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

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 in W estern E urope. On a subjective level, the R ousseauan movement of a ‘return to N ature’, H erder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespread R omantic 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 in W estern E urope. Here I consider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return to N ature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings by P aul S andby, J . M . W . T urner and J ohn C onstable in early nineteenth‐century B ritain, and then in the rural genre paintings of J ean‐ F rancois M illet and J ules B reton in nineteenth‐century F rance and J osef I sraels, A nton M auve and V incent V an G ogh in the later nineteenth‐century N etherlands. 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.