The living room is among the most enjoyable and, at the same time, most intimidating rooms to decorate with art. Since this is the room that most of your guests will see and spend time in, most of us take up a lot of pressure on ourselves to make it perfect. Setting the correct tone and evoking conversation is a crucial part of choosing the right artwork.

Although difficult to decorate, the living room gives you a lot of freedom to experiment. And, when it comes to experimenting, why not choose a battle art?
Apart from your living room, you can set a serious mood with a battle art in your study or your office as well.

Depiction of Battle and Strife in painting

Since the dawn of time, artists have depicted the horrors and hardships of battle through their work. Battle art is a genre of fine art depicting themes of war and military life. It is common for painters of battle scenes (including sea battles) and military campaigns to attempt to capture a particularly significant or characteristic moment of a fight, convey the excitement of the battle and the heroism of war, and reveal the historical significance of those events. At this point, the genre of battle painting approaches historical painting.

Over the past two centuries, the themes and moods of military art have changed dramatically. Before the 20th century, war artists were more prone to depict heroic tales with religious imagery, for example, the “Massacre of the Innocents” and the “Passion of Christ.” British art of the 19th century was obsessed with representing crucial military operations taking place amid awe-inspiring battlefield vistas.

As early as the 20th century, art began to take on a political overtone. It’s usually very clear, however, true for the artists who use their art to protest against war and conflicts. Even artists who openly want to influence the way people see armed conflict may find that their art actually obscures tragedy. It is possible for art to turn violence into an appealing melodrama or consumable drama.

War art, however, entails the cultural contemplation of violence even when it does not clearly show the human body in its highest mortal aspects. Through the creative energy of artists, the past, present, and futures of those who have been victorious and defeated are refracted. In the hands of an artist, the eyes of a witness and the dead continue to live on.

When thinking of war and battle paintings, the names Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s The Third of May may pop up, but there are many others that are just as important. They deserve just as much consideration as some of the most famous war and conflict paintings. From the earliest to the most modern, here are the 11 best battle paintings.

Best Battle and Strife Paintings

Decamps visited Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1828, and this painting depicts Turkish military patrols making their rounds. It’s a late version of his first significant Orientalist work, which was shown at the Paris Salon in 1831. (now in the Wallace Collection, London). French painters like Decamps were pioneers in popularizing Middle Eastern subjects depicting everyday life.
St. George, a Roman soldier, is said to have killed a dragon that terrorized a Libyan city, leading the people to convert to Christianity, as a result of their gratitude. Though the climax of the killing is depicted in this picture by Redon, the extreme violence and the action are shoved aside. It is instead the flaming colors of nature that provide the drama.
Goya’s final series, centered on the theme of bullfighting, was his briefest, yet it is widely regarded as one of the masterworks of printmaking. With failing eyesight and hearing (he had been deaf for decades), Goya, in his late 70s, sat down at an easel with the heavy stones and sketched with the greasy lithographic crayon, as though he were working on lithographic paintings, which were yet a new technique at the time. Bullfighting’s intensity and ferocity are beautifully captured in his image. However, the richness of the composition and the artistic handling of the front crowd are befitting of Goya’s mastery.
This picture portrays an armed Native American on a galloping horse being followed down a rugged mountainside by many riders, who are barely noticeable in the distance. The fact that the man and his horse are going to be plunged into the viewer’s field of vision adds to the tension. When painting outside, Schreyvogel used the Palisades, the steep cliffs along the Hudson River near his studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, to study his models in the daytime. The pictures and sketches that he had taken during his travels to the West were also brought up.

A Reconnaissance, 1902, Frederic Remington

Late in life, Remington began to paint nighttime scenes that featured darkness as an integral part of the tale. A Reconnaissance features three cavalry troops and their horses in a moonlight, snow-covered terrain rendered in a muted color palette of blue, green, and brown. An officer and a scout have climbed a nearby hilltop in preparation for a possible encounter with a distant tree line. Remington creates an eerie atmosphere by turning the figures away from the observer, which heightens the tension of an uncertain outcome.

On the Southern Plains, 1907, Frederic Remington, American

“His heroism is called duty, and it probably is,” wrote Remington of the American soldier in the West, a subject he often explored. Here, soldiers headed by a scout in buckskin charge an unknown enemy. Although Remington labeled the painting “Cavalry in the Sixties,” the uniforms and weapons dating from the Civil War through the 1870s, making the work a time capsule of American history. The painter was also willing to deviate from the truth in other details. Among other things, the horses and riders are depicted as a dynamic mass rather than a straight horizontal line, which was the typical attack formation.

1807, Friedland, ca. 1861-75, Ernest Meissonier, French

Meissonier’s largest and most ambitious painting depicts Napoleon Bonaparte winning one of his greatest victories. It took Meissonier hundreds of preliminary research, including sketches and sculptural models. This painting was part of a larger cycle he had in mind, one of which was never completed: The Campaign of France—1814, a portrait depicting the Emperor’s defeat at the hands of the French. Alexander T. Stewart, the American department store mogul, bought the present work from the artist in 1876, for a mammoth price of $60,000,

An Eruption of Vesuvius, 1824, Johan Christian Dahl

Prince Christian Frederik invited Dahl to Naples in 1820, and Dahl happily accepted, even though he was already engaged to a young woman named Emilia. He lived in Italy for the next 10 months, after marrying Emilia. Dahl reached just in time for Mount Vesuvius’s explosion on Christmas day and discovered the brilliance of color and light in Italy that would forever affect his approach to painting.
Dahl’s depiction of the volcano eruption perfectly portrays nature’s untamed, raw force that the Romantics admired. It’s a dreary, brown rocky landscape covering nearly half of the painting, yet there’s a huge explosion of color in the upper left corner. Even though the picture was completed four years after Dahl had seen the volcano erupt, it captures the speed and awe-inspiring immediacy of the molten lava and billowing cloud.

Burning of the Sidewheeler, Henry Clay, ca. 1854-60, American

Henry Clay was a renowned proponent of the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise of 1850, both attempts to protect the American union from sectional strife over slavery as part of his American System (which included a national bank, tariffs, and internal improvements to promote economic stability and prosperity). Clay, not only was a notable politician, but he was an astounding painter too. “Burning of the Sidewheeler” is Clay’s masterpiece depicting the political unrest of the time. Although he ran unsuccessfully for president in three general elections, his political and artistic career made some successful changes in American history.

Rainy Day in Camp, 1871, Winslow Homer, American

When he finished this painting, six years after the Civil War ended, he used studies he had done during the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in April and May 1862. It was the emblem of the Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps, of which Homer’s regiment was part. The red cloverleaf above Homer’s name on the upturned barrel in the left foreground represents the Sixty-First New York Volunteer Infantry . According to one reviewer, the neglected donkey on the right tells the “full narrative” of Yorktown’s misery.

Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus, ca. 1650, Pietro Test

Alexander paused in Tarsus during his campaign against Darius to take a bath in the Cydnus. As soon as he entered, his limbs stiffened as though frozen, and the vital warmth of his body slowly drained from him. The river god is on the left. There is a cloud of smoke rising from the blaze caused by Darius’s warriors in Tarsus as they fled. The painting was done shortly before Testa drowned himself in the Tiber, which is believed to be a suicide.