ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a mode of historical representation that is primarily visual rather than verbal. 1 Its subject—history painting—was long regarded as the most demanding of painterly pursuits. To trace its evolution as a painterly mode since the seventeenth century is also to trace a history of genre-construction itself, for although history painting is today regarded as one among several genres of visual representation, its lofty position in the early modern period positioned it above the other named genres. It was only in the nineteenth century that history painting came to be understood as one genre among others, if still the most prestigious. This change, as I will argue, was both the product of convergence of previously recognised genres of painterly expression with historical representation and a reflection of the broader historicist and democratising currents at large during that century.
