In France, pictorial interest in national-historical themes is by no means a 19th-century invention. Patriotic sentiment and the cult of great men inspired projects like the scenes of the life of St Louis at the École Militaire (1773) and D’Angiviller’s royal commissions (devised in 1776), which had the twofold ambition of fostering the grand genre of history painting, and to encourage subject-matter drawn from national history as well as classical antiquity. This interest in national history went against traditional academic doctrine, which considered modern costume (as opposed to classical) not dignified enough for the grand genre. The conflict between “vernacular” inspiration and classical heritage (which had characterized the prestige of the French School since the 17th century) remained a constant issue in debates on national painting throughout the 19th century.
The French Revolution rejected themes associated with the Ancien Régime and, with its invocation of Greek and Roman history as precursors to the new political system, privileged neoclassicist history painting as embodied by Jacques-Louis David. David, however, introduced two important features: he represented contemporary events in a classical style (emphasizing France’s status as the first emancipated state since antiquity), and (against the idealized view of antiquity as ageless and perennial) strove for accuracy to historical detail.
Under Napoleon, these innovations took a national turn, although largely outside the grand genre. Contemporary battle scenes, glorifying the success of military campaigns, compensated for the new regime’s lack of historical prestige and dynastic legitimacy, and were actively encouraged by the government. Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) imposed the genre as a means par excellence to arouse patriotic sentiment on a national, socially-inclusive scale. Similarly, Horace Vernet’s (1789–1863) accessible, realistic military scenes earned him the reputation of a truly “national” artist. Military actions – in particular the Crimean and the Franco-Prussian Wars, but also colonial conflicts – provided the scenery, complexity and grandeur of history paintings in a contemporary setting and with a directly national import, and secured the genre’s fortune throughout the century in the works of artists like Isidore Pils (1813–1875) and Alphonse de Neuville (1836–1885).
Meanwhile, the Musée des monuments français (1795-1816) enthused a new generation of artists, writers and historians for the more remote centuries of French history. Among them, the pioneers of “troubadour painting”, Fleury Richard and Pierre Révoil, approached national history from the anecdotal, object-oriented angle of genre painting, with great attention for historical detail. Their idyllic, small-format portrayals of national history were highly popular during the Restoration and paved the way for the realist historical genre scenes of artists like Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891).
Although the appreciation of Romantic literature manifested itself in history painting around 1800 in scenes from Chateaubriand’s Atala and Macpherson’s Ossian, efforts to reconcile the grand genre with pre-Revolutionary national themes did not fully reappear until the Restoration. National-historical subject matter now grew into a privileged topic in history painting, encouraged by the state. Scenes from the lives of illustrious ancestors (Louis IX, Henry IV, Francis I) or other historical figures helped establish a sense of continuity with the Ancien Régime, and served as an instrument to comment on the present. Enriched by other disciplines – literature, theatre, historiography – the repertoire of references became increasingly complex, polysemic and international (for example, the tribulations of the Scottish-French Queen Mary Stuart, popularized by Schiller and Walter Scott, mirroring the misfortunes of Marie-Antoinette).
As neoclassicism declined (David left France in 1816 and died in Brussels in 1825), Romanticism flourished, and with it a lasting crisis in the definition of history painting. From the austere stylistic historicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), via Paul Delaroche’s (1797–1856) controlled drama and attention to historical detail, to the bold imagination and psychological intensity of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863): the progressive blurring of the lines between genre and history painting led to an increasingly polyphonic ensemble of approaches to (national) history. Louis-Philippe’s order for the creation of the Musée de l’Histoire de France in Versailles (1837) was as much an attempt to come to terms with the political turmoil of the previous decades as an embrace of the diversity of modern French approaches to history painting.
Combining historical detail, couleur locale and melodramatic mise-en-scène, the genre historique initiated by Delaroche would become the leading formula for national history painting throughout Europe for the following decades. It was largely diffused through the Salon, the Parisian ateliers with their numerous foreign students, the internationalizing art market and print reproductions. In France, its impact resonated through the second half of the century in the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921).
Orientalism and Philhellenism, as exemplified by Delacroix, reflected a generalized exoticism that also fed into the historicist cult of the past. More particularly, it also marked a shift of perspective from the classicist or historicist interest in antiquity or the nation’s past to a fascination with “authentic” populations who preserved traces of ancient civilization in modern times, brought to notice by French colonialism and the Greek War of Independence. In a similar response, the industrialization and social unrest of 1830 and 1848 encouraged interest in paintings of “timeless” rustic life, transposed from ancient Greece via the Italian campagna to the French countryside. After 1848, this genre became increasingly influenced by the Realist movement with its tendency towards social commentary and social criticism.
The material and sensual immediacy of painters like Delaroche and Laurens was denounced by those who considered the grand genre to be the preserve of transcendent and universal ideas. Around 1830, Catholics around Lamennais had already advocated a new universal-religious art, based on the model of the Nazarenes and the Munich School. Comparable ambitions for a “peinture philosophique” were developed in the course of the century with the renewal of religious painting, in particular by a second generation of artists from Lyon, like Victor Orsel (1795–1850) and Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864). At the close of the century, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s (1824–1898) Saint Geneviève cycle in the Panthéon exemplifies this spiritual, anti-materialist view on French history, which finds its secular, Realist antithesis in the Sainte Geneviève cycle of Laurens in the same building (1880-85).
