Pharoah's daughter finds Moses (1886) by the British painter Edwin Longsden Long. This is a very traditional subject in art history and lots of painters made a version of that story. What's relatively new is the historical exotic touch. Long traveled to Syria and Egypt and was specialized in oriental paintings.
After the murder (1882) by the British painter John Collier (1850-1934). Collier depicted here Clytemnestra the wife of king Agamemnon. She killed her husband in the bath after he had returned from the Trojan war. But probably she got her reason. Agamemnon had sacrificed her daughter Iphigenia and brought for himself a new wife as a trophy from the war. Probably Collier got the same opinion because he shows her with an axe not with the usual dagger, so she looks strong and pround.
The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo by the British battle painter Robert Alexander Hillingford (1825-1904). Hillingford did a whole series of Waterloo paintings. Here he shows the Duke of Wellington encouraging one of his famous infantry squares the backbone of the British army then.
Faded Laurels (1889) by the British painter Edmund Blair-Leighton (1853-1922). Beautiful cheesy middle ages, could also be a scene from the Lord of the Rings.
Across the Brazos by the great American artist Robert McGinnis (born 1926). McGinnis did over 1200 paperback book covers and movie posters. Here is a good example how the newly invented CinemaScope format also influenced the formats of paintings.
A Knight at the Crossroads (1878) by the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926). The scene is taken from an old Russian fairy tale where a hero comes to a fork in the road where he found menhir with the inscription: "If you ride to the left, you will lose your horse, if you ride to the right, you will lose your head"
The Flute Concert by the French painter Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger (1824-88). It's evident that the artist and his potential buyers had visited Pomeii and studied there the architecture and especially the frescoes. So the painting is above all a nice reconstruction of a Pompeiian villa.
The Coronation of Charlemagne (1861) by the German romantic painter Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Theodor Kaulbach (1822-1839). Kaulbach did this mural for the Maximilianeum a big palatial building in Munich. started in 1857. Corresponding to the neo-Gothic style of the Maximilianeum these murals should emphasize a long tradition dating back to the middle ages.
Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887) by the French painter Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889). The beautiful but cruel Cleopatra watches cold and impassively the effect of poison on some poor prisoners. The painter also makes great efforts with the exotic dress and the Egyptian architecture in the background, which he probably knew by the then very popular prints of the paintings by David Roberts.
The Christianization of Poland (1889) by the Polish painter Jan Matejko (1838-1893). Above all it's a symbolic painting. People are plowing, cutting timber while others are being baptized and all is illuminated by the divine light from above.
A Roman Bath (1858) by the Russian painter Fyodor Andreyevich Bronnikov (1827-1902). Roman decadence was already an important subject at this time and Bronnikov uses it to stage some beautiful girls. They seem to be posing among each other but in the end it's all for the onlooker.
The Battle of Somo-Sierra in Castille, 30 november 1808 (1810) by the French battle painter Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848). Lejeune was himself with the Napoleonic troops in Spain, so it's quite possible that the battle happened like he painted it two years later.
