Romantic painting in Germany is usually linked to the name of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who portrayed many members of the Romantic generation and evoked their world-view in his meditative landscapes. Friedrich shared the anti-French German fervour of the period 1810-13, and some German patriotism can be read into his paintings: his German figures commune with the sublime landscapes of sea, mountains and forest, in which French figures are lost or out of their depth; but Friedrich’s pictorial nationalism is usually oblique. Even so, he was mistrusted as a radical by the Restoration regimes and never obtained a regular appointment at an art academy; as an adjunct professor at Dresden he taught some younger painters but did not really found a school or pictorial tradition.

A more lasting influence was exercised by the so-called Nazarenes, who, unlike the Protestant, north-German Friedrich, were predominantly Catholics (either by birth or by conversion) and accordingly developed closer ties with the Catholic German lands. The core group of the Nazarenes had moved to Rome in 1810 when they lost their places at the downsized Vienna Academy; there they obtained their nickname owing to their long hair, parted in the middle – part of their German-national dress style. (Their own self-appellation was Lukasbund or “League of St Luke”, after the patron saint of painting.) In Rome, they studied the art of the Italian Renaissance fresco and gained fame when they adorned the residences of the Prussian ambassador Bartholdy (1816/17) and the Casa Massimo (1818). This, and the friendship between Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Bunsen, also cemented their good relations with the German diplomatic corps in Rome and opened the path to their acceptance in the German art world. Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872) was appointed professor at the Munich Academy in 1826 and would become president of the Dresden Academy in 1844. The leading Nazarene Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869) refused invitations to head the academies of Düsseldorf and Munich and the Städelsches Institut of Frankfurt. This last position went to the Nazarenes’ associate Philipp Veit (1793–1877), a son of Dorothea Mendelssohn and stepson of Friedrich Schlegel, and a past pupil of C.D. Friedrich. Active in Frankfurt between 1830 and 1843, Veit is above all associated with the large allegorical Germania figure that hung in the deliberation hall of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848; Veit also painted some of the historical portraits of the German emperors that adorned the Kaisersaal of the Frankfurt imperial hall (Römer).

The decoration of public buildings was in fact to be the main outlet for the Nazarene influence in Germany. When the Nazarene associate Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) was appointed director of the Academy of Düsseldorf in 1819, he programmatically declared the art of the mural to be an artistic challenge and a growth area for future artists; the lessons of Casa Bartholdy and Casa Massimo were henceforth applied in the palaces and public buildings of the German lands. A commission for the Munich Hofgarten in 1826 meant that the Bavarian capital (where Schnorr von Carolsfeld worked at the Art Academy) became a close ally of the Nazarene/Düsseldorf tradition, with followers like Wilhelm von Kaulbach and Moritz von Schwind (who in the 1850s was to decorate the interior of the restored Wartburg). Within the Munich Academy, Schnorr’s legacy was continued by his pupil Karl von Piloty (1826–1886), whose fame also attracted students from adjacent Central European lands. Other products of the Düsseldorf School to stamp historical or historicist buildings with their mural art were Alfred Rethel (1816–1859), who under Philipp Veit contributed to the emperors’ portrait gallery in the Frankfurt Römer and painted the interior of Aachen city hall with scenes from the life of Charlemagne, and Hermann Wislicenus (1825–1899). An erstwhile pupil of Schnorr at Dresden, and Cornelius’s successor as president of the Düsseldorf Academy from 1868, Wislicenus executed a huge historicist decoration programme in the restored imperial manor of Goslar between 1877 and 1897. Thus, the shadow of the Nazarenes extended to the very end of the century. The international outreach of Düsseldorf notably involved the Nordic lands, many of whose history and landscape painters trained in Düsseldorf and adopted its style of strong colours, clear outlines and reverential subject treatment.

The influence of the Nazarenes as amplified through Düsseldorf also reached into Switzerland. Zürich-born Ludwig Vogel (1788–1879) was among those who relocated from Vienna to Rome in 1810 and there painted his canvas on the return of the victorious Swiss combatants from the Battle of Morgarten. After his return to Switzerland, he evoked Swiss history and country life in a series of paintings and fostered the career of Johann Caspar Bosshardt (1823–1887), whom he encouraged to enter the Düsseldorf Academy. The country’s third major history painter, Ernst Stückelberg (1831–1903), was an alumnus of the academies of Antwerp, where he had studied under Gustaaf Wappers, and Munich.

The art of the mural as revived by the Nazarenes relied on clear contours with strong coloration; this style was also applied to history paintings on canvas, as well as genre paintings and landscapes, and also matched the growing demand for stained-glass windows (such as the ones donated by Ludwig of Bavaria to the restored Cathedral of Cologne). The Nazarene imagery was dignified and static, but under the influence of a number of Belgian history paintings from the Antwerp Academy exhibited in various German cities, the Düsseldorf and Munich schools later opted for a more dynamic, emotive evocation of passionate or sentimental episodes. This style was equally suited for religious and for secular-historical painting, and indeed, many of the artists involved accepted commissions for church interiors as well as palaces or public buildings. A sense of dignified piety, be it religious or national, suffused all of their work.

Biedermeier painting meanwhile also developed an interest in rustic scenes and genre painting with a folkloric interest in sentimentally representing traditional farm interiors and peasant dress from different regions; this matched the literary treatment of such settings in the genre of the Dorfgeschichte. The imagery of the peasantry and their lifestyle had been thematized early on in the draughtsmanship of Ludwig Grimm (brother of Jacob and Wilhelm, and famous illustrator of their fairy tales). Scenes of fairy tales would remain a sentimental sub-genre, e.g. in the work of Schwind, and book illustrations would recycle pictorially canonized themes.

The tradition of Academic Romanticism was challenged in Germany as elsewhere by the rise of loose-brush open-air painting and an artistic avant-garde towards the end of the century. However, government commissions kept the strong tradition of the large decorative history painting alive into the 20th century, and the official art of the Wilhelminian Empire, both in its statuary and in its paintings, maintained the historicist piety established in the 1820s.