So wrote Charles Dickens at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, his masterpiece about the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

It’s that very time of bloody tumult which has given the people of Ballarat the chance to see works by some of the most famous artists of the last 200 years, including Renoir, David, Delacroix and Courbet.

Into Light: French Masterpieces from the Musee de la Chartreuse opens this Friday at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. A selection of 60 works on loan from the museum of the city of Douai in northern France, the tale of the collection’s existence is born in the violence of the 1790s.

The Douai museum is housed in a former Carthusian monastery whose monks were driven out during the anti-clerical purges of the Revolution. At the same time the widespread looting and pillaging of Church property meant that sizeable collections of art were being amassed by the revolutionaries, who tried to turn them into profit by selling them.

Finding no buyer in Douai, the pilfered works were saved from destruction by being turned into a nascent museum, soon supplemented by further artworks donated in coming years. The donations broadened the Douai museum’s scope, and the current exhibition focuses on works by French painters of the C19 and early C20, a period encompassing one of the major shifts in artistic perspective in history.

Gallery curator Julie McLaren says the exhibition is not organised chronologically but rather with an eye to demonstrating the influence that French painting had on Australian artists of the time whose works are held in Ballarat. Among the works in the exhibition are paintings by Auguste Renoir and Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Courbet and Jacques-Louis David, Alfred Sisley and Eugene Carriere.

Focussing on the works in terms of portraits, landscapes and themes, McLaren says the groupings show the transition of style in painting, from the formal Academy set pieces through the Barbizon School of landscape painting to Realism and ultimately Impressionism.

“You can see the rise of plein air painting, the birth of the paint tube, the influence of photography,” says McLaren.

“It was also advances in in the development of the paint itself that changed the way artists painted. Impressionists were all about painting with pure pigments and and not blending their colors; they  put them together on the canvas, not beforehand.

“All those subtle and not-subtle shifts you can see in these paintings together.”

Into Light opens June 23 at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. The show will run until September.