The exhibition “Albania and Albanians in the paintings of European authors of the 19th century” remains open in the exhibition hall on the first floor of the National History Museum.

The exhibition contains 45 reproductions of paintings, where Albanians widely portrayed  by foreign painters, especially in the early years of the 19th century. After the French Revolution and especially after the victory of the Greek Revolution, a number of artists, writers, historians and archaeologists, but in particular French, English, Italian, German and Swiss painters addressed the Albanian theme. Albanians appeared in their paintings in different profiles and characters. Paintings show them sometimes in fighting positions and sometimes in meditation scenes, or free portraits, where each of the painters expressed their originality and pictorial style. Peculiar vitality of the traditional Albanian characters and costumes stands out in all the images created by the painters of the 19th century. These characters are not created simply from imagination, but from a direct encounter with these characters.

These paintings are a part of that great artistic productivity of European painters of the 19th century, who, in addition to exoticism through figures, compositions and colors, also give drama, tragedy or that little lyricism that could exist in the heavy atmosphere of an imperial rule. In addition, these painters enable today’s generations to have the opportunity to look at the Albanian character type during that century as a real figure and the drama that he conceived in oneself. We would not be able to properly imagine the figures of the Suljots without seeing the paintings of Louis Dupré, or the paintings of J. L. Gérôme, the embodiment of the war of Marko Boçari in the paintings of Delacroix, the face of the Albanian girl in Corot, etc.

Through the paintings of European painters of the 19th century, the life of Albanians is recreated in their lands and beyond the borders, in the long travels of history.

/a.p./