Lets set the Wayback Machine and take a walk through the year 1896 by way of the Wikimedia Commons page for that category.
Yes, the image quality is uneven, but there are gems to be found, and this is just a selection from the introductory page for this category. You can drill down into subcategories, and of course into listings for individual artists.
For more on browsing image resources on Wikimedia Commons, see my post from 2010.
(Images above: Daniel Ridgeway Knight, Albert Anker, Ivan Shishkin, Alfons Mucha, Ilya Repin, Carl Schuster, James Jabusa Shannon, John William Waterhouse, Anders Zorn, Kryzhitsky Ozero, Viktor Vasnetsov)