1. English art Earliest art

Background

The oldest surviving British art includes Stonehenge from around 2600 BC, and tin and gold works of art produced by the Beaker people from around 2150 BC. The La Tène style of Celtic art reached the British Isles rather late, no earlier than about 400 BC, and developed a particular "Insular Celtic" style seen in objects such as the Battersea Shield, and a number of bronze mirror-backs decorated with intricate patterns of curves, spirals and trumpet-shapes. Only in the British Isles can Celtic decorative style be seen to have survived throughout the Roman period, as shown in objects like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan and the resurgence of Celtic motifs, now blended with Germanic interlace and Mediterranean elements, in Christian Insular art. This had a brief but spectacular flowering in all the countries that now form the United Kingdom in the 7th and 8th centuries, in works such as the Book of Kells and Book of Lindisfarne. The Insular style was influential across Northern Europe, and especially so in later Anglo-Saxon art, although this received new Continental influences.
The English contribution to Romanesque art and Gothic art was considerable, especially in illuminated manuscripts and monumental sculpture for churches, though the other countries were now essentially provincial, and in the 15th century Britain struggled to keep up with developments in painting on the Continent. A few examples of top-quality English painting on walls or panel from before 1500 have survived, including the Westminster Retable, The Wilton Diptych and some survivals from paintings in Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster.^[1]
The Protestant Reformations of England and Scotland were especially destructive of existing religious art, and the production of new work virtually ceased. The Artists of the Tudor Court were mostly imported from Europe, setting a pattern that would continue until the 18th century. The portraiture of Elizabeth I ignored contemporary European Renaissance models to create iconic images that border on naive art. The portraitists Hans Holbein and Anthony van Dyck were the most distinguished and influential of a large number of artists who spent extended periods in Britain, generally eclipsing local talents like Nicolas Hilliard, the painter of portrait miniatures, Robert Peake the elder, William Larkin, William Dobson, and John Michael Wright, a Scot who mostly worked in London.^[2]
Landscape painting was as yet little developed in Britain at the time of the Union, but a tradition of marine art had been established by the father and son both called Willem van de Velde, who had been the leading Dutch maritime painters until they moved to London in 1673, in the middle of the Third Anglo-Dutch War
The so-called Acts of Union 1707 came in the middle of the long period of domination in London of Sir Godfrey Kneller, a German portraitist who had eventually succeeded as principal court painter the Dutch Sir Peter Lely, whose style he had adopted for his enormous and formulaic output, of greatly varying quality, which was itself repeated by an army of lesser painters. His counterpart in Edinburgh, Sir John Baptist Medina, born in Brussels to Spanish parents, had died just before the Union took place, and was one of the last batch of Scottish knights to be created. Medina had first worked in London, but in mid-career moved to the less competitive environment of Edinburgh, where he dominated portraiture of the Scottish elite. However, after the Union the movement was to be all in the other direction, and Scottish aristocrats resigned themselves to paying more to have their portraits painted in London, even if by Scottish painters such as Medina's pupil William Aikman, who moved down in 1723, or Allan Ramsay.^[4]
There was an alternative, more direct, tradition in British portraiture to that of Lely and Kneller, tracing back to William Dobson and the German or Dutch Gerard Soest, who trained John Riley, to whom only a few works are firmly attributed and who in turn trained Jonathan Richardson, a fine artist who trained Thomas Hudson who trained Joshua Reynolds and Joseph Wright of Derby. Richardson also trained the most notable Irish portraitist of the period, Charles Jervas who enjoyed social and financial success in London despite his clear limitations as an artist.^[5]
An exception to the dominance of the "lower genres" of painting was Sir James Thornhill (1675/76–1734) who was the first and last significant English painter of huge Baroque allegorical decorative schemes, and the first native painter to be knighted. His best-known work is at Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and the cupola of Saint Paul's Cathedral, London. His drawings show a taste for strongly drawn realism in the direction his son-in-law William Hogarth was to pursue, but this is largely overridden in the finished works, and for Greenwich he took to heart his careful list of "Objections that will arise from the plain representation of the King's landing as it was in fact and in the modern way and dress" and painted a conventional Baroque glorification.^[6] Like Hogarth, he played the nationalist card in promoting himself, and eventually beat Sebastiano Ricci to enough commissions that in 1716 he and his team retreated to France, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini having already left in 1713. Once the other leading foreign painters of allegoric schemes, Antonio Verrio and Louis Laguerre, had died in 1707 and 1721 respectively, Thornhill had the field to himself, although by the end of his life commissions for grand schemes had dried up from changes in taste
William Hogarth was a great presence in the second quarter of the century, whose art was successful in achieving a particular English character, with vividly moralistic scenes of contemporary life, full of both satire and pathos, attuned to the tastes and prejudices of the Protestant middle-class, who bought the engraved versions of his paintings in huge numbers. Other subjects were only issued as prints, and Hogarth was both the first significant British printmaker, and still the best known. Many works were series of four or more scenes, of which the best known are: A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress from the 1730s and Marriage à-la-mode from the mid-1740s. In fact, although he only once briefly left England and his own propaganda asserted his Englishness and often attacked the Old Masters, his background in printmaking, more closely aware of Continental art than most British painting, and apparently his ability to quickly absorb lessons from other painters, meant that he was more aware of, and made more use of, Continental art than most of his contemporaries.
Like many later painters Hogarth wanted above all to achieve success at history painting in the Grand Manner, but his few attempts were not successful and are now little regarded. His portraits were mostly of middle-class sitters shown with an apparent realism that reflected both sympathy and flattery, and included some in the fashionable form of the conversation piece, recently introduced from France by Philippe Mercier, which was to remain a favourite in Britain, taken up by artists such as Francis Hayman, though usually abandoned once an artist could get good single figure commissions.
There was a recognition that, even more than the rest of Europe given the lack of British artists, the training of artists needed to be extended beyond the workshop of established masters, and various attempts were made to set up academies, starting with Kneller in 1711, with the help of Pellegrini, in Great Queen Street. The academy was taken over by Thornhill in 1716, but seems to have become inactive by the time John Vanderbank and Louis Chéron set up their own academy in 1720. This did not last long, and in 1724/5 Thornhill tried again in his own house, with little success. Hogarth inherited the equipment for this, and used it to start the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1735, which was the most enduring, eventually being absorbed by the Royal Academy in 1768. Hogarth also helped solve the problem of a lack of exhibition venues in London, arranging for shows at the Foundling Hospital from 1746.^[10]
The Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay worked in Edinburgh before moving to London by 1739. He made visits of three years to Italy at the beginning and end of his career, and anticipated Joshua Reynolds in bringing a more relaxed version of "Grand Manner" to British portraiture, combined with very sensitive handling in his best work, which is generally agreed to have been of female sitters. His main London rival in the mid-century, until Reynolds made his reputation, was Reynold's master, the stodgy Thomas Hudson.^[11]
John Wootton, active from about 1714 to his death in 1765, was the leading sporting painter of his day, based in the capital of English horse racing at Newmarket, and producing large numbers of portraits of horses and also battle scenes and conversation pieces with a hunting or riding setting. He had begun life as a page to the family of the Dukes of Beaufort, who in the 1720s sent him to Rome, where he acquired a classicising landscape style based on that of Gaspard Dughet and Claude, which he used in some pure landscape paintings, as well as views of country houses and equine subjects. This introduced an alternative to the various Dutch and Flemish artists who had previously set the prevailing landscape style in Britain, and through intermediary artists such as George Lambert, the first British painter to base a career on landscape subjects, was to greatly influence other British artists such as Gainsborough.^[12] Samuel Scott was the best of the native marine and townscape artists, though in the latter specialization he could not match the visiting Canaletto, who was in England from nine years from 1746, and whose Venetian views were a favourite souvenir of the Grand Tour.
The antiquary and engraver George Vertue was a figure in the London art scene for most of the period, and his copious notebooks were adapted and published in the 1760s by Horace Walpole as Some Anecdotes of Painting in England, which remains a principal source for the period.^[14]
From his arrival in London in 1720, the Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack was the leader in his field until the arrival in 1730 of Louis-François Roubiliac who had a Rococo style which was highly effective in busts and small figures, though by the following decade he was also commissioned for larger works. He also produced models for the Chelsea porcelain factory founded in 1743, a private enterprise which sought to compete with Continental factories mostly established by rulers. Roubiliac's style formed that of the leading native sculptor Sir Henry Cheere, and his brother John who specialized in statues for gardens.^[15]
The strong London silversmithing trade was dominated by the descendants of Huguenot refugees like Paul de Lamerie, Paul Crespin, Nicholas Sprimont, and the Courtauld family, as well as Georges Wickes. Orders were received from as far away as the courts of Russia and Portugal, though English styles were still led by Paris.^[16] The manufacture of silk at Spitalfields in London was also a traditional Huguenot business, but from the late 1720s silk design was dominated by the surprising figure of Anna Maria Garthwaite, a parson's daughter from Lincolnshire who emerged at the age of 40 as a designer of largely floral patterns in Rococo styles.^[17]
Unlike in France and Germany, the English adoption of the Rococo style was patchy rather than whole-hearted, and there was resistance to it on nationalist grounds, led by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and William Kent, who promoted styles in interior design and furniture to match the Palladianism of the architecture they produced together, also beginning the influential British tradition of the landscape garden,^[18] according to Nikolaus Pevsner "the most influential of all English innovations in art".^[19] The French-born engraver Hubert-François Gravelot, in London from 1732 to 1745, was a key figure in importing Rococo taste in book illustrations and ornament prints for craftsmen to follow.
In the modern popular mind, English art from about 1750–1790 — today referred to as the "classical age" of English painting — was dominated by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), George Stubbs (1724–1806), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) and Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797). At the time Reynolds was considered the dominant figure, Gainsborough was very highly reputed, but Stubbs was seen as a mere painter of animals and viewed as far a less significant figure than many other painters that are today little-known or forgotten. The period saw continued rising prosperity for Britain and British artists: "By the 1780s English painters were among the wealthiest men in the country, their names familiar to newspaper readers, their quarrels and cabals the talk of the town, their subjects known to everyone from the displays in the print-shop windows", according to Gerald Reitlinger.^[21]
Reynolds returned from a long visit to Italy in 1753, and very quickly established a reputation as the most fashionable London portraitist, and before long as a formidable figure in society;, the public leader of the arts in Britain. He had studied both classical and modern Italian art, and his compositions discreetly re-use models seen on his travels. He could convey a wide range of moods and emotions, whether heroic military men or very young women, and often to unite background and figure in a dramatic way.
The Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce had been founded in 1754, principally to provide a location for exhibitions. In 1761 Reynolds was a leader in founding the rival Society of Artists of Great Britain, where the artists had more control. This continued until 1791, despite the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, which immediately became both the most important exhibiting organization and the most important school in London. Reynolds was its first President, holding the office until his death in 1792. His published Discourses, first delivered to the students, were regarded as the first major writing on art in English, and set out the aspiration for a style to match the classical grandeur of classical sculpture and High Renaissance painting.^[23]
After the academy was established, Reynolds' portraits became more overly classicizing, and often more distant, until in the late 1770s he returned to a more intimate style, perhaps influenced by the success of Thomas Gainsborough,^[24] who only settled in London in 1773, after working in Ipswich and then Bath. While Reynolds' practice of aristocratic portraits seem exactly matched to his talents, Gainsborough, if not forced to follow the market for his work, might well have developed as a pure landscape painter, or a portraitist in the informal style of many of his portraits of his family. He continued to paint pure landscapes, largely for pleasure until his later years; full recognition of his landscapes came only in the 20th century. His main influences were French in his portraits and Dutch in his landscapes, rather than Italian, and he is famous for the brilliant light touch of his brushwork.^[25] George Romney also became prominent in about 1770 and was active until 1799, though with a falling-off in his last years. His portraits are mostly characterful but flattering images of dignified society figures, but he developed an obsession with the flighty young Emma Hamilton from 1781, painting her about sixty times in more extravagant poses.^[26] His work was especially sought-after by American collectors in the early 20th century and many are now in American museums.^[27] By the end of the period this generation had been succeeded by younger portraitists including John Hoppner, Sir William Beechey and the young Gilbert Stuart, who only realized his mature style after he returned to America.
The Welsh painter Richard Wilson returned to London from seven years in Italy in 1757, and over the next two decades developed a "sublime" landscape style adapting the Franco-Italian tradition of Claude and Gaspard Dughet to British subjects. Though much admired, like those of Gainsborough his landscapes were hard to sell, and he sometimes resorted, as Reynolds complained, to the common strategem of turning them into history paintings by adding a few small figures, which doubled their price to about £80.^[29] He continued to paint scenes set in Italy, as well as England and Wales, and his death in 1782 came just as large numbers of artists began to travel to Wales, and later the Lake District and Scotland in search of mountainous views, both for oil paintings and watercolours which were now starting their long period of popularity in Britain, both with professionals and amateurs. Paul Sandby, Francis Towne, John Warwick Smith, and John Robert Cozens were among the leading specialist painters and the clergyman and amateur artist William Gilpin was an important writer who stimulated the popularity of amateur painting of the picturesque, while the works of Alexander Cozens recommended forming random ink blots into landscape compositions—even Constable tried this technique.^[30]

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1778)

History painting in the grand manner continued to be the most prestigious form of art, though not the easiest to sell, and Reynolds made several attempts at it, as unsuccessful as Hogarth's. The unheroic nature of modern dress was seen as a major obstacle in the depiction of contemporary scenes, and the Scottish gentleman-artist and art dealer Gavin Hamilton preferred classical scenes as well as painting some based on his Eastern travels, where his European figures by-passed the problem by wearing Arab dress. He spent most of his adult life based in Rome and had at least as much influence on Neo-Classicism in Europe as in Britain. The Irishman James Barry was an influence on Blake but had a difficult career, and spent years on his cycle The Progress of Human Culture in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts. The most successful history painters, who were not afraid of buttons and wigs, were both Americans settled in London: Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, though one of his most successful works Watson and the Shark (1778) was able to mostly avoid them, showing a rescue from drowning. Smaller scale subjects from literature were also popular, pioneered by Francis Hayman, one of the first to paint scenes from Shakespeare, and Joseph Highmore, with a series illustrating the novel Pamela. At the end of the period the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was an ambitious project for paintings, and prints after them, illustrating "the Bard", as he had now become, while exposing the limitations of contemporary English history painting.^[31] Joseph Wright of Derby was mainly a portrait painter who also was one of the first artists to depict the Industrial Revolution, as well as developing a cross between the conversation piece and history painting in works like An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (c. 1766), which like many of his works are lit only by candlelight, giving a strong chiaroscuro effect.^[32]

Paintings recording scenes from the theatre were another subgenre, painted by the German Johann Zoffany among others. Zoffany painted portraits and conversation pieces, who also spent over two years in India, painting the English nabobs and local scenes, and the expanding British Empire played an increasing role in British art.^[33] Training in art was considered a useful skill in the military for sketch maps and plans, and many British officers made the first Western images, often in watercolour, of scenes and places around the world. In India, the Company style developed as a hybrid form between Western and Indian art, produced by Indians for a British market.