During the 19th and early 20th century, a time where the woman’s primary role was the mother, Kristian Zahrtmann’s distinctive history paintings were on the contrary often fronted by strong female subjects. Not only did he paint historical women who had peculiar lives, but he allowed them to take on complex gender roles during a time where women’s lives were tightly restricted by domestication and beauty. Within the genre of hisory painting Zahrtmann managed to not only challange the gender norms of his own time but also those present within a pictorial tradition such as history painting. The three selected artworks for this study are Aspasia with the bust of her son Perikles, Susanna and the elders and Struensee and princess Caroline Mathilde with the dead body of Sofie Magdalena. The aim of this thesis is therefore to explore the ways in which the danish artist Kristian Zahrtmann depict different aspect of gender, particularly the complex female roles that take form in his historical paintings. I will investigate by which means Zahrtmann as an artist managed to challange contemporary gender norms in his historical portraits of women by using Laura Mulvey's essay “Visual Pleasue and Narrative Cinema” and a comparative and iconographic method. Mulvey’s research dwelves into different aspects of gender within cinema, mainly the ways in which women have been depicted within the practise and due to the objectifying male gaze have taken on the role of objects rather than subjects.