Romantic art took hold in Iceland belatedly; the Icelanders formed a small rural society, lacking an urban elite sensitive to Romantic taste and themes. Only well into the 19th century did notions of sublime Nordic landscape and the celebration of rural traditions, of metropolitan-European provenance, become internalized by Icelandic artists, who now approached their own landscape and culture from the perspective of the foreign observer.

In the 1850s, Sigurður Guðmundsson (known as málari, “the painter”), while studying in Copenhagen, came under the influence of the Romantic historicism of the celebrated Danish art historian Niels Laurits Høyen. Høyen’s influence coincided for Sigurður with the neoclassicist aesthetics of Constantin Hansen and the historical poetry of N.F.S. Grundtvig and Adam Oehlenschläger. After his 1858 return to Iceland, Sigurður produced altarpieces, portraits and landscapes. In 1860, he organized the first in a popular series of performances of tableaux vivants, which featured painted backgrounds against which actors, dressed like saga heroes or mythological characters, posed to depict a specific scene or event. His evocations of the past were classicistically inflected. In the absence of actual specimens of Viking longships, Sigurður relied on types of Roman galleons, and a portrait of the saga hero Grettir the Strong (from Grettis saga) bears a remarkable resemblance to the marble bust of the Roman emperor Caracalla. For the sake of historical accuracy, Sigurður studied historical artefacts and archeological finds extensively and laid the foundations of what would become the National Museum of Iceland in 1863. He also designed Iceland’s national costume for women, based on designs from all parts of the island and from the nation’s past.

The development of the visual arts in Iceland was further influenced by the influx of foreign depictions of Icelandic culture and nature. In 1885, Iceland received a large art collection from the magistrate Björn Bjarnason, containing work by the Danish painter Otto Bache, e.g. his painting of the saga hero Skarphéðinn holding his axe while sliding over the frozen Markarfljót river (1862). The Romantic depictions of saga scenes by the Norwegian Andreas Bloch, which originally appeared in popular Norwegian saga editions but were widely distributed in the form of postcards, were also well known in Iceland and may have contributed to the heroic self-image of Icelandic nationalists around 1900. In the run-up to the millennial celebration of the establishment of Iceland’s medieval parliament (1930), this nationalistic heroic image popped up in various media: a deck of playing cards featuring saga characters, designed by Tryggvi Magnússon, and a stained-glass window for the church at Bessastaðir, among others. The historical costumes worn during the celebration itself were in line with the tableaux vivants of  Sugurður Guðmundsson’s design. Visual representations of the saga tradition in Iceland did not really flourish until the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the works of a new, modern-minded generation of artists that was highly critical of the earlier Romantic hero-worship; this coincided with the literary trend towards antiromanticism, with the controversial edition of Njáls saga by Halldór Laxness (1945) and its stark, black-and-white illustrations.

A more popular and unproblematic genre in Icelandic art is landscape painting, pioneered by Sigurður Guðmundsson and Þórarinn Benedikt Þorláksson. Þórarinn was the first Icelandic artist to receive a public grant; it enabled him to study art in Denmark. In 1900, an exhibition of his work in Reykjavík was the first exhibition of Icelandic painting in Iceland. In his work, Þórarinn eschewed the exoticizing gaze of the Romantic traveller. Although sagas or historical scenes are not directly thematized in his paintings, Þórarinn did have a special preference for the landscape of Þingvellir, the site of the medieval parliamentary gatherings. Notable landscape paintings, in a looser, more impressionistic style, were also produced by Þorláksson’s fellow-student in Copenhagen, Ásgrímur Jónsson, and in their wake followed a generation of landscape painters.

Iceland’s first sculptor was Einar Jónsson, who, as a student in Copenhagen and Rome, renounced classical naturalism. Instead, he developed a symbolic language inspired in part by German symbolism and the theosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). When Einar returned to Iceland, he received a house from the Icelandic parliament, on the condition that all his works would be dedicated to the Icelandic people. He drew his inspiration mainly from the Icelandic landscape – which he experienced as an animated, living entity –, Icelandic history, mystical Christianity, mythology and ancient folk tales, dealing with elves, spirits and trolls turning into stone. His statues commissioned by the parliament offer heroic depictions of national heroes, both old – for example Ingólfr Árnarson, Iceland’s first settler from the Viking Age – and new – for example Jón Sigurðsson (1811–1879), leader of Iceland’s national movement. These iconic statues were often recycled in other media such as postcards and stamps, thereby determining the visual representation of Iceland’s heroic national self-image. Casts of his statue of the Viking Þorfinnr Karlsefni (1920) were placed both in Iceland and in Philadelphia, where the presumed Viking discovery of America was being cultivated ideologically. Jónsson also drew on mythological imagery from the Edda. The monumental building in which he lived and worked became Iceland’s first public museum in 1923.