The spacious galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts’ showcase Gund Gallery are uncharacteristically dim. In part that’s because the MFA’s latest Impressionist blockbuster, "Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet," is not yet fully installed. The lights are still being tinkered with, and the labels are still being printed — for now, yellow stickies mark their places. But even when December 15 arrives and "Impressions of Light" is open for business, the lights will be low, because almost half of the show is made up of works on paper — etchings, lithographs, pastels, photographs, monotypes. All of these are extremely sensitive to light and must spend most of their lives in boxes and drawers if they’re to last for future generations. Drawn entirely from the MFA’s collection, and accompanied by a hefty catalogue, "Impressions of Light" mixes paintings we know well with oil paintings we don’t, and it places them in the thought-provoking context of these significant 19th-century French graphic works.

"We have alternated the galleries of paintings with large galleries of works on paper," explains Sue Reed, curator of prints and drawings for the MFA, as she breezes past the paintings that fill the initial rooms of the exhibit. Reed, who curated the exhibition with George Shackelford, chair of the MFA’s Art of Europe department, is headed straight for one of her favorite works, a detailed pencil drawing of a tree created by Theodore Caruelle d’Aligny in 1826. It is one of the earliest examples in the show of drawings by French artists who traveled to Italy to study the works of Renaissance masters and to sketch and paint the landscape. "Following Aligny," says Reed, "Corot was one of the first to come back and paint the French landscape. At this time in Paris, artists were making history paintings and portraits, but landscapes were not what you showed in the Salon. Think David — Classicism at its peak! So, artists beginning to show landscapes . . . Corot did that."

Reed’s intimate working relationship with the MFA’s collection of 19th-century French prints and drawings, which runs as a rich, parallel substratum to its superb collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, is evident as she peers closely at Degas’s groundbreaking monotypes or Corot’s experiments with photographic cliché-verre technique. "Boston collectors were acquiring this work before the French were, in many instances. This show was George’s idea, because we have a tremendous depth and breadth of works on paper, and we wanted to use them to enrich the core of fine paintings that we have by Renoir, Monet, and the rest — with the works on paper, we could just dig deeper."

So "Impressions of Light" affords us an opportunity not only to revisit gorgeous paintings by artists from Corot and the Barbizon School to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists but also to experience these and lesser-known artists’ work in other media, and to experience the wide range of their vision and innovation, including their experimentation with photographic and printmaking techniques. Their exploration of new methods and subject matter might just put well-known images like Monet’s glowing grainstacks and Gauguin’s vibrant Breton countryside in a whole new light.

"Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, from December 15 through April 13. Call (617) 267-9300.