Flags operate as potent visual symbols, most often standing for nationhood and patriotism. As a result, there is a rich history of artists including flags in their work. Historically, flags have been used as a sign of revolution, indicating the artist’s sympathy for a cause. In the 1600s, the genre of seascape painting became popular in the Netherlands. Artists often included the so-called Prince’s Flag—with horizontal orange, white, and blue stripes—to show their allegiance to William of Orange and the cause of Dutch independence. Flags were used as symbols in paintings commemorating the American and French Revolutions as well. In 1830, Eugène Delacroix painted the now-iconic Liberty Leading the People, which centers onan allegorical figure of Liberty: a woman raising a large French flag with one hand, holding a musket in the other. She leads a crowd over the bodies of those sacrificed for the cause of war, the flag symbolizing their nation’s bright future. The American flag plays a similar role in the monumental 1850 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted by German-American artist Emanuel Leutze. The heroic figure of George Washington stands at the bow of a ship, a flag flapping in the wind behind him.

American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam also hoped to inspire patriotism with his series of thirty flag paintings painted in the early years of World War I. By depicting elegant scenes of New York’s Fifth Avenue filled with flags, Hassam signaled his belief that the United States should intervene in the war. In more recent years, flags have taken on more complicated meaning—Jasper Johns created a series of works with the American flag as its subject in order to mine the complex associations, both positive and negative, with the flag as a visual object. Other artists who have incorporated flags into their work include Aligherio Boetti, Robert Longo, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, and Sean Scully.