Pierre Mignard—studied in Rome).

This sort of sea change couldn’t have occurred without guns backing it up. Consider the Louvre, the largest art museum in the world and a symbol of Paris’s commitment to the arts. Some of the museum’s most famous pieces, including a charming little canvas by the name of the Mona Lisa, came courtesy of eager donors or dying monarchs, but a sizeable chunk of the collection was stolen during Napoleon’s reign. Few Louvre patrons may realize that the Louvre was originally built as a fortress, and in a way, it still is: a symbol of Paris’s military might. In the early 19th century, Napoleon’s troops snatched tens of thousands of masterpieces from Egypt, Italy, and Spain. Even after his defeat, some of the wilier Parisian art collectors found ways of keeping the booty, with the result that much of it ended up in the Louvre.

The new, lonely, “Haussmannized” Paris

Cities are some of the only places capable of nurturing full-fledged artistic communities. Cities are also, by definition, bad places to go in search of solitude, the thing almost every artist depends on. Often, artists (like the rest of us) have love-hate relationships with their cities. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Parisian Impressionists.

If you were a young, ambitious painter living in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, there would have been one subject you couldn’t have resisted painting: Paris itself. Beginning in 1854, the city began an epochal process of renovation, green-lit by Emperor Napoleon III and managed by urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Cobblestone streets swelled into grand boulevards. Dozens of parks sprang up, as well as hundreds of theaters, railway stations, schools, and hospitals.

The new “Haussmannized” Paris was at the center of French Impressionism. It’s there in the tranquil greenery of Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862–63), a painting that caused a stir in its day but quickly came to be recognized as one of the key works of modern art. You could even read Manet’s work from the early 1860s as an ongoing ode to the new Paris. But there was a melancholic side to the Impressionists’ view of their city—a creeping fear that, by modernizing Paris, Haussmann had taken its soul. Consider Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), which depicts a typical post-Haussmann boulevard, dotted with blank-faced, gray-clothed figures. When the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that these figures looked like they were “attending some funeral or other,” he summed up the loneliness of the new Paris.

The avant-garde marches on, and then moves on

If you thought a little thing like floor-to-ceiling revamping could ruin Paris’ art scene, you don’t know Paris. It’s striking, looking back at the last century of art history, how many great avant-garde painters moved to Paris and did some of their finest work there: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani, just to name a few.

But of course, nothing lasts forever. In the early 20th century, starting with the 1913 Armory Show and continuing through the World Wars, Europe would bleed artists to America. And toward the end of the 20th century, art would become truly globalized, rendering useless any notion of just one capital of the art world—now there are New York, London, São Paulo, Tokyo, Mexico City, Berlin, Lagos, Barcelona, and many others to contend with. Which isn’t to say Paris is no longer immensely influential. Millions of tourists still flock every year to the city’s museums. And besides, just as the Renaissance left a lasting influence on all art thereafter, Paris’ famed art scene has forever left an imprint on art history.

Was there something in the water? It’s always hard to explain why a city becomes an artistic hub, but in Paris’ case, the answer probably has something to do with cold, hard cash. Over the centuries, Paris has done an outstanding job of subsidizing its creatives: Rents in the outer neighborhoods were cheap, museums were accessible, and parks and boulevards provided free inspiration to anyone with an easel and a pair of eyes. As recently as 2016, the French Ministry of Culture, based in Paris’ 1st arrondissement, announced an unprecedented 3.2 billion dollar arts budget. Paris gained its reputation by putting its money where its art is and it continues to do so today.