A distinctly and deliberately Latvian art developed only in the late 19th century among the second generation of ethnic Latvian artists, who merged different strains of neo-Romanticism and realism, soon followed by post-impressionism, symbolism, art nouveau, and other styles. The emerging Latvian national art scene co-existed with the regionally-identified, institutionalized, and more developed Baltic-German market of artistic production. Owing to a lack of local education opportunities, artists were usually trained in St Petersburg (the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Stieglitz Central School of Technical Drawing). Public demand for a national art began to grow in the 1860s; at first, it was catered for by illustrations and graphic art. The Bilderbogen broadsheet (a picture sheet with summary) gained in popularity; illustrations were also carried in popular almanacs, translated fiction, and devotional literature. Printed material of the 1870s often featured portraits of noted national-cultural activists, while the imagery of National Romanticism was introduced by the title page of the song collection Līgo (1875) by the composer Baumaņu Kārlis.

Towards the fin de siècle, history paintings and depictions of “Latvian types” and rustic-realistic paintings emerged; given the lack of documentation about early Latvian history, the majority of historical paintings drew on motifs from Latvian mythology and folklore. The first exhibition of Latvian paintings was mounted in 1896 during the Latvian Ethnographic Exhibition, which itself took place in the framework of the 10th All-Russian Archeological Congress in Riga.

A loose artist’s association named Rūķis (“Gnome”), uniting nationally-minded artists and musicians, was formed in St Petersburg during the 1880s and 1890s. The artists involved abandoned Academicism and embraced the stylistic and conceptual influences of the Peredvižniki and new Western European trends, turning to a nationally-themed Realism (studies of rural population, farm buildings, landscapes and country scenes).

The leading ideologist of Rūķis was the painter Ādams Alksnis (1864–1897), one of the pioneers of socially-oriented Realism and National Romanticism in Latvian art. Trained in the battle-painters class at the Imperial Academy of Arts, he authored multiple paintings, water-colours, and drawings thematizing early Latvian history (e.g. The battle of the ancient Latvians against the Teutonic Knights, c.1890; Riders before a castle, mid-1890s), rural life, and folklore. In general, Alksnis merged rustic Realism with mythological symbolism and placed it in an imagined national landscape.

Another Rūķis member Romantically evoking ancient Latvian history was Arturs Baumanis (1867–1904), student at the Imperial Academy of Arts and illustrator of Lautenbahs-Jūsmiņš’s long epic Niedrīšu Vidvuds (1891). Baumanis also specialized in portraits and was commissioned after 1878 to paint portraits of leading figures of the Riga Latvian Society, including its honorary member Krišjānis Valdemārs. He also re-painted the historical etchings of the Baltic-German artist Friedrich Meidel.

Rihards Zariņš (1869–1939), also a Rūķis member and 1895 graduate from the Stieglitz Central School of Technical Drawing in St Petersburg, became an accomplished graphic artist (he perfected his skills in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Paris) and authored multiple illustrations in newspapers and books, including the first fundamental edition of Latvju Dainas (“Latvian folk songs”, 1894). He was also an ethnographic collector and arts sponsor; stylistically, his drawings are in the conservative-Romantic mode of Academic historicism and Realism. There are some Art Nouveau tendencies in his style, although he ardently opposed that movement’s internationalism. Zariņš was famous for his visualization of themes from Latvian folklore and literature, depicting the plots and characters of legends, folk songs, and fairy tales with great attention to naturalistic detail (e.g. the etchings series Ko latvijas meži šalc, “What the Latvian forests whisper”, 1908-11). Following Latvian independence, he designed the country’s postage stamps, coins, and banknotes, as well as its coat of arms.

The most influential Rūķis member, a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1893), was the painter, graphic artist, and critic Janis Rozentāls (1866–1916). His work ranged from depictions of rural life to portraits and mythological scenes and to a large extent established the theoretical basis for modern art in Latvia. Rozentāls’s paintings of the 1890s form the stylistic apogee of what might be called “national Realism” – a synthesis of late Peredvižniki naturalism inflected by Rūķis nationalism. The artist’s mythological and folkloristic imagery drew equally on Romantic Nationalism and on fin-de-siècle Symbolism. Alongside the landscape artist Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945), Rozentāls was one of the very few artists whose works were exhibited both locally and abroad (e.g. in St Petersburg and Munich). Greatly inspired by Finnish Romantic Nationalism, and in particular the work of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, he created a distinctly Latvian imagery in the monumental paintings on the façade of the new Rīgas Latviešu biedrība (Riga Latvian Society) building, an allegory with images of Latvian mythological beings (1910).

In the early 20th century, Romantic Nationalism manifested itself more often in texts than in visual artworks. The critic Jānis Asaris (1877–1908) called both for a glorification of Latvian nature and for a realistic representation of the people’s living conditions, and Zariņš insisted on ethnographic authenticity in evoking the Latvian identity and national character. This was carried over into the field of applied arts and design by Jūlijs Madernieks (1870–1955), a painter and art critic of note, who became Latvia’s leading universalist, also practising graphic art, embroidery, furniture, and interior design. Following demands for a more assertively national style, made by the art historian and diplomat Oļģerds Grosvalds (1884–1962) and the writer Jānis Liepiņš (1885–1940), Latvian art developed the “Heroic Symbolism” which became a significant feature of the national style in the 1930s.