Even as art galleries and museums around the world contend with falling visitor numbers, stepping inside a Japanese museum can feel more like braving Mitsukoshi on the first day of the summer sales.

But while it's great to see art exhibitions packed with visitors, it's hard not to wonder whether Japan's love of gallery-going isn't causing more than a few problems -- principally, the ability of venues to keep up with demand. With frequent openings and short-term shows (major exhibitions rarely run for longer than 6-8 weeks and the turnaround time between them is amazingly fast), galleries are under pressure to come up with high-quality, well-researched exhibitions up to eight times a year.

No wonder, then, that some venues are resorting to that favorite Hollywood fallback: the sequel. But like the movies, things are rarely as good the second time around.

In 1996, the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, hosted an impressive selection of 16th- and 17th-century Italian drawings from the world-class collection of the British Museum. The Ueno museum is currently revisiting the genre, this time turning the spotlight on France, in its exhibition "French Drawings From the British Museum: From Fontainebleau to Versailles."

The only problem is that the draughtsmen of Renaissance Italy were masters and innovators of the art of drawing; French artists of the same period have no such claim to greatness. France's first maestro was Ingres ("his music is the line," said one contemporary), who was born in 1780, and even though the timeline of the current exhibition is longer than that of the first, allowing the inclusion of 18th-century French works, there is nothing here that comes close to the drawings of Raphael, Botticelli and da Vinci.

What is here is interesting, but more for the light it sheds on French cultural history than for its value as fine art -- a factor the curators seem to acknowledge by using the distinctive court cultures centered on Fontainebleau (rebuilt in the early 16th century) and Versailles (remodeled through the 17th and 18th centuries) to bookend the exhibits.

It's not just the art historians of today who prize Italian art above France's homegrown talent. One of France's most cosmopolitan kings, Francois I (r. 1515-47), brought to his court three prominent Italian artists: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolo dell'Abate. But their classical-style sketches shown here are markedly inferior to those of Italy's great names from only a generation before.

More interesting -- because they are less self-consciously artistic -- are works that show the French court in the grip of the spirit of intellectual inquiry that swept all of Europe. The ink-drawn plan of Fontainebleau and the graceful front elevation of the Chateau de Boulogne by Jacques Androuet de Cerceau raised architectural drawing to the level of art form and influenced such later draftsmen as the Englishman David Loggan (1633-92). Two delicately colored works by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, "Peach Blossom and Damsel Fly" and "Cucumber," indicate a growing recognition of the scientific value of accurate illustration -- while also pleasing the eye.

Yet even after Francois' death, the shadow of Italy still fell over French art. Just as the 16th century saw Italian artists working in Paris, so the two greatest French painters of the 17th century, the proto-landscapist Claude Lorraine (1600-82) and the classicist Nicolas Poussin (1593/4-1665), went to Italy, residing and working in Rome for most of their lives. Their drawings are nonetheless included here. Poussin's is a strongly outlined, well-composed ink sketch of the raising of Lazarus that hints (despite its small size) at the scale and grandeur of the artist's mature canvases.

More surprising are two of Lorraine's brush drawings, shown here alongside three of his orthodox compositional studies. Containing luminous expanses of sky and sea, their human figures dwarfed by nature's grandeur, Lorraine's paintings were the precursor of "pure" landscape and an influence on the master of that genre, J.M.W. Turner, among others. The two dark, brushed landscapes displayed here at first appear the antithesis of the paintings. Yet the flowing, intuitive strokes capture the mood of the scene in a way that is characteristically Lorraine.

With the reign of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715), French culture came dazzlingly into its own. The Roi Soleil oversaw the remodeling of Versailles on a colossal scale, and his court boasted such literary lights as Moliere, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine -- but no artist of an equivalent stature.

Louis sought to establish his own taste in art as the universal ideal and ordered the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts (founded in 1648) to establish a strict hierarchy of merit, which exalted classical art, lauded Raphael and his peers, and praised Poussin as an heir to the classical tradition. Adherence to the Academy's concept of good art was so strictly enforced that "academic" is, to this day, the disparaging term for the dryly unimaginative artworks such rigor produced. The Academicians debated hotly the relative importance of color and drawing, with the latter winning out -- yet with a few exceptions the drawings of this period shown here share the lifelessness that characterizes academic painting.

Classical values began to slide, however, with the period of libertine rule ushered in by the death of Louis XIV. The regent Duc d'Orleans (r. 1715-23) and Louis XV (r. 1715-1774) presided over the slippage of court culture from the impressive to the indolent -- and the subjects depicted in this exhibition's final room of drawings tell the whole story. Out go austere religious or antique scenes, in come genre works such as Jean-Baptiste Oudry's "Mastiff Attacking a Swan," fantasias like Claude Gillot's "Panel of Arabesque Ornament," and too many female nudes and studies to mention.

In place of Poussin and Claude, the artistic spirit of the day was embodied in the moralizing work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) and the gallantry and eroticism of Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806). Greuze's specialties were chirpy genre scenes and sickly-sweet portraits of women, each represented here in "The Recompense Refused," which shows a low-life altercation over a dead dog, and "Head of a Little Girl," all eyes and wispy curls. There is also a fine, swashbuckling Fragonard sketch of Don Quixote.

"Apres nous, le deluge," Madame de Pompadour is reputed to have said to her lover, Louis XV, after the French defeat at Rossenbach by Fredrick the Great, Nov. 5, 1757. The deluge didn't come for another three decades, but when it did the French Revolution not only swept away a monarchy and a social order, but also the aesthetic frivolity of the ancien regime. The artistic preference of the revolutionaries was, in retrospect, predictable: the austere classicism of Italian antiquity.

If this exhibition of French drawings disappoints by comparison with its Italian precursor, it is at least true to the relative merits of the two countries' early-modern art history. France would have to wait another century for its flowering -- for the age of Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism, when Paris, for the first time, eclipsed Rome as the center of the artistic world.