History in painting. Events and memory

Nicolas Poussin · probably 1633–34

The subject is the violent abduction of women in Rome’s founding legend. Poussin studied ancient sculpture and arranged wax figures in a miniature theatre to organise the crowd. The painting later belonged to Cardinal Richelieu. Its apparent disorder rests on careful preparation.

Jacques Louis David · 1787

Socrates prepares to drink poison while remaining faithful to his convictions. David consulted classical scholars but deliberately included Plato, who was absent at the execution. He thereby placed the author of the Phaedo, which preserved the account of the philosopher's death, within the scene.

Eugène Delacroix · 1826

Delacroix drew the subject from Byron’s poem about revenge for a lover’s death. Interlocked riders and horses convey the struggle through colour and brushwork. He painted it before visiting Morocco. Its Eastern setting came primarily from European Romantic literature and imagination.

Eugène Delacroix · 1846

Delacroix adapts Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Rebecca is carried from a burning castle by enslaved men acting under Bois-Guilbert’s orders. Interlocking bodies and compressed space intensify the abduction. Contemporary fiction supplied Romantic painters with subjects and imagined medieval worlds.

Francisco Goya · 1814

Goya painted the executions in 1814, six years after the Madrid uprising against Napoleon's troops. Its companion shows the fighting of 2 May. The paintings were commissioned under the Regency and executed after Ferdinand VII returned to Madrid. Goya chose the nighttime killings on the city's outskirts, bringing the victims into the foreground.

Théodore Géricault · 1818–1819

In 1816 the Méduse ran aground while carrying a governor to Senegal as France resumed colonial control there. About 150 people were put on a raft; rescuers found only fifteen alive. Géricault interviewed survivors and gave this recent disaster the scale of history painting. The figures try to signal a distant ship.

Eugène Delacroix · 1830

Delacroix painted this response to the July Revolution of 1830 between September and December that year. Contemporary street fighters follow a personification of Liberty carrying the tricolor. Shown at the Salon in 1831, it brought a recent uprising into the scale of history painting. This photograph records its appearance after the 2023–2024 restoration.

Jacques Louis David · 1812

A clock, nearly spent candles, and disordered clothing present an emperor who has worked through the night on legislation. David assembles these signs into a persuasive political image. Separate events and objects support the claim of tireless administration. The apparently observed moment was deliberately constructed.

Emanuel Leutze · 1851

Leutze’s crossing became an emblem of the American Revolution in both Germany and the United States. Later artists repeatedly reinterpreted it. The present frame reconstructs the original design using a Mathew Brady photograph, adding another stage to the work’s public history.

Winslow Homer · 1866

Homer painted the confrontation after the Civil War, drawing on General Francis Barlow’s capture of Confederate soldiers in 1864. Age, clothing and posture differentiate the participants. Damaged ground makes the consequences of war visible beyond the immediate meeting.

Winslow Homer · 1865

Army clothing identifies the reaper as a veteran returning to farming in 1865. Harvest allows hope for recovery, while the scythe retains its traditional association with death. Both meanings coexist in a painting made as the Civil War ended.

Winslow Homer · 1877

Preparing a costume recalls Jonkonnu traditions incorporated into Independence Day celebrations after emancipation. The painting dates to 1877, the end of Reconstruction and a retreat of federal protection for Black Americans’ rights. Festive preparation belongs to that difficult historical moment.

Thomas Hovenden · 1882–84

Hovenden painted John Brown more than twenty years after his execution in 1859. He took the episode of Brown kissing a child from a newspaper account. The painting honours the committed opponent of slavery through a story that had grown around him.

Nikolai Ge · 1871

Ge showed this painting at the first Wanderers exhibition in 1871, a century and a half after the interrogation of the tsarevich. He studied historical accounts and portraits, then staged Peter’s meeting with his son as a scene for two figures.

Jules Bastien-Lepage · 1879

Joan hears the saints who call her to lead France. Bastien-Lepage sets the encounter in a recognisable rural garden. After France lost Alsace and part of Lorraine in the war of 1870–71, Joan acquired renewed patriotic importance. The painter came from Lorraine himself.