The Image and the Presence

Nineteenth-century history paintings were as formative as the historical novel for fixing our cultural image of the national past. Their style was conformist and even kitschy; but their visual evocation of bygone ages provided Romantic narratives of the national past with a visual, spectacular and, what is more, enduring iconography. Painting operated in tandem with the historical novel and with history writing. It helped translate historians’ knowledge production into cultural production, into a cultural repertoire and a visual iconography. And as the study of history evolved from Romantic nationalism towards a more factualist, archive-driven academic specialism, that Romantic iconography continued to dominate the popular imagination of what the national past had been like. History painting shaped, lastingly, how the nation’s past was envisaged, even as its status declined to that of a largely decorative art.