Around 1800, a growing nationalization became noticeable in Europe’s visual arts, especially in the genre of history painting. Official art was Academic: taught and canonized in and by the academies which had sprung up over the preceding centuries (1593: Accademia di San Luca, Rome; 1648: Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, later to become the Académie des beaux-arts); 1664: Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp; 1696: Akademie der Künste, Berlin; 1725: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; 1735: Royal Academy for the Liberal Arts, Stockholm; 1744: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; 1754: Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen; 1757: Imperial Academy of Arts, St Petersburg; 1764: Allgemeine Kunst-Akademie, Dresden; 1768: Royal Academy of Arts, London; 1773: Arts Academies, Düsseldorf and Munich; 1818: Arts Academy, Kraków).

In the academic system, classicism in style and thematics had been the order of the day until the very end of the 18th century. History painting counted as the most prestigious of all artistic genres, above the portrait, landscape or still life. History paintings were usually in the high, sublime mode, ambitious in topic and large in execution. The topics were taken from a standard biblical or classical (Greek/Roman) thematic repertoire, although occasionally a heroic figure from the nation’s vernacular past could be thematized if his/her heroism had been celebrated by classical authors such as Tacitus.

The (fuzzy) outlines, diffusion and characteristics of 19th-century national history paintings

It should be emphasized that this biblical/classical repertoire remained dominant within history painting for as long as that genre endured (a late example of classical historicism being the work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema). However, this was complemented, from the late 18th century onwards, by a vernacular turn, where increasingly themes could also be chosen from the post-classical history of the European nations. Benjamin West’s The death of General Wolfe (1770), a glorification of the conqueror of Quebec expiring on the battlefield in 1759, is usually considered a turning point in the thematization of the national, as opposed to the universal (classical or biblical) past. Another national trend was dynastically motivated: monarchs would have their palaces adorned with portraits and acts of their forefathers, which in the cases of Britain and France might lead into that medieval and semi-legendary territory which subsequently would be claimed for “national” history. (Here as in the cult of commemorative monuments we can see that national-collective historicism was prepared, in the decades around 1800, by the dynastic-familial historicism of the monarchs of Europe.) Conversely, in the work of Jacques-Louis David, the use of classical themes was invested with an obvious contemporary, national relevance, holding up ancient Greek or Roman heroes like Leonidas or the Horatii as models for the republican virtues of contemporary France.

National history could thus hark back to classical symbols, or, conversely, be so recent in its thematics as to be hardly “historical” at all. History-painters would in the 19th century often become the recorders of their country’s recent glories, commissioned to render battles, military scenes, and court ceremonies of “historical” significance but situated in the near-present. Examples reach from Napoleonic battle scenes to the proclamation of the German Empire in Versailles. The “history” in history painting is often of very recent vintage.

Nor is the category “national” in national history paintings a clearly-demarcated fixity. Medieval and early-modern historical themes were usually, but not always, taken from the painter’s own national history. Joan of Arc, crusading knights and the two doomed young princes in the Tower of London were themes with a transnational appeal (for instance in the French troubadour style, which flourished in the early decades after 1800). Similarly, in the 1820s, paintings overtly propagandizing the cause of national freedom often used the cause of contemporary Greece as a coded disguise to signify the aspirations of all European nations – the continuity of Delacroix’ Philhellenic paintings with his French-patriotic “Liberty leading the People” is telling.

As indicated by the name of Delacroix, the turn to a national-historicist couleur locale (medieval or historicizing settings) was accompanied by an altogether different taste for colourful exoticism: that of Orientalism. Almost every painter of history paintings also tried his hand at odalisques, harem or bazaar scenes. The tight conjunction between exoticism and historicism is striking but meaningful: both are, in true Romantic fashion, attempts to render a world other than the straightforward here and now. In addition, a nationalist undercurrent is noticeable in both: while historicism bolsters the nation’s rootedness in the past, exoticism often bespeaks colonial ambitions, rooted as it was in Mediterranean expeditions from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign onwards. Maghrebinian scenes by French or Spanish painters are part of the expansionism of both countries in North Africa; Orientalism in Russian painting is part of that country’s oriental imperal colonialism in the Caucasus and Central Asia, overtly celebrated in Vasilij Surikov’s huge canvas on the Conquest of Siberia (1895).

There are, then, a number of fuzzy borders to the corpus of national history paintings: the genre shades into military painting, genre painting, court painting and even overlaps with Orientalism (and the popular genre showcasing female nudity in a permissible, mythologizing or classical-antiquity setting). But even within those fuzzy, porous borders one can see a definite trend take shape in the course of the century. With the Parisian Academy of Fine Arts as an obvious starting ground, an increasingly recognizable, clearly-characterized genre of national history paintings spread across Europe by means of the tight, professional system of masters and pupils that formed the art world. David, Ingres, Gros, their pupils, and their pupils’ pupils, fixed an iconography of sublime evocations of key moments in the nation’s history: court scenes, deathbed scenes, battle scenes and a number of genre scenes showing great historical figures (frequently other painters: Dürer, Leonardo) in anecdotal situations; conversely, they canonized such representative national moments as suitable and canonical enough for even the most prestigious of artistic expressions. Although the choice and treatment of topics is often Romantic (evoking the couleur locale of the past and the pathos of history), the style is invariably that of high, classical Academicism: ambitiously striving for technically convincing verisimilitude through the mastery of brush technique, perspective, textures, human anatomy and physiognomy, and historical detail.

There were, of course, other main “hubs” besides Paris helping to consolidate and spread this boom of pictorial national historicism between 1810 and 1870: Berlin, St Petersburg, Vienna, Antwerp. In addition, there was not only the Papal Academy at Rome, but various ateliers set up by artists from various nationalities resident in Rome and foreshadowing the rise of “national” art institutes in that European metropolis. A sojourn in Rome (often facilitated by a Prix de Rome or a patronage scholarship) counted as the culmination of an artist’s training and helped consolidate the city’s hub function. Among these private ateliers and points of artistic congregation, none proved more influential than that of the German Nazarenes, whose anti-classicist return to the clear simplicity of late-medieval and early-Renaissance forms was prompted by the desire to express sincerely-felt inspiration. Such Romantic-sentimental principles helped re-launch a fresco-derived clarity and simplicity of outline and colour (disegno and colorito), which was to remain influential in religious art for more than a century. A similarly clearly-outlined and brightly-coloured style was, through the mediation of Peter Cornelius, introduced at the Academy of Düsseldorf, which was itself to prove one of the main training grounds for a great number of Romantic-Academic painters in the century, especially from Scandinavia. The fact that later on in the century many of the most prestigious commissions were for mural decorations of restored or newly-built palaces and government buildings helped consolidate this Nazarene, Romantic tendency in national historicism: from Jules Lenepveu’s Joan of Arc cycle in the Parisian Panthéon to Henri Leys’s historical murals for the Antwerp City Hall and Ford Madox Brown’s Pre-Raphaelite celebrations of craftsmanship and labour for the Manchester Town Hall. German examples include Alfred Rethel’s murals for the city hall of Aachen, Hermann Wislicenus’s murals for the restored Imperial Manor at Goslar, and Carl von Piloty’s work for the Munich city hall and the Neue Pinakothek.

Occasionally, the travelling exposition of key paintings explains the cross-national spread of a style or genre. The exposition of two prominent painters from the Antwerp historicist school, Édouard de Biefve and Louis Gallait, in nine German cities between 1842 and 1844 famously inspired a new departure for history painting in many parts of Germany, notably Bavaria. But usually it is the personal network, the filiations of masters to pupils, often through the “hub” of an internationally renowned academy, that adds up to a quasi-genealogical conduit carrying the spread of history painting across Europe. Even from remote countries with a modest local art scene, promising young artists would be sent (often thanks to sponsorship from wealthy, public-minded patrons) to train at an academy and return to introduce the fruit of their training in their own country: witness Theodor Aman in Romania.

National history painting in the sublime, idealistic-academic mode declined after the 1840s, roughly at the same time that the historical novel gave way to the rustic/realist mode of writing. To be sure, artworks (paintings, murals and sculptures) commissioned for monumental, royal or governmental purposes kept the prestige and viability of Academic art alive, even into the 20th century, and provided an ongoing demand – but almost as an anachronism. Painters like Il’ja Repin and Theodor Aman, who had made their name as Academic history painters, participated in this turn towards more contemporary themes and a looser style. National history painting proper subsisted in (usually officially-commissioned) monumental work which on the whole was deeply conservative, and almost propagandistic; witness, alongside Wislicenus’s Goslar murals, Árpád Feszty’s huge panorama celebrating the Hungarian Landnahme by the Magyars (1894). Only in a few cases do we see that avant-garde artists of the later century turn to historical topics in a modern register: Puvis de Chavannes’s St Geneviève murals for the Panthéon (1874), the Midvinterblot mural that Carl Larsson undertook for Stockholm’s National Museum (1915), or Alfons Mucha’s Slavic epic cycle (1910-28) Besides these monumentally conceived examples of “modern history paintings”, there is the Russian historicism in Art Nouveau style that some artists around the Mir iskusstva magazine pursued, or the younger generation of painters from the emerging Baltic nationalities trained at the St Petersburg academy, who expressed the belated discovery of their vernacular past in a modern pictorial style.

For the rest, history painting retreated to the medium of engravings or illustrations for popular periodicals or historical albums (such as the German Gartenlaube or the 1890 collection Bildersaal der deutschen Geschichte), or educational school plates. The national theme in the visual arts had (here as in the genres of opera and novel-writing) firmly shifted from history to the contemporary countryside, from the sublime to realism, from Past to Peasant.

Rustic realism in the visual arts

The canonical primacy of Academic art was overtaken by a new avant-garde which announced itself when Gustave Courbet, refused for an Academy Salon in the mid-1850, mounted a private exhibition which he entitled Le réalisme. This challenge to the venerable Salon as the official showcase of academically endorsed art culminated when in 1862-63 protests arose over the Salon’s refusal to exhibit work by (among others) Courbet and Manet. As a palliative measure, a Salon des refusés was organized, which included some of the more unconventional new work of the period. Already since the 1841 invention of the lead tube, and the possibility of carrying oil paints around in portable tube form, rather than having to mix them in the inescapable environment of the studio, open-air painting (as opposed to mere sketching) had become an attractive option; and rustic scenery outside the cities was becoming more easily accessible thanks to the spreading railways.

Everywhere painters were taking to the open countryside after the mid-century and painted landscape scenes with peasant topics, from the French Fontainebleau and Barbizon groups (the localities having become easily accessible from 1849 thanks to the new Paris-Melun railway line) to the Russian Peredvižniki or “Itinerants”. The concentration of artists in rustic retreats like Barbizon was later to set the pattern (as an alternative to the academy as a working hub) of the artists’ colony, e.g. Nagybánya in (what then was) Hungary, Abramtsevo in Russia, Worpswede in Germany, Skagen in Denmark and Newlyn in Cornwall; such places usually stimulated an idyllic celebration of the nation’s unspoilt countryside and of the lifestyle of the local rustics. Rural, bucolic design and applied arts often emanated from such settings: the Russian folk style of Abramtsevo and the Swedish style of Carl Larsson’s one-family colony in Sundborn.

As artists turned from the academy to the open air, so too their themes turned from history to the realities of peasant life and their style turned to the looser, more stylized brushwork of the post-Academics (the Impressionists), whose work appealed to an expanding market of collectors outside the state establishment. Scenes of rural life and of the countryside were often, but by no means always or necessarily, invested with a patriotic message. In some cases the choice of scenes was a matter of pure aestheticism of idyllic hedonism; in some cases artists showed empathy with the hardships suffered by the peasantry and the uneducated margins of society, evincing social criticism rather than national idyll. (In this respect, too, the turn towards rustic realism parallels similar trends in the novel.) But in many countries, painters lovingly depicted scenes from communitarian folk life in order to celebrate national authenticity: scenes of folk dances or peasant conviviality, or, in its most kitschy manifestation, Blut und Boden: racially representative types living in a primordially timeless tradition. This was to be incorporated into the modern propagandistic art of post-1919 nationalism. Serious artistic production itself, with the advent of modernism and the avant-garde movements, tended to turn away from historicism, idyll and the national.