Following the stylistic register of European Romanticism, historical painting in 19th-century Greece focuses on the Greek Revolution of 1821. French and German Romanticism had influenced Greek artists educated in Paris and Munich, who took up teaching at the newly founded School of the Arts (Σχολή των Τεχνών, 1836) in Athens, at the same time as the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix flourished in Paris. Paintings celebrated the Greek struggle and its heroes but were also intended to cultivate modern Greek society and to provide a platform for the new nation’s elite and the court entourage of King Otto. Hence, heroic and anecdotal scenes from recent history and portraits of well-known 1821 revolutionaries occupy a central place.

The first professor of the Athens School of the Arts was Pierre Bonirote (1811–1891), a pupil of Ingres. Geōrgios Margaritīs (1814–1884), who, together with his brother Filippos, was among the first Greek teachers of the School of the Arts, had also studied in Paris. Their work is dominated by paintings of monumental size with historical subjects inspired by the Revolt, intended for official use and with a clearly ideological role. When in 1844, Prime Minister Iōannīs Kōlettīs commissioned from the Margaritīs brothers a historical painting, he did so with the telling comment that the painters would create the new history of Greece, preserve the figures of the fighters and populate a modern Greek picture gallery with their images. The painting in question, with its overt nation-building intent, thematized Georgios Karaiskakīs’s assault on the Acropolis as a subject; intended for the Prime Minister’s office, it is now in the National Gallery in Athens. Although it evokes Géricault’s pictorial rendition of Byron’s The Giaour, and echoes Romantic visions of the Acropolis, it renders its theme without violence or emotionalism, reminiscent of popular and religious Greek painting.

Historical painting in Greece found its main representative in Theodōros Vryzakīs (1819–1878), the first Greek graduate of the Academy of Munich, where he lived most of his life. His compositions follow the historical Romanticism and Philhellenism of the German school. From 1848 to 1850 Vryzakīs lived in Greece and in this period created a series of imposing historical paintings and portraits commissioned by King Otto. In 1855 his “The Exodus from Missolonghi” (Η ´Εξοδος του Μεσολογγίου) was exhibited at the International Exhibition of Paris. Well-known Philhellenes, as well as 1821 leaders, are united in the allegorical “Everything for the Fatherland” (Υπέρ Πατρίδος το Παν), a vivid ideological manifesto inspired by the poem by Rīgas Velestinlīs. Figures including Koraīs, Kapodistrias and Rīgas himself (based on work by the German painters Karl Krazeisen and Peter von Hess) are gathered around the archaic, laurel-crowned, “ideal” figure of the resurrected Greece, with a pile of coins at her feet and part of an ancient temple behind her. The ideological intent of Vryzakīs’s paintings is underscored by their monumental size, their solemn and staged compositions and their academic idealistic realism. Some of them were reproduced as lithographs by printing houses in Paris and Munich and circulated throughout Europe, carried by the Philhellenic wave.

A similar Philhellenism inspired, besides these monumental compositions with their official character, picturesque Romantic genre pieces invoking the Revolt, e.g. Vryzakīs’s “Leave-taking at Sounion” (Αποχαιρετισμός στο Σούνιο).

Besides the imposing compositions by Vryzakīs, historical painting in Greece is also represented by the smaller, sentimentally charged work of Dionysios Tsokos. Born on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, Tsokos studied in Venice under Ludovico Lipparini (1800–1856) and mainly worked on themes related to the history of the Ionian Islands. He drew his examples from mainly Italian Romantic classic Philhellenic works, and in his paintings foregrounds religion. (Indeed, in much of European Philhellenism, and Romanticism generally, the opposition between Christianity and Islam is a central concern.) An important historical painting by Tsokos depicts in dramatic style the 1831 assassination of Iōannīs Kapodistrias, the governor of Greece, outside the church of Agios Spyridon in Nafplion.