TIRANA, August 4/ATA/ The National Historical Museum stages the exhibition “Albania and Albanians in the paintings of European authors of the 19th century” for all local and foreign visitors.
The exhibition, conceived and prepared by the National Historical Museum, contains 45 reproductions of paintings of Albanians 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 with different profiles and characters: sometimes in fighting positions and sometimes in calm meditation scenes, or free portraits, where each of the painters expressed their originality and pictorial style.
In all the images created by the painters of the 19th century, what stands out is a kind of vitality of the traditional Albanian characters and costumes. These characters are not created simply from imagination, but from a direct encounter with these characters.
These paintings enable present-day generations to have the opportunity to look at the Albanian during that century as a real figure and the drama that he conceived in himself.
We would not be able to properly imagine the figures of the Suliote without seeing the paintings of Louis Dupré, we would not be able to imagine the Albanian without seeing the paintings of J. L. Gérôme, the embodiment of the war of Marko Boçari without seeing the paintings of Delacroix, the face of the Albanian young woman without seeing Corot’s picture, which turned into an emblematic picture.
Through the paintings of European painters of the 19th century, there is recreated in our imagination the life of Albanians in their lands and across borders, in the long journey of history. A whole group of great painters offers us today the image of the Albanian of the 19th century, his figure sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic and sometimes lyrical.
The exhibition is open in the Main Hall of the National Historical Museum in Tirana. /k.s/p.s./