Book excerpt: Here approximately two hundred works by French and Spanish artists chart the development of this cultural influence and map a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting, from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque. Above all, these images demonstrate how direct contact with Spanish painting fired the imagination of nineteenth-century French artists and brought about the triumph of Realism in the 1860s, and with it a foundation for modern art."--BOOK JACKET.