History of Painting

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, dated at about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, and mammoth. There are examples of cave painting all over the world.

History painting is the painting of scenes with storyline content from classical history, Christian history,and mythology, as well as depicting the historical events of the near past. These include paintings with religious, mythological, historical, literary, or allegorical subjects--they embodied some interpretation of life or conveyed a moral or intellectual message. The historical events chosen would be iconographic, not only depicting important events, but ones of particular significance to the painter's society, as for instance, the signing of the declaration of independence in American history painting.

The event, if suitable, does not need to have actually occurred, and artists have frequently taken great liberties with historical facts in order to portray the message desired. The gods and goddesses from the ancient mythologies represented different aspects of the human psyche, figures from religions represented different ideas, and history, like the other sources, represented a dialectic or play of ideas. For a long time, especially during the French Revolution, history painting often focused on depiction of the heroic male nude; though this waned into the 19th century. Other artists depicted scenes, regardless of when they occurred, in classical dress. When, in 1770, Benjamin West proposed to depict "The Death of General Wolfe" in contemporary dress, he was firmly instructed to use classical attire by many people.

He did depict the scene in clothing that had occurred on the scene. Although George III refused to purchase the work, he succeeded both in overcoming his critics' objections and inaugurating a more historically accurate style in such paintings. In the mid-nineteenth-century there arose a style known as historicism, which marked a formal imitation of historical styles and/or artists. Another development in the nineteenth century was the blending of this genre with that known as genre painting: the depiction of scenes of everyday life.

Grand depictions of events of great public importance were supplemented with scenes depicting more personal incidents in the lives of the great, or the everyday life in historical settings. The artists who depicted them sometimes connected the change with the moral messages conveyed by the public events; they asserted that moral messages were also instructive in the ordinary life, and indeed, were even superior because more people would be able to apply the lesson implicit in a depiction of family life than in one of a heroic death on the battle field.

Pre-history :

Main articles:
Prehistoric art, Art of the Upper Paleolithic, Art of the Middle Paleolithic, and List of Stone Age art Pettakere Cave are more than 44,000 years old, Maros, South Sulawesi, Indonesia The oldest known paintings are approximately 40,000 years old, found in both the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe, and in the caves in the district of Maros (Sulawesi, Indonesia).

The oldest type of cave paintings are hand stencils and simple geometric shapes; the oldest undisputed examples of figurative cave paintings are somewhat younger, close to 35,000 years old.[11] In November 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the then-oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of LubangJerijiSaléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo (Kalimantan).[12][13]

In December 2019, however, figurative cave paintings depicting pig hunting in the Maros-Pangkep karst in Sulawesi were estimated to be even older, at least 43,900 years old. The finding was noted to be "the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world".[14][15] And more recently, in 2021, cave art of a pig found in an Indonesian island, and dated to over 45,500 years, has been reported.[16] There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in Indonesia, France, India, Spain, Southern Africa, China, Australia etc.

Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people that made them. Prehistoric artists may have painted animals to "catch" their soul or spirit in order to hunt them more easily or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to surrounding nature. They may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they could have been for the transmission of practical information.