Narrative art is art that visually recounts a story. It details an event, communicates an episode in time, chronicles a passage in history and recites the happenings within a season of time. The story can be told as a moment in time, as an ongoing story or as a detailed sequence of events unfolding over a period of time. The earliest evidence of human art reveals that Man, from different backgrounds and in multifarious ways, told stories with pictures. Even though there are common features to all narrative art, different cultures all over the earth developed peculiar methods to tell the story of their existence in images. For example, much of Western art until the twentieth century was narrative. The paintings, sculptures and drawings recounted stories from the bible, or depicted legendary myths and described historical events.

In essence, genre painting and history painting are each types of narrative art, but while genre paintings depict events of an everyday sort, history paintings recount and chronicle famous events.