‘The land and its people’: reflections on artistic identification in an age of nations and nationalism

Abstract

Abstract From the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing numbers of visual artists came to identify with their nations and with the homeland and its people. This development was strongly influenced by growing national cultural support and regulation of the arts by academies, art schools, museums and art markets inWesternEurope. On a subjective level, theRousseauan movement of a ‘return toNature’,Herder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespreadRomantic cult of authenticity, were potent influences on the inner self‐identification of visual artists after 1800, and were manifested in the novel importance accorded to landscape and rural genre painting inWesternEurope. HereIconsider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return toNature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings byPaulSandby,J.M.W.Turner andJohnConstable in early nineteenth‐centuryBritain, and then in the rural genre paintings ofJean‐FrancoisMillet andJulesBreton in nineteenth‐centuryFrance andJosefIsraels,AntonMauve andVincentVanGogh in the later nineteenth‐centuryNetherlands. Their work reveals how nineteenth‐century visual artists became inwardly identified with the ‘land and its people’, and how they in turn contributed, especially through prints and engravings, to the dissemination of national imagery and a cultural nationalism.

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