Art of the United Kingdom
Encyclopedia
The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since its formation in 1707. For earlier periods, and some more detailed information on the post-1707 period, see English art
, Scottish art
, Welsh art
and Irish art
. It is part of Western art history
, and during the 18th century began once again to take the leading place it had had in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art
. Increasing British prosperity led to a greatly increased production of both fine art
and the decorative arts, the latter often being exported. The Romantic
period produced the very diverse talents of William Blake
, J. M. W. Turner
, John Constable
and Samuel Palmer
. The Victorian period saw a great diversity of art, and a far larger quantity created than before. Much Victorian art is now out of critical favour, with interest concentrated on the Pre-Raphaelites and the innovative movements at the end of the century.
The training of artists, which had long been weak, began to be improved by private and government initiatives in the 18th century, and greatly expanded in the 19th, and public exhibitions and later the opening of museums brought art to a wider public, especially in London. In the 19th century publicly displayed religious art once again became popular, after a virtual absence since the Reformation
, and, as in other countries, movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
and the Glasgow School
contended with established Academic art
. The British contribution to early Modernist art was relatively small, but since World War II British artists have made a considerable impact on Contemporary art
, especially with figurative work, and Britain remains a key centre of an increasingly globalized art world.
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 manuscript
s 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
.
The Protestant Reformation
s 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 miniature
s, Robert Peake the elder
, William Larkin
, William Dobson
, and John Michael Wright
, a Scot who mostly worked in London. 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
.
came in the middle of the long period of supremacy 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.
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.
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. 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. From 1714 the new Hanoverian dynasty
conducted a far less ostentatious court, and largely withdrew from patronage of the arts, other than the necessary portraits. Fortunately the booming British economy was able to supply aristocratic and mercantile wealth to replace the court, above all in London.
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 Master
s, 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 he 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.
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
.
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
, 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. 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.
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. Roubillac's style formed that of the leading native sculptor Sir Henry Cheere
, and his brother John
who specialized in statues for gardens.
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. 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.
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
, according to Nikolaus Pevsner
"the most influential of all English innovations in art". 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 — what is sometimes called the "classical age" of English painting — was dominated by the closely contemporary figures of Sir Joshua Reynolds
(1723–1792), George Stubbs
(1724–1806), and Thomas Gainsborough
(1727–1788), with Joseph Wright of Derby
(1734–1797) perhaps equally well-known. At the time perceptions were very different, with Reynolds certainly the dominant figure, and Gainsborough very highly reputed, but Stubbs, as a mere animal painter, seen as far less significant a figure than many other painters now relatively little-known. 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
.
Reynolds returned from a long visit to Italy in 1753, and very rapidly established himself as the most fashionable London portraitist, and before long as a formidable figure in society, the public leader of the arts in Britain, and in a position to help raise both its quality and status. He had studied Italian art, both classical and modern, intensely, and his compositions discreetly re-use models seen on his travels. He was able to convey a wide range of moods and emotions with his figures, 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
, where the artists had more control. This continued until 1791, despite the founding of the Royal Academy
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.
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
, 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 for, 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. 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. His work was especially sought-after by American collectors in the early 20th century and many are now in American museums. 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 painting
s by adding a few small figures, which doubled their price to about £80. 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.
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, and exposing the limitations of contemporary English history painting. 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.
Paintings recording scenes from the theatre were another sub-genre, painted by the German Johann Zoffany
among others. Zoffany was a successful painter of 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. 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.
Thomas Rowlandson
produced aimiably comic watercolours and prints satirizing British life, but mostly avoiding politics. The undoubted master of the political caricature
, sold individually by print shops (often acting as publishers also), either hand-coloured or plain, was James Gillray
. The emphasis on portrait-painting in British art should not be entirely put down to the vanity of the sitters. There was a large collector's market for portrait prints, mostly reproductions of paintings, which were often mounted in albums. From the mid-century there was a great growth in the expensive but more effective reproductions in mezzotint
, of portraits and other paintings, with special demand from collectors for early proof states "before letter" (that is, before the inscriptions were added), which the printmakers obligingly printed off in growing numbers.
This was also a great period for the decorative arts in Britain. Around the mid-century many porcelain
factories opened, including Bow
in London, and in the provinces Lowestoft, Worcester
, Royal Crown Derby
, Liverpool
, and Wedgewood, with Spode
following in 1767. Most were started in a very small way, and some lasted only a few decades while others still survive today. By the end of the period British porcelain services were being commissioned by foreign royalty and the British manufacturers were especially adept at pursuing the rapidly expanding international middle-class market, developing bone china
and transfer-print
ed wares as well as hand-painted true porcelain.
The three leading furniture makers, Thomas Chippendale
(1718–1779), Thomas Sheraton
(1751–1806) and George Hepplewhite
(1727? - 1786) had varied styles and have achieved the lasting fame they have mainly as the authors of pattern books used by other makers in Britain and abroad. In fact it is far from clear if the last two named ever ran actual workshops, though Chippendale certainly was successful in this and in what we now call interior design; unlike France Britain had abandoned its guild
system, and Chippendale was able to employ specialists in all the crafts needed to complete a redecoration. During the period Rococo and Chinoiserie
gave way to Neo-Classicism, with the Scottish architect and interior designer Robert Adam
(1728–1792) leading the new style.
in British art includes Joseph Wright of Derby
, James Ward
, Samuel Palmer
, Richard Parkes Bonington
, John Martin
and was perhaps the most radical period in British art, also producing William Blake
(1757–1827), John Constable
(1776–1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the later two being arguably the most internationally influential of all British artists. Turner's style, based on the Italianate tradition although he never saw Italy until in his forties, passed through considerable changes before his final wild, almost abstract, landscapes that explored the effects of light, and were a profound influence on the Impressionists and other later movements. Constable normally painted pure landscapes with at most a few genre figures, in a style based on Northern European traditions, but, like Turner, his "six-footers" were intended to make as striking an impact as any history painting. They were carefully prepared using studies and full-size oil sketch
es, whereas Turner was notorious for finishing his exhibition pieces when they were already hanging for show, freely adjusting them to dominate the surrounding works in the tightly-packed hangs of the day.
Blake's visionary style was a minority taste in his lifetime, but influenced the younger group of "Ancients
" of Samuel Palmer, John Linnell
, Edward Calvert and George Richmond
, who gathered in the country at Shoreham, Kent
in the 1820s, producing intense and lyrical pastoral idylls in conditions of some poverty. They went on to more conventional artistic careers and Palmer's early work was entirely forgotten until the early 20th century. Blake and Palmer became a significant influence on modernist artists of the 20th century seen (among others) in the painting of British artists such as Dora Carrington
,Paul Nash
and Graham Sutherland
. Blake also had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture
of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg
and songwriters Bob Dylan
, Jim Morrison
, and Van Morrison
.
Thomas Lawrence
was already a leading portraitist by the turn of the century, and able to give a Romantic dash to his portraits of high society, and the leaders of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna
after the Napoleonic Wars
. Henry Raeburn
was the most significant portraitist since the Union to remain based in Edinburgh throughout his career, an indication of increasing Scottish prosperity. But David Wilkie
took the traditional road south, achieving great success with subjects of country life and hybrid genre
and history scenes such as The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo
Dispatch (1822).
John Flaxman
was the most thorough-going neo-classical English artist. Beginning as a sculptor, he became best known for his many spare "outline drawings" of classical scenes, often illustrating literature, which were reproduced as prints. These imitated the effects of the classical-style reliefs he also produced. The German-Swiss Henry Fuseli
also produced work in a linear graphic style, but his narrative scenes, often from English literature, were intensely Romantic and highly dramatic.
(PRB) achieved considerable influence after its foundation in 1848 with paintings that concentrated on religious, literary, and genre
subjects executed in a colourful and minutely detailed style, rejecting the loose painterly brushwork of the tradition represented by "Sir Sploshua" Reynolds. PRB artists included John Everett Millais
, William Holman Hunt
, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, and Ford Madox Brown
(never officially a member), and figures such as Edward Burne-Jones
and John William Waterhouse
were later much influenced by aspects of their ideas, as was the designer William Morris
. Morris advocated a return to hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts over the industrial manufacture that was rapidly being applied to all crafts. His efforts to make beautiful objects affordable (or even free) for everyone led to his wallpaper and tile designs defining the Victorian
aesthetic and instigating the Arts and Crafts movement
. The PRB, like Turner, was supported by the magisterial art critic John Ruskin
, himself a very fine amateur artist. For all their technical innovation, the PRB were both traditional and Victorian in their adherence to the history painting
as the highest form of art, and their subject matter was thoroughly in tune with Victorian taste, and indeed "everything that the publishers of steel engravings welcomed", enabling them to merge easily into the mainstream in their later careers.
While the Pre-Raphaelites had a turbulent and divided reception, the most popular and expensive painters of the period included Edwin Landseer, who specialized in sentimental animal subjects, which were favourites of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the later part of the century artists could earn large sums from selling the reproduction rights of their paintings to print publishers, and works of Landseer, especially his Monarch of the Glen
(1851), a portrait of a Highland stag, were among the most popular. Like Millais' Bubbles (painting)
(1886) it was used on packaging and advertisements for decades, for brands of whisky and soap respectively. During the late Victorian era
in Britain the academic paintings, some enormously large, of Lord Leighton and the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema
were enormously popular, both often featuring lightly clad beauties in exotic or classical settings, while the allegorical works of G.F. Watts
matched the Victorian sense of high purpose. The classical ladies of Edward Poynter
and Albert Moore
wore more clothes and met with rather less success. William Powell Frith
painted highly detailed scenes of social life, typically including all classes of society, that include comic and moral elements and have an acknowledged debt to Hogarth, though tellingly different to his work.
For all such artists the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
was an essential platform, reviewed at huge length in the press, which often alternated ridicule and extravagant praise in discussing works. The ultimate, and very rare, accolade was when a rail had to be put in front of a painting to protect it from the eager crowd; up to 1874 this had only happened to Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners, Frith's Derby Day and Salon d'Or and Luke Filde's The Casuals (see below). A great number of artists laboured year after year in the hope of a hit there, often working in manners to which their talent was not really suited, a trope exemplified by the suicide in 1846 of Benjamin Haydon
, a friend of Keats and Dickens and a better writer than painter, leaving his blood splashed over his unfinished King Alfred and the First British Jury.
British history was a very common subject, with the Middle Ages, Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots and the English Civil War
especially popular sources for subjects. Many painters mentioned elsewhere painted historical subjects, including Millais (The Boyhood of Raleigh
and many others), Ford Madox Brown (Cromwell on his Farm
), David Wilkie, Watts and Frith, and West, Bonington and Turner in earlier decades. The London-based Irishman Daniel Maclise
and Charles West Cope
painted scenes for the new Palace of Westminster
. Lady Jane Grey
was, like Mary Queen of Scots, a female whose sufferings attracted many painters, though none quite matched The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, one of many British historical subjects by the Frenchman Paul Delaroche. Painters prided themselves on the increasing accuracy of their period settings in terms of costume and objects, studying the collections of the new Victoria and Albert Museum
and books, and scorning the breezy approximations of earlier generations of artists.
Victorian painting developed the Hogarthian social subject, packed with moralizing detail, and the tradition of illustrating scenes from literature, into a range of types of genre painting, many with only a few figures, others large and crowded scenes like Frith's best-known works. Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience
(1853) and Augustus Egg
's set of Past and Present (1858) are of the first type, both dealing with "fallen women", a perennial Victorian concern. As Peter Conrad
points out, these were paintings designed to be read like novels, whose meaning emerged after the viewer had done the work of deciphering it. Other "anecdotal" scenes were lighter in mood, tending towards being captionless Punch
cartoons. Towards the end of the century the problem picture
left the details of the narrative action deliberately ambiguous, inviting the viewer to speculate on it using the evidence in front of them, but not supplying a final answer (artists learned to smile enigmatically when asked). This sometimes provoked discussion on sensitive social issues, typically involving women, that might have been hard to raise directly. They were enormously popular; newspapers ran competitions for readers to supply the meaning of the painting.
British Orientalism
, though not as common as in France at the same period, had many specialists, including John Frederick Lewis
, who lived for nine years in Cairo
, David Roberts
, a Scot who made lithographs of his travels in the Middle East and Italy, the nonsense writer Edward Lear
, a continual traveller who reached as far as Ceylon, and Richard Dadd
. Holman Hunt also travelled to Palestine
to obtain authentic settings for his Biblical pictures. The Frenchman James Tissot
, who fled to London after the fall of the Paris Commune
, divided his time between scenes of high society social events and a huge series of Biblical illustrations, made in watercolour for reproductive publication. Frederick Goodall
specialized in scenes of Ancient Egypt.
Larger paintings concerned with the social conditions of the poor tended to concentrate on rural scenes, so that the misery of the human figures was at least offset by a landscape. Painters of these included Frederick Walker
, Luke Fildes
(although he made his name in 1874 with Applicants for Admission to the Casual Ward at Saint Martin in the Fields- see above), Frank Holl
, George Clausen
, and the German Hubert von Herkomer
. William Bell Scott
, a friend of the Rosettis, painted historical scenes and other types of work, but was also one of the few artists to depict scenes from heavy industry. His memoirs are a useful source for the period, and he was one of several artists to be employed for a period in the greatly expanded system of government art schools, which were driven by the administrator Henry Cole
(the inventor of the Christmas card
) and employed Richard Redgrave
, Edward Poynter
, Richard Burchett
, the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser
and many others. Burchett was headmaster of the "South Kensington Schools", now the Royal College of Art
, which gradually replaced the Royal Academy School as the leading British art school, though around the turn of the century the Slade School of Fine Art
produced many of the forward-looking artists.
The Royal Academy was initially by no means as conservative and restrictive as the Paris Salon
, and the Pre-Raphaelites had most of their submissions for exhibition accepted, although like everyone else they complained about the positions their paintings were given. They were especially welcomed at the Liverpool Academy of Arts
, one of the largest regional exhibiting organizations; the Royal Scottish Academy
was founded in 1826 and opened its grand new building
in the 1850s. There were alternative London locations like the British Institution
, and as the conservatism of the Royal Academy gradually increased, despite the efforts of Lord Leighton when President, new spaces opened, notably the Grosvenor Gallery
in Bond Street
, from 1877, which became the home of the Aesthetic Movement, and the New English Art Club
, which from 1885 exhibited many artists with Impressionist tendencies, initially using the Egyptian Hall
, opposite the Royal Academy, which also hosted many exhibitions of foreign art. The American portrait painter John Singer Sargent
(1856–1925), spent most of his working career in Europe and he maintained his studio in London (where he died) from 1886 to 1907.
Alfred Sisley
, who was French by birth but had British nationality, painted in France as one of the Impressionists
; Walter Sickert
and Philip Wilson Steer
at the start of their careers were also strongly influenced, but despite the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel
bringing many exhibitions to London, the movement made little impact in England until decades later. Some members of the Newlyn School
of landscapes and genre scenes adopted a quasi-Impressionist technique while others used realist or more traditional levels of finish. The late 19th century also saw the Decadent movement
in France and the British Aesthetic movement
. The British based American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley
, and the former Pre-Raphaelites
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, and Edward Burne-Jones
are associated with those movements, with late Burne-Jones and Beardsley both being admired abroad and representing the nearest British approach to European Symbolism
. In 1877 James McNeill Whistler, sued the art critic
John Ruskin
for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face." The jury reached a verdict in favor of Whistler but awarded him omly a single farthing in nominal damages, and the court costs were split. The cost of the case, together with huge debts from building his residence ("The White House" in Tite Street
, Chelsea
, designed with E. W. Godwin
, 1877–8), bankrupted Whistler by May 1879, resulting in an auction of his work, collections, and house. Stansky notes the irony that the Fine Art Society of London
, which had organized a collection to pay for Ruskin's legal costs, supported him in etching "the stones of Venice"
(and in exhibiting the series in 1883) which helped recoup Whistler's costs.
Scottish art was now regaining an adequate home market, allowing it to develop a distinctive character, of which the "Glasgow Boys" were one expression, straddling Impressionism
in painting, and Art Nouveau
, Japonism
and the Celtic Revival
in design, with the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh
now their best-known member. Painters included Thomas Millie Dow
, George Henry
, Joseph Crawhall and James Guthrie
.
New printing technology brought a great expansion in book illustration with illustrations for children's books providing much of the best remembered work of the period. Specialized artists included Randolph Caldecott
, Walter Crane
, Kate Greenaway
and, from 1902, Beatrix Potter
.
The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire
, led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility in the United Kingdom. British people
used their art "to illustrate their knowledge and command of the natural world", whilst the permanent settlers in British North America
, Australasia
, and South Africa "embarked upon a search for distinctive artistic expression appropriate to their sense of national identity". The empire has been "at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art".
The enormous variety and massive production of the various forms of British decorative art during the period are too complex to be easily summarized. Victorian taste, until the various movements of the last decades, such as Arts and Crafts
, is generally poorly regarded today, but much fine work was produced, and much money made. Both William Burges
and Augustus Pugin were architects committed to the Gothic Revival, who expanded into designing furniture, metalwork, tiles and objects in other media. There was an enormous boom in re-Gothicising the fittings of medieval churches, and fitting out new ones in the style, especially with stained glass
, an industry revived from effective extinction. The revival of furniture painted with images was a particular feature at the top end of the market. From its opening in 1875 the London department store Liberty & Co. was especially associated with imported Far Eastern decorative items and British goods in the new styles of the end of the century. Charles Voysey
was an architect who also did much design work in textiles, wallpaper furniture and other media, bringing the Arts and Crafts movement
into Art Nouveau
and beyond; he continued to design into the 1920s. A. H. Mackmurdo
was a similar figure.
In many respects the Victorian era continued until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the Royal Academy became increasingly ossified; the unmistakably late Victorian figure of Frank Dicksee was appointed President in 1924. In photography Pictorialism
aimed to achieve artistic indeed painterly effects; The Linked Ring
contained the leading practitioners. The American John Singer Sargent
was the most successful London portraitist at the start of the century, with John Lavery
, Augustus John
and William Orpen
rising figures. John's sister Gwen John
lived in France, and her intimate portraits were relatively little appreciated until decades after her death. British attitudes to modern art
were "polarized" at the end of the 19th century. Modernist movements were both cherished and vilified by artists and critics; Impressionism
was initially regarded by "many conservative critics" as a "subversive foreign influence", but became "fully assimilated" into British art during the early-20th century. The London-born Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats
(1871–1957), was based in Dublin, at once a romantic painter
, a symbolist and an expressionist
.
Vorticism
was a brief coming together of a number of Modernist artists in the years immediately before 1914; members included Wyndham Lewis
, the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg
, Malcolm Arbuthnot
, Lawrence Atkinson
, the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn
, Frederick Etchells
, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
, Cuthbert Hamilton
, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts
, Edward Wadsworth
, Jessica Dismorr
, Helen Saunders
, and Dorothy Shakespear
. The early 20th century also includes The Sitwells
artistic circle and more notably the Bloomsbury Group
a group of mostly English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including painter Dora Carrington
, painter and art critic
Roger Fry
, art critic
Clive Bell
, painter Vanessa Bell
, painter Duncan Grant
among others; very fashionable at the time, their work in the visual arts looks less impressive today. British modernism was to remain somewhat tentative until after World War II, though figures such as Ben Nicholson
kept in touch with European developments.
Walter Sickert
and the Camden Town Group
developed an English style of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
with a strong strand of social documentary, including Harold Gilman
, Spencer Frederick Gore
, Charles Ginner
, Robert Bevan
, Malcolm Drummond
and Lucien Pissarro
(the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro
). Where their colouring is often notoriously drab, the Scottish Colourists
indeed mostly used bright light and colour; some, like Samuel Peploe
and John Duncan Fergusson
, were living in France to find suitable subjects. They were initially inspired by Sir William McTaggart
(1835–1910), a Scottish landscape painter associated with Impressionism.
The reaction to the horrors of the First World War prompted a return to pastoral subjects as represented by Paul Nash
and Eric Ravilious
, mainly a printmaker. Stanley Spencer
painted mystical works, as well as landscapes, and the sculptor, printmaker and typographer Eric Gill
produced elegant simple forms in a style related to Art Deco
. The Euston Road School
was a group of "progressive" realists of the late 1930s, including the influential teacher William Coldstream
. Surrealism
, with artists including John Tunnard
and the Birmingham Surrealists
, was briefly popular in the 1930s, influencing Roland Penrose
and Henry Moore
. Stanley William Hayter
was a British
painter
and printmaker
associated in the 1930s with Surrealism
and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism
. in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris. Since his death in 1988, it has been known as Atelier Contrepoint. Hayter became one of the most influential printmakers of the 20th century. Fashionable portraitists included Meredith Frampton
in a hard-faced Art Deco classicism, Augustus John
, and Sir Alfred Munnings
if horses were involved. Munnings was President of the Royal Academy 1944–1949 and led a jeering hostility to Modernism. The photographers of the period include Bill Brandt
, Angus McBean
and the diarist Cecil Beaton
.
Henry Moore emerged after World War II
as Britain's leading sculptor, promoted alongside Victor Pasmore
and Barbara Hepworth
by the Festival of Britain
. The "London School" of figurative painters including Francis Bacon
, Lucian Freud
, Frank Auerbach
, Leon Kossoff
, and Michael Andrews
have received widespread international recognition, while other painters such as John Minton
and John Craxton
are characterized as Neo-Romantics. Graham Sutherland
, the Romantic landscapist John Piper
(a prolific and popular lithographer), the sculptor Elisabeth Frink
, and the industrial townscapes of L.S. Lowry also contributed to the strong figurative presence in post-war British art. In 1952 at the 26th Venice Biennale
a group of young British sculptors including Kenneth Armitage
, Reg Butler
, Lynn Chadwick
, William Turnbull
and Eduardo Paolozzi
, exhibited works that demonstrated anti-monumental, expressionism. Scottish painter Alan Davie
created a large body of abstract paintings during the 1950s that synthesize and reflect his interest in mythology and zen. Abstract art became prominent during the 1950s with Ben Nicholson
, Terry Frost
, Peter Lanyon
and Patrick Heron
, who were part of the St Ives school
in Cornwall.
In the 1950s the London based Independent Group
formed; from which pop art
emerged in 1956 with the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
This Is Tomorrow
, as a British reaction to abstract expressionism
. The International Group was the topic of a two-day, international conference at the Tate Britain
in March 2007. The Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the Pop Art
movement in Britain and the United States. The This is Tomorrow show featured Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi
, Richard Hamilton
, and artist John McHale
amongst others, and the group included the influential art critic
Lawrence Alloway
as well.
In the 1960s Sir Anthony Caro became a leading figure of British sculpture along with a younger generation of abstract artists including Isaac Witkin
, Phillip King and William G. Tucker
. John Hoyland
, Howard Hodgkin
, John Walker
, Ian Stephenson
, Robyn Denny
and John Plumb
were British painters who emerged at that time and who reflected the new international style of Color Field painting. During the 1960s another group of British artists offered a radical alternative to more conventional artmaking and they included Bruce McLean
, Barry Flanagan
, Richard Long
and Gilbert and George
. British pop art
painters David Hockney
, Patrick Caulfield
, Derek Boshier
, Peter Phillips
, Peter Blake
(best known for the cover-art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
), Gerald Laing
, the sculptor Allen Jones
were part of the sixties art scene as was the British based American painter R. B. Kitaj
. Photorealism
in the hands of Malcolm Morley
(who was awarded the first Turner Prize
in 1984) emerged in the 1960s as well as the op-art of Bridget Riley
. Michael Craig Martin was an influential teacher of some of the Young British Artists
and is known for the conceptual work, An Oak Tree
(1973).
Post-modern
, contemporary British art, particularly that of the Young British Artists
, has been said to be "characterised by a fundamental concern with material culture ... perceived as a post-imperial cultural anxiety". The annual Turner Prize
, founded in 1984 and organized by the Tate, has developed as a highly publicized showcase for contemporary British art. Among the beneficiaries have been several members of the Young British Artists
(YBA) movement, which includes Damien Hirst
, Rachel Whiteread
, and Tracey Emin
, who rose to prominence after the Freeze exhibition
of 1988, with the backing of Charles Saatchi
and achieved international recognition with their version of conceptual art
. This often featured installations
, notably Hirst's vitrine containing a preserved shark
. The Tate gallery and eventually the Royal Academy also gave them exposure. The influence of Saatchi's generous and wide-ranging patronage was to become a matter of some controversy, as was that of Jay Jopling
, the most influential London gallerist.
The Sensation exhibition of works from the Saatchi Collection was controversial in both the UK and the US, though in different ways. At the Royal Academy press-generated controversy centred on Myra
, a very large image of the murderer Myra Hindley
by Marcus Harvey
, but when the show travelled to New York City, opening at the Brooklyn Museum
in late 1999, it was met with intense protest about The Holy Virgin Mary
by Chris Ofili
, which had not provoked this reaction in London. While the press reported that the piece was smeared with elephant dung, although Ofili's work in fact showed a carefully rendered black Madonna
decorated with a resin-covered lump of elephant dung. The figure is also surrounded by small collage
images of female genitalia from pornographic magazines; these seemed from a distance to be the traditional cherubim. Among other criticism, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had seen the work in the catalogue but not in the show, called it "sick stuff" and threatened to withdraw the annual $7 million City Hall grant from the Brooklyn Museum
hosting the show, because "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion."
In 1999, the Stuckists
figurative painting group which includes Billy Childish
and Charles Thomson
was founded as a reaction to the YBAs. The Federation of British Artists
hosts shows of traditional figurative painting. Jack Vettriano
and Beryl Cook
have widespread popularity, but not establishment recognition. Banksy
made a reputation with street graffiti
and is now a highly valued mainstream artist. In 2004, the Walker Art Gallery
staged The Stuckists Punk Victorian
, the first national museum exhibition of the Stuckist
art movement.
Antony Gormley
produces sculptures, mostly in metal and based on the human figure, which include the 20 metres (66 ft) high Angel of the North
near Gateshead
, one of the first of a number of very large public sculptures produced in the 2000s, Another Place
, and Event Horizon
. The Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor
has public works around the world, including Cloud Gate
in Chicago
and Sky Mirror
in various locations; like much of his work these use curved mirror-like steel surfaces. The environmental sculpture
s of British earth works artist
Andy Goldsworthy
have been created in many locations around the world. Using natural found materials they are often very emphemeral, and are recorded in photographs of which several collections in book form have been published. Richard Long
is another land artist, often working with river mud. Grayson Perry
works in various media, including ceramics.
English art
English art is the body of visual arts made in England. Following historical surveys such as Creative Art In England by William Johnstone , Nikolaus Pevsner attempted a definition in his 1956 book The Englishness of English Art, as did Sir Roy Strong in his 2000 book The Spirit of Britain: A...
, Scottish art
Scottish art
The history of Scottish art which we can take to mean the visual art produced within the modern political boundary of Scotland since the earliest times, forms a distinctive tradition within British and European art...
, Welsh art
Welsh art
Welsh art refers to the traditions in the visual arts associated with Wales and its people. Wales cannot claim to have been a major centre of the visual arts at any point, and Welsh art is essentially a regional variant of the forms and styles of the rest of the British Isles; a very different...
and Irish art
Irish art
The early history of Irish art is generally considered to begin with early carvings found at sites such as Newgrange and is traced through Bronze Age artefacts, particularly ornamental gold objects, and the religious carvings and illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period...
. It is part of Western art history
Western art history
Western art is the art of the North American and European countries, and art created in the forms accepted by those countries.Written histories of Western art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Aegean civilisations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC...
, and during the 18th century began once again to take the leading place it had had in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
. Increasing British prosperity led to a greatly increased production of both fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
and the decorative arts, the latter often being exported. The Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
period produced the very diverse talents of William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
, J. M. W. Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
, John Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
and Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.-Early life:...
. The Victorian period saw a great diversity of art, and a far larger quantity created than before. Much Victorian art is now out of critical favour, with interest concentrated on the Pre-Raphaelites and the innovative movements at the end of the century.
The training of artists, which had long been weak, began to be improved by private and government initiatives in the 18th century, and greatly expanded in the 19th, and public exhibitions and later the opening of museums brought art to a wider public, especially in London. In the 19th century publicly displayed religious art once again became popular, after a virtual absence since the Reformation
Reformation
- Movements :* Protestant Reformation, an attempt by Martin Luther to reform the Roman Catholic Church that resulted in a schism, and grew into a wider movement...
, and, as in other countries, movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
and the Glasgow School
Glasgow School
The Glasgow School was a circle of influential modern artists and designers who began to coalesce in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to sometime around 1910. Representative groups were: The Four , the Glasgow Girls and the Glasgow Boys...
contended with established Academic art
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...
. The British contribution to early Modernist art was relatively small, but since World War II British artists have made a considerable impact on Contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
, especially with figurative work, and Britain remains a key centre of an increasingly globalized art world.
Background
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...
from around 2600 BC, and tin
Tin
Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn and atomic number 50. It is a main group metal in group 14 of the periodic table. Tin shows chemical similarity to both neighboring group 14 elements, germanium and lead and has two possible oxidation states, +2 and the slightly more stable +4...
and gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
works of art produced by the Beaker people from around 2150 BC. The La Tène style of Celtic art
Celtic art
Celtic art is the art associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic...
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
Battersea Shield
The Battersea Shield is one of the most significant pieces of ancient Celtic military equipment found in Britain. It is a sheet bronze covering of a wooden shield decorated in La Tène style...
, 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
Roman Britain
Roman Britain was the part of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire from AD 43 until ca. AD 410.The Romans referred to the imperial province as Britannia, which eventually comprised all of the island of Great Britain south of the fluid frontier with Caledonia...
, as shown in objects like the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan
Staffordshire Moorlands Pan
thumb|Staffordshire Moorlands Pan.The Staffordshire Moorlands Pan is a 2nd century AD enamelled bronze trulla with an inscription relating to the forts of Hadrian's Wall...
and the resurgence of Celtic motifs, now blended with Germanic interlace and Mediterranean elements, in Christian Insular art
Insular art
Insular art, also known as Hiberno-Saxon art, is the style of art produced in the post-Roman history of Ireland and Great Britain. The term derives from insula, the Latin term for "island"; in this period Britain and Ireland shared a largely common style different from that of the rest of Europe...
. 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
Book of Kells
The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...
and Book of Lindisfarne. The Insular style was influential across Northern Europe, and especially so in later Anglo-Saxon art
Anglo-Saxon art
Anglo-Saxon art covers art produced within the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, beginning with the Migration period style that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them from the continent in the 5th century, and ending in 1066 with the Norman Conquest of a large Anglo-Saxon nation-state whose...
, although this received new Continental influences. The English contribution to Romanesque art
Romanesque art
Romanesque art refers to the art of Western Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region. The preceding period is increasingly known as the Pre-Romanesque...
and Gothic art
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
was considerable, especially in illuminated manuscript
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
s 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
Westminster Retable
The Westminster Retable, the oldest known panel painting altarpiece in England, is estimated to have been painted in the 1270s in the circle of Plantagenet court painters, for Westminster Abbey, very probably for the high altar. It is thought to have been donated by Henry III of England as part of...
, The Wilton Diptych
The Wilton Diptych
The Wilton Diptych is a small portable diptych of two hinged panels, painted on both sides. It is an extremely rare survival of a late Medieval religious panel painting from England. The diptych was painted for King Richard II of England who is depicted kneeling before the Virgin and Child in...
and some survivals from paintings in Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
and the Palace of Westminster
Palace of Westminster
The Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament or Westminster Palace, is the meeting place of the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom—the House of Lords and the House of Commons...
.
The Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
s of England
English Reformation
The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th-century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church....
and Scotland
Scottish Reformation
The Scottish Reformation was Scotland's formal break with the Papacy in 1560, and the events surrounding this. It was part of the wider European Protestant Reformation; and in Scotland's case culminated ecclesiastically in the re-establishment of the church along Reformed lines, and politically in...
were especially destructive of existing religious art, and the production of new work virtually ceased. The Artists of the Tudor Court
Artists of the Tudor court
The artists of the Tudor court are the painters and limners engaged by the monarchs of England's Tudor dynasty and their courtiers between 1485 and 1603, from the reign of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I....
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
Naïve art
Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true...
. The portraitists Hans Holbein
Hans Holbein
Hans Holbein may refer to two German painters:* Hans Holbein the Elder father of Hans the Younger* Hans Holbein the Younger , better known of the two, court artist to King Henry VIII of England...
and Anthony van Dyck
Anthony van Dyck
Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England. He is most famous for his portraits of Charles I of England and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next...
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 miniature
Portrait miniature
A portrait miniature is a miniature portrait painting, usually executed in gouache, watercolour, or enamel.Portrait miniatures began to flourish in 16th century Europe and the art was practiced during the 17th century and 18th century...
s, Robert Peake the elder
Robert Peake the Elder
Robert Peake the Elder was an English painter active in the later part of Elizabeth I's reign and for most of the reign of James I. In 1604, he was appointed picture maker to the heir to the throne, Prince Henry; and in 1607, serjeant-painter to King James I – a post he shared with John De Critz...
, William Larkin
William Larkin
William Larkin was an English painter active from 1609 until his death in 1619, known for his iconic portraits of members of the court of James I of England which capture in brilliant detail the opulent layering of textiles, embroidery, lace, and jewellery characteristic of fashion in the Jacobean...
, William Dobson
William Dobson
William Dobson was a portraitist and one of the first notable English painters, praised by his contemporary John Aubrey as "the most excellent painter that England has yet bred"....
, and John Michael Wright
John Michael Wright
John Michael Wright was a portrait painter in the Baroque style. Described variously as English and Scottish, Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome...
, a Scot who mostly worked in London. Landscape painting was as yet little developed in Britain at the time of the Union, but a tradition of marine art
Marine art
Marine art or maritime art is any form of figurative art that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea—a genre particularly strong from the 17th to 19th centuries...
had been established by the father
Willem van de Velde the Elder
Willem van de Velde the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age seascape painter.-Biographical Outline:Willem van de Velde, known as the Elder, a marine draughtsman and painter, was born in Leiden, the son of a Flemish skipper, Willem Willemsz. van de Velde, and is commonly said to have been bred to the sea...
and son
Willem van de Velde the Younger
Willem van de Velde the Younger was a Dutch marine painter.-Biography:Willem van de Velde was baptised on 18 December 1633 in Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic....
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
Third Anglo-Dutch War
The Third Anglo–Dutch War or Third Dutch War was a military conflict between England and the Dutch Republic lasting from 1672 to 1674. It was part of the larger Franco-Dutch War...
.
Early 18th century
The Acts of Union 1707Acts of Union 1707
The Acts of Union were two Parliamentary Acts - the Union with Scotland Act passed in 1706 by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act passed in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland - which put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on 22 July 1706,...
came in the middle of the long period of supremacy in London of Sir Godfrey Kneller
Godfrey Kneller
Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to British monarchs from Charles II to George I...
, a German portraitist who had eventually succeeded as principal court painter the Dutch Sir Peter Lely
Peter Lely
Sir Peter Lely was a painter of Dutch origin, whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court.-Life:...
, 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
John Baptist Medina
Sir John Baptist Medina or John Baptiste de Medina was an artist of Flemish-Spanish origin who worked in England and Scotland, mostly as a portrait painter, though he was also the first illustrator of Paradise Lost by John Milton in 1688.-Life and portrait-painting:Medina was the son of a Spanish...
, 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
William Aikman (painter)
William Aikman was a Scottish portrait-painter.-Life and career:Aikman was the son of William Aikman, of Cairney. His father intended that he should follow the law, and gave him an education suitable to these views; but the strong predilection of the son to the fine arts induced him to attach...
, who moved down in 1723, or Allan Ramsay.
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
Gerard Soest
Gerard Soest , also known as Gerald Soest, was a portrait painter who was active in England during the late 17th century...
, who trained John Riley
John Riley (painter)
John Riley, or Ryley, was an English portrait painter. He painted portraits of Charles II and James II, and was court painter to William III and Mary II...
, to whom only a few works are firmly attributed and who in turn trained Jonathan Richardson
Jonathan Richardson (painter)
Jonathan Richardson sometimes called "the Elder" to distinguish him from his son) was an English artist, collector of drawings, and writer on art, working almost entirely as a portrait-painter in London. He was considered by some art-critics as one of the three foremost painters of his time. He...
, a fine artist who trained Thomas Hudson
Thomas Hudson (painter)
Thomas Hudson was an English portrait painter in the 18th century. He was born in 1701 in the West Country of the United Kingdom. His exact birthplace is unknown...
who trained Joshua Reynolds and Joseph Wright of Derby. Richardson also trained the most notable Irish portraitist of the period, Charles Jervas
Charles Jervas
Charles Jervas [Jarvis] was an Irish portrait painter, translator, and art collector of the early 18th century.-Early life:...
who enjoyed social and financial success in London despite his clear limitations as an artist.
An exception to the dominance of the "lower genres
Hierarchy of genres
A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value....
" of painting was Sir James Thornhill
James Thornhill
Sir James Thornhill was an English painter of historical subjects, in the Italian baroque tradition.-Life:...
(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
Old Royal Naval College
The Old Royal Naval College is the architectural centrepiece of Maritime Greenwich, a World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London, described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation as being of “outstanding universal value” and reckoned to be the “finest and most...
, Blenheim Palace
Blenheim Palace
Blenheim Palace is a monumental country house situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, residence of the dukes of Marlborough. It is the only non-royal non-episcopal country house in England to hold the title of palace. The palace, one of England's largest houses, was built between...
and the cupola
Cupola
In architecture, a cupola is a small, most-often dome-like, structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome....
of Saint Paul's Cathedral, London. His drawings show a taste for strongly drawn realism in the direction his son-in-law William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
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. Like Hogarth, he played the nationalist card in promoting himself, and eventually beat Sebastiano Ricci
Sebastiano Ricci
Sebastiano Ricci was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting.-Early years:He was born in Belluno, son...
to enough commissions that in 1716 he and his team retreated to France, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini was a widely-travelled Rococo decorative painter from Venice, where he was born and died...
having already left in 1713. Once the other leading foreign painters of allegoric schemes, Antonio Verrio
Antonio Verrio
The Italian-born Antonio Verrio was responsible for introducing Baroque mural painting into England and served the Crown over a thirty year period.-Career:...
and Louis Laguerre
Louis Laguerre
Louis Laguerre , was a French decorative painter mainly working in England.Born in Versailles in 1663 and trained at the Paris Academy under Charles Le Brun, he came to England in 1683, where he first worked with Antonio Verrio, and then on his own...
, 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. From 1714 the new Hanoverian dynasty
House of Hanover
The House of Hanover is a deposed German royal dynasty which has ruled the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg , the Kingdom of Hanover, the Kingdom of Great Britain, the Kingdom of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...
conducted a far less ostentatious court, and largely withdrew from patronage of the arts, other than the necessary portraits. Fortunately the booming British economy was able to supply aristocratic and mercantile wealth to replace the court, above all in London.
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
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
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
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
A Harlot's Progress
A Harlot's Progress is a series of six paintings and engravings by William Hogarth. The series shows the story of a young woman, Mary Hackabout, who arrives in London from the country and becomes a prostitute...
and A Rake's Progress
A Rake's Progress
A Rake's Progress is a series of eight paintings by 18th century English artist William Hogarth. The canvases were produced in 1732–33 then engraved and published in print form in 1735...
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 Master
Old Master
"Old Master" is a term for a European painter of skill who worked before about 1800, or a painting by such an artist. An "old master print" is an original print made by an artist in the same period...
s, his background in printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
, 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 he wanted above all to achieve success at history painting
History painting
History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
in the Grand Manner
Grand manner
Grand Manner refers to an idealized aesthetic style derived from classical art, and the modern "classic art" of the High Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, British artists and connoisseurs used the term to describe paintings that incorporated visual metaphors in order to suggest noble qualities...
, 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
Conversation piece
Conversation piece is a term for an informal group portrait, especially those painted in Britain in the 18th century, beginning in the 1720s. They are distinguished by their portrayal of the group apparently engaged in genteel conversation or some activity, very often outdoors...
, recently introduced from France by Philippe Mercier
Philippe Mercier
Philippe Mercier was a French painter and etcher, who lived principally and was active in England. He was born in Berlin of French extraction, the son of a Huguenot tapestry-worker. He studied painting at the Akademie der Wissenschaften of Berlin and later under Antoine Pesne, who had arrived...
, which was to remain a favourite in Britain, taken up by artists such as Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman was an English painter and illustrator who became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 and later its first librarian....
, 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
John Vanderbank
John Vanderbank was an English portrait painter and book illustrator, who enjoyed a high reputation for a short while during the reign of King George I, but who died relatively young due to an intemperate and extravagant lifestyle.-Life:Vanderbank was born in London, the eldest son of John...
and Louis Chéron
Louis Chéron
Louis Chéron was a French painter, illustrator and art tutor.-Life:Born into a French Protestant family of artists . He trained under his father then at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture...
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
St. Martin's Lane Academy
The St. Martin's Lane Academy, which was the precursor of the Royal Academy, was organized in 1735 by William Hogarth, from the circle of artists and designers who gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House at the upper end of St. Martin's Lane, London. The artistic set that introduced the Rococo style...
in 1735, which was the most enduring, eventually being absorbed by the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
in 1768. Hogarth also helped solve the problem of a lack of exhibition venues in London, arranging for shows at the Foundling Hospital
Foundling Hospital
The Foundling Hospital in London, England was founded in 1741 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram. It was a children's home established for the "education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children." The word "hospital" was used in a more general sense than it is today, simply...
from 1746.
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
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy...
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
Thomas Hudson (painter)
Thomas Hudson was an English portrait painter in the 18th century. He was born in 1701 in the West Country of the United Kingdom. His exact birthplace is unknown...
.
John Wootton
John Wootton
John Wootton was an English painter of sporting subjects, battle scenes and landscapes, and illustrator.-Life:Born in Snitterfield, Warwickshire , he is best remembered as a pioneer in the painting of sporting subjects – together with Peter Tillemans and James Seymour – and was considered the...
, 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
Horse racing
Horse racing is an equestrian sport that has a long history. Archaeological records indicate that horse racing occurred in ancient Babylon, Syria, and Egypt. Both chariot and mounted horse racing were events in the ancient Greek Olympics by 648 BC...
at Newmarket, and producing large numbers of portraits of horses and also battle scenes and conversation pieces with a hunting
Fox hunting
Fox hunting is an activity involving the tracking, chase, and sometimes killing of a fox, traditionally a red fox, by trained foxhounds or other scent hounds, and a group of followers led by a master of foxhounds, who follow the hounds on foot or on horseback.Fox hunting originated in its current...
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
Gaspard Dughet
Gaspard Dughet , also known as Gaspard Poussin, was a French painter born in Rome.A pupil of Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet was the brother of Poussin's wife...
, 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
George Lambert (English painter)
George Lambert was an English landscape artist and theatre scene painter. He has been described as the Father of English Landscape Oil Painting.-Life and work:...
, the first British painter to base a career on landscape subjects, was to greatly influence other British artists such as Gainsborough. Samuel Scott was the best of the native marine and townscape artists, though in the latter specialization he could not match the visiting Canaletto
Canaletto
Giovanni Antonio Canal better known as Canaletto , was a Venetian painter famous for his landscapes, or vedute, of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching.- Early career :...
, who was in England from nine years from 1746, and whose Venetian views were a favourite souvenir of the Grand Tour
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...
.
The antiquary and engraver George Vertue
George Vertue
George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.-Life:...
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.
From his arrival in London in 1720, the Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack
John Michael Rysbrack
Johannes Michel or John Michael Rysbrack, original name Jan Michiel Rijsbrack , was an 18th-century Flemish sculptor. His birth-year is sometimes given as 1693 or 1684....
was the leader in his field until the arrival in 1730 of Louis-François Roubiliac
Louis-François Roubiliac
Louis-François Roubiliac was a French sculptor who worked in England, one of the four most prominent sculptors in London working in the rococo style, "probably the most accomplished sculptor ever to work in England", according to Margaret Whinney.-Works:Roubiliac was largely employed for portrait...
who had a Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
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
Chelsea porcelain factory
The Chelsea porcelain manufactory is the first important porcelain manufactory in England; its earliest soft-paste porcelain, aimed at the aristocratic market—cream jugs in the form of two seated goats—are dated 1745...
founded in 1743, a private enterprise which sought to compete with Continental factories mostly established by rulers. Roubillac's style formed that of the leading native sculptor Sir Henry Cheere
Sir Henry Cheere, 1st Baronet
Sir Henry Cheere, 1st Baronet was a renowned English sculptor and monumental mason of the eighteenth century, and older brother of John Cheere, also a notable sculptor.-Personal life and career:...
, and his brother John
John Cheere
John Cheere was an English sculptor, born in London. Brother of the sculptor Sir Henry Cheere, he was originally apprenticed as a haberdasher from 1725 to 1732.-Life:...
who specialized in statues for gardens.
The strong London silversmithing trade was dominated by the descendants of Huguenot
Huguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
refugees like Paul de Lamerie
Paul de Lamerie
Paul de Lamerie was an English silversmith. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes him as the "greatest silversmith working in England in the 18th century". Though his mark raises the market value of silver, his output was large and not all his pieces are outstanding...
, Paul Crespin, Nicholas Sprimont, and the Courtauld family
Louisa Courtauld
Louisa Courtauld was an English silversmith.Daughter of a silk weaver from France, Courtauld was born in London, in which city she spent most of her career. She lived in a cottage behind Joseph Priestley's house off Clapton Square on the corner of Clapton Passage and Lower Clapton Road in Hackney...
, 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. The manufacture of silk
Silk
Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The best-known type of silk is obtained from the cocoons of the larvae of the mulberry silkworm Bombyx mori reared in captivity...
at Spitalfields
Spitalfields
Spitalfields is a former parish in the borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London, near to Liverpool Street station and Brick Lane. The area straddles Commercial Street and is home to many markets, including the historic Old Spitalfields Market, founded in the 17th century, Sunday...
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
Anna Maria Garthwaite
Anna Maria Garthwaite was an English textile designer known for creating vivid floral designs for silk fabrics hand-woven in Spitalfields near London in the mid-18th century. Garthwaite was acknowledged as one of the premiere English designers of her day...
, a parson's daughter from Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire is a county in the east of England. It borders Norfolk to the south east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south west, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to the west, South Yorkshire to the north west, and the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north. It also borders...
who emerged at the age of 40 as a designer of largely floral patterns in Rococo styles.
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
Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington
Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork PC , born in Yorkshire, England, was the son of Charles Boyle, 2nd Earl of Burlington and 3rd Earl of Cork...
and William Kent
William Kent
William Kent , born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, was an eminent English architect, landscape architect and furniture designer of the early 18th century.He was baptised as William Cant.-Education:...
, 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
Landscape garden
The term landscape garden is often used to describe the English garden design style characteristic of the eighteenth century, that swept the Continent replacing the formal Renaissance garden and Garden à la française models. The work of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is particularly influential.The...
, according to Nikolaus Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, FBA was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture...
"the most influential of all English innovations in art". The French-born engraver Hubert-François Gravelot
Hubert-François Gravelot
Hubert-François Bourguignon, commonly known as Gravelot , was a French engraver, a famous book illustrator, designer and drawing-master...
, in London from 1732 to 1745, was a key figure in importing Rococo taste in book illustrations and ornament prints for craftsmen to follow.
Late 18th century
In the modern popular mind, English art from about 1750–1790 — what is sometimes called the "classical age" of English painting — was dominated by the closely contemporary figures of Sir Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy...
(1723–1792), George Stubbs
George Stubbs
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses.-Biography:Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier and leather merchant. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias Humphry towards the...
(1724–1806), and Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter.-Suffolk:Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let...
(1727–1788), with Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright , styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution"....
(1734–1797) perhaps equally well-known. At the time perceptions were very different, with Reynolds certainly the dominant figure, and Gainsborough very highly reputed, but Stubbs, as a mere animal painter, seen as far less significant a figure than many other painters now relatively little-known. 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
Gerald Reitlinger
Gerald Roberts Reitlinger was a scholar of the economics of art and of history, particularly the Holocaust...
.
Reynolds returned from a long visit to Italy in 1753, and very rapidly established himself as the most fashionable London portraitist, and before long as a formidable figure in society, the public leader of the arts in Britain, and in a position to help raise both its quality and status. He had studied Italian art, both classical and modern, intensely, and his compositions discreetly re-use models seen on his travels. He was able to convey a wide range of moods and emotions with his figures, whether heroic military men or very young women, and often to unite background and figure in a dramatic way.
Society of Artists
The Society of Artists of Great Britain was founded in London in May 1761 by an association of artists in order to provide a venue for the public exhibition of recent work by living artists, such as was having success in the long-established Paris salons....
, where the artists had more control. This continued until 1791, despite the founding of the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
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
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
painting.
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
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter.-Suffolk:Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let...
, who only settled in London in 1773, after working in Ipswich
Ipswich
Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...
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 for, 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. George Romney
George Romney (painter)
George Romney was an English portrait painter. He was the most fashionable artist of his day, painting many leading society figures - including his artistic muse, Emma Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson....
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. His work was especially sought-after by American collectors in the early 20th century and many are now in American museums. By the end of the period this generation had been succeeded by younger portraitists including John Hoppner
John Hoppner
John Hoppner was an English portrait painter, .-Early life:Hoppner was born in Whitechapel, London, the son of German parents - his mother was one of the German attendants at the royal palace. King George's fatherly interest and patronage of the young boy gave rise to rumours, quite unfounded,...
, Sir William Beechey and the young Gilbert Stuart
Gilbert Stuart
Gilbert Charles Stuart was an American painter from Rhode Island.Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America's foremost portraitists...
, who only realized his mature style after he returned to America.
The Welsh painter Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson (painter)
Richard Wilson was a Welsh landscape painter, and one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Wilson has been described as '...the most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country.' He is considered to be the...
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
Claude
Claude is a relatively common French given name for males. It can also be an uncommon given name for females or a family name...
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 painting
History painting
History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
s by adding a few small figures, which doubled their price to about £80. 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
Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...
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
Paul Sandby
Paul Sandby was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolours, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768.-Life and work:...
, Francis Towne
Francis Towne
Francis Towne was a British watercolour landscape painter.-Biography:Towne was born in Isleworth in Middlesex the son of a corn chandler. In 1752 he was apprenticed to a leading coach painter in London, Thomas Brookshead...
, John Warwick Smith
John Warwick Smith
John "Warwick" Smith was a British watercolour landscape painter and illustrator.-Life and work:John Smith was born at Irthington, near Carlisle, Cumberland, the son of a gardener to the Gilpin family, and was educated at St. Bees...
, and John Robert Cozens
John Robert Cozens
John Robert Cozens was a British draftsman and painter of romantic watercolour landscapes.-Biography:The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolorist, Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the...
were among the leading specialist painters and the clergyman and amateur artist William Gilpin
William Gilpin (clergyman)
The Reverend William Gilpin was an English artist, clergyman, schoolmaster, and author, best known as one of the originators of the idea of the picturesque.-Early life:...
was an important writer who stimulated the popularity of amateur painting of the picturesque
Picturesque
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's...
, while the works of Alexander Cozens
Alexander Cozens
Alexander Cozens was a British landscape painter in watercolours, a published teacher of painting, and father of John Robert Cozens.-Life:...
recommended forming random ink blots into landscape compositions—even Constable tried this technique.
History painting
History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
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
Gavin Hamilton (artist)
Gavin Hamilton was a Scottish neoclassical history painterwho is more widely remembered for his hunts for antiquities in the neighborhood of Rome...
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
James Barry (painter)
James Barry , Irish painter, best remembered for his six part series of paintings entitled The Progress of Human Culture in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts...
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
Royal Society of Arts
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London. The name Royal Society of Arts is frequently used for brevity...
. The most successful history painters, who were not afraid of buttons and wigs, were both Americans settled in London: Benjamin West
Benjamin West
Benjamin West, RA was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence...
and John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts, and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects...
, though one of his most successful works Watson and the Shark
Watson and the Shark
Watson and the Shark is the title of a 1778 oil painting by John Singleton Copley, depicting the rescue of Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba. The original of three versions by Copley is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.....
(1778) was able to mostly avoid them, showing a rescue from drowning. Smaller scale subjects from literature were also popular, pioneered by Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman was an English painter and illustrator who became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 and later its first librarian....
, one of the first to paint scenes from Shakespeare, and Joseph Highmore
Joseph Highmore
Joseph Highmore was an English portrait and historical painter, illustrator and author.-Life:Highmore was born in London, the third son of Edward Highmore, a coal merchant, and nephew of Thomas Highmore, Serjeant Painter to William III. He displayed early ability but was discouraged by his family...
, with a series illustrating the novel Pamela. At the end of the period the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, England, was the first stage of a three-part project initiated in November 1786 by engraver and publisher John Boydell in an effort to foster a school of British history painting...
was an ambitious project for paintings, and prints after them, illustrating "the Bard", as he had now become, and exposing the limitations of contemporary English history painting. Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright , styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution"....
was mainly a portrait painter who also was one of the first artists to depict the Industrial Revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
, 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
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is a 1768 oil-on-canvas painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of a number of candlelit scenes that Wright painted during the 1760s. The painting departed from convention of the time by depicting a scientific subject in the reverential manner formerly...
(1768) and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery
A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery
A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, or the full title, A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby depicting a lecturer giving a demonstration of an orrery to a small audience...
(c. 1766), which like many of his works are lit only by candlelight, giving a strong chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted"....
effect.
Johann Zoffany
Johan Zoffany, Zoffani or Zauffelij was a German neoclassical painter, active mainly in England...
among others. Zoffany was a successful painter of portraits and conversation pieces, who also spent over two years in India, painting the English nabobs and local scenes, and the expanding British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
played an increasing role in British art. 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
Company style
Company style or Company painting is a term for a hybrid Indo-European style of paintings made in India by Indian artists, many of whom worked for European patrons in the British East India Company or other foreign Companies in the 18th and 19th centuries...
developed as a hybrid form between Western and Indian art
Indian art
Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...
, produced by Indians for a British market.
Thomas Rowlandson
Thomas Rowlandson
Thomas Rowlandson was an English artist and caricaturist.- Biography :Rowlandson was born in Old Jewry, in the City of London. He was the son of a tradesman or city merchant. On leaving school he became a student at the Royal Academy...
produced aimiably comic watercolours and prints satirizing British life, but mostly avoiding politics. The undoubted master of the political caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
, sold individually by print shops (often acting as publishers also), either hand-coloured or plain, was James Gillray
James Gillray
James Gillray , was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.- Early life :He was born in Chelsea...
. The emphasis on portrait-painting in British art should not be entirely put down to the vanity of the sitters. There was a large collector's market for portrait prints, mostly reproductions of paintings, which were often mounted in albums. From the mid-century there was a great growth in the expensive but more effective reproductions in mezzotint
Mezzotint
Mezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple...
, of portraits and other paintings, with special demand from collectors for early proof states "before letter" (that is, before the inscriptions were added), which the printmakers obligingly printed off in growing numbers.
This was also a great period for the decorative arts in Britain. Around the mid-century many porcelain
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including clay in the form of kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between and...
factories opened, including Bow
Bow porcelain factory
The Bow porcelain factory was an emulative rival of the Chelsea porcelain factory in the manufacture of early soft-paste porcelain in Great Britain...
in London, and in the provinces Lowestoft, Worcester
Royal Worcester
Royal Worcester is believed to be the oldest remaining English pottery brand still in existence today.-Overview:Royal Worcester is a British brand known for its history, provenance and classically English collections of porcelain...
, Royal Crown Derby
Royal Crown Derby
The Royal Crown Derby Porcelain Company is a porcelain manufacturer, based in Derby, England. The company, particularly known for its high-quality bone china, has produced tableware and ornamental items since approximately 1750...
, Liverpool
Liverpool porcelain
Liverpool porcelain is mostly of the soft-paste porcelain type and was produced between 1756 and 1804 in various factories in Liverpool. A portion of the output was exported, mainly to North America. Factories included those of Richard Chaffers, Philip Christian, William Reid, Samuel Gilbody and...
, and Wedgewood, with Spode
Spode
Spode is a well-known English brand of pottery and homewares based in Stoke-on-Trent.- The overview :Spode is a Stoke-on-Trent based pottery company that was founded by Josiah Spode in 1770...
following in 1767. Most were started in a very small way, and some lasted only a few decades while others still survive today. By the end of the period British porcelain services were being commissioned by foreign royalty and the British manufacturers were especially adept at pursuing the rapidly expanding international middle-class market, developing bone china
Bone china
Bone china is a type of soft-paste porcelain that is composed of bone ash, feldspathic material and kaolin. It has been defined as ware with a translucent body containing a minimum of 30% of phosphate derived from animal bone and calculated calcium phosphate...
and transfer-print
Transfer-print
Transfer printing is a mass-production method of applying an image to a curved or uneven surface. It is most commonly used for printing on porcelain and other hard surfaced pottery.Transfer printing evolved in England in the 1750s...
ed wares as well as hand-painted true porcelain.
The three leading furniture makers, Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale was a London cabinet-maker and furniture designer in the mid-Georgian, English Rococo, and Neoclassical styles. In 1754 he published a book of his designs, titled The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director...
(1718–1779), Thomas Sheraton
Thomas Sheraton
Thomas Sheraton was a furniture designer, one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite.-Biography:...
(1751–1806) and George Hepplewhite
George Hepplewhite
George Hepplewhite was a cabinetmaker. He is regarded as having been one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale...
(1727? - 1786) had varied styles and have achieved the lasting fame they have mainly as the authors of pattern books used by other makers in Britain and abroad. In fact it is far from clear if the last two named ever ran actual workshops, though Chippendale certainly was successful in this and in what we now call interior design; unlike France Britain had abandoned its guild
Guild
A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society...
system, and Chippendale was able to employ specialists in all the crafts needed to complete a redecoration. During the period Rococo and Chinoiserie
Chinoiserie
Chinoiserie, a French term, signifying "Chinese-esque", and pronounced ) refers to a recurring theme in European artistic styles since the seventeenth century, which reflect Chinese artistic influences...
gave way to Neo-Classicism, with the Scottish architect and interior designer Robert Adam
Robert Adam
Robert Adam was a Scottish neoclassical architect, interior designer and furniture designer. He was the son of William Adam , Scotland's foremost architect of the time, and trained under him...
(1728–1792) leading the new style.
19th century and the Romantics
The late 18th century and the early 19th century characterized by the Romantic movementRomanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
in British art includes Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright , styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution"....
, James Ward
James Ward (artist)
James Ward , R.A., was a painter, particularly of animals, and an engraver.-Biography:Born in London, and younger brother of William Ward the engraver, James Ward was influenced by many people, but his career is conventionally divided into two periods: until 1803, his single greatest influence was...
, Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.-Early life:...
, Richard Parkes Bonington
Richard Parkes Bonington
Richard Parkes Bonington was an English Romantic landscape painter. One of the most influential British artists of his time, the facility of his style was inspired by the old masters, yet was entirely modern in its application.-Life and work:Richard Parkes Bonington was born in the town of Arnold,...
, John Martin
John Martin (painter)
John Martin was an English Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator.-Biography:Martin was born in July 1789, in a one-room family cottage, at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland, the 4th son of Fenwick Martin, a one time fencing master...
and was perhaps the most radical period in British art, also producing William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
(1757–1827), John Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
(1776–1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the later two being arguably the most internationally influential of all British artists. Turner's style, based on the Italianate tradition although he never saw Italy until in his forties, passed through considerable changes before his final wild, almost abstract, landscapes that explored the effects of light, and were a profound influence on the Impressionists and other later movements. Constable normally painted pure landscapes with at most a few genre figures, in a style based on Northern European traditions, but, like Turner, his "six-footers" were intended to make as striking an impact as any history painting. They were carefully prepared using studies and full-size oil sketch
Oil sketch
An Oil sketch or oil study is an artwork made primarily in oil paints that is more abbreviated in handling than a fully finished painting. Originally these were created as preparatory studies or modelli, especially so as to gain approval for the design of a larger commissioned painting...
es, whereas Turner was notorious for finishing his exhibition pieces when they were already hanging for show, freely adjusting them to dominate the surrounding works in the tightly-packed hangs of the day.
Blake's visionary style was a minority taste in his lifetime, but influenced the younger group of "Ancients
Ancients (art group)
The Ancients , were a group of English artists who were brought together by their attraction to archaism in art and admiration for the work of William Blake. The core members of the Ancients were Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, Edward Calvert...
" of Samuel Palmer, John Linnell
John Linnell (painter)
John Linnell was an English landscape painter. Linnell was a naturalist and a rival to John Constable. He had a taste for Northern European art of the Renaissance, particularly Albrecht Dürer. He also associated with William Blake, to whom he introduced Samuel Palmer and others of the...
, Edward Calvert and George Richmond
George Richmond
For the 21st century educator see George H. RichmondGeorge Richmond was an English painter.George Richmond was the father of the painter William Blake Richmond as well as the grandfather of the naval historian, Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond.A keen follower of cricket, Richmond was noted in one...
, who gathered in the country at Shoreham, Kent
Shoreham, Kent
Shoreham is a village and civil parish in the valley of the River Darent six miles north of Sevenoaks in Kent: it is in the District of Sevenoaks. The parish includes the settlements of Badgers Mount and Well Hill....
in the 1820s, producing intense and lyrical pastoral idylls in conditions of some poverty. They went on to more conventional artistic careers and Palmer's early work was entirely forgotten until the early 20th century. Blake and Palmer became a significant influence on modernist artists of the 20th century seen (among others) in the painting of British artists such as Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....
,Paul Nash
Paul Nash (artist)
Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...
and Graham Sutherland
Graham Sutherland
Graham Vivien Sutherland OM was an English artist.-Early life:He was born in Streatham, attending Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. He was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey before going up to Goldsmiths, University of London...
. Blake also had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and songwriters Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...
, and Van Morrison
Van Morrison
Van Morrison, OBE is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician. His live performances at their best are regarded as transcendental and inspired; while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album It's Too Late to Stop Now, are widely...
.
Thomas Lawrence
Thomas Lawrence
Thomas Lawrence may refer to:*Sir Thomas Lawrence, British artist, President of Royal Academy*Thomas Lawrence , mayor of colonial Philadelphia*T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia"*Thomas Lawrence , U.S. politician...
was already a leading portraitist by the turn of the century, and able to give a Romantic dash to his portraits of high society, and the leaders of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna
Congress of Vienna
The Congress of Vienna was a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and held in Vienna from September, 1814 to June, 1815. The objective of the Congress was to settle the many issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars,...
after the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
. Henry Raeburn
Henry Raeburn
Sir Henry Raeburn was a Scottish portrait painter, the first significant Scottish portraitist since the Act of Union 1707 to remain based in Scotland.-Biography:...
was the most significant portraitist since the Union to remain based in Edinburgh throughout his career, an indication of increasing Scottish prosperity. But David Wilkie
David Wilkie (artist)
Sir David Wilkie was a Scottish painter.- Early life :Wilkie was the son of the parish minister of Cults in Fife. He developed a love for art at an early age. In 1799, after he had attended school at Pitlessie, Kettle and Cupar, his father reluctantly agreed to his becoming a painter...
took the traditional road south, achieving great success with subjects of country life and hybrid genre
Genre painting
Genre works, also called genre scenes or genre views, are pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or...
and history scenes such as The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands...
Dispatch (1822).
John Flaxman
John Flaxman
John Flaxman was an English sculptor and draughtsman.-Early life:He was born in York. His father was also named John, after an ancestor who, according to family tradition, had fought for Parliament at the Battle of Naseby, and afterwards settled as a carrier or farmer in Buckinghamshire...
was the most thorough-going neo-classical English artist. Beginning as a sculptor, he became best known for his many spare "outline drawings" of classical scenes, often illustrating literature, which were reproduced as prints. These imitated the effects of the classical-style reliefs he also produced. The German-Swiss Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli was a British painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, of Swiss origin.-Biography:...
also produced work in a linear graphic style, but his narrative scenes, often from English literature, were intensely Romantic and highly dramatic.
Victorian art
The Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodPre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
(PRB) achieved considerable influence after its foundation in 1848 with paintings that concentrated on religious, literary, and genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
subjects executed in a colourful and minutely detailed style, rejecting the loose painterly brushwork of the tradition represented by "Sir Sploshua" Reynolds. PRB artists included John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...
, William Holman Hunt
William Holman Hunt
William Holman Hunt OM was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Biography:...
, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, and Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...
(never officially a member), and figures such as Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
and John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse was an English painter known for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He worked several decades after the breakup of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had seen its heydey in the mid-nineteenth century, leading him to have gained the moniker of "the modern Pre-Raphaelite"...
were later much influenced by aspects of their ideas, as was the designer William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
. Morris advocated a return to hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts over the industrial manufacture that was rapidly being applied to all crafts. His efforts to make beautiful objects affordable (or even free) for everyone led to his wallpaper and tile designs defining the Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
aesthetic and instigating the Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
. The PRB, like Turner, was supported by the magisterial art critic John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
, himself a very fine amateur artist. For all their technical innovation, the PRB were both traditional and Victorian in their adherence to the history painting
History painting
History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
as the highest form of art, and their subject matter was thoroughly in tune with Victorian taste, and indeed "everything that the publishers of steel engravings welcomed", enabling them to merge easily into the mainstream in their later careers.
Monarch of the Glen (painting)
Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting from 1851 by the English painter Sir Edwin Landseer, which was commissioned as part of a series of three panels to hang in the Palace of Westminster in London, England...
(1851), a portrait of a Highland stag, were among the most popular. Like Millais' Bubbles (painting)
Bubbles (painting)
Bubbles, originally titled A Child's World, is a painting by Sir John Everett Millais that became famous when it was used over many generations in advertisements for Pears soap...
(1886) it was used on packaging and advertisements for decades, for brands of whisky and soap respectively. During the late Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
in Britain the academic paintings, some enormously large, of Lord Leighton and the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA was a Dutch painter.Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there...
were enormously popular, both often featuring lightly clad beauties in exotic or classical settings, while the allegorical works of G.F. Watts
George Frederic Watts
George Frederic Watts, OM was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life...
matched the Victorian sense of high purpose. The classical ladies of Edward Poynter
Edward Poynter
Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter, designer, and draughtsman who served as President of the Royal Academy.-Life:...
and Albert Moore
Albert Joseph Moore
Albert Joseph Moore was an English painter, known for his depictions of langorous female figures set against the luxury and decadence of the classical world....
wore more clothes and met with rather less success. William Powell Frith
William Powell Frith
William Powell Frith , was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1852...
painted highly detailed scenes of social life, typically including all classes of society, that include comic and moral elements and have an acknowledged debt to Hogarth, though tellingly different to his work.
For all such artists the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy summer exhibition
The Summer Exhibition is an open art exhibition held annually by the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly in central London, England, during the summer months of June, July, and August...
was an essential platform, reviewed at huge length in the press, which often alternated ridicule and extravagant praise in discussing works. The ultimate, and very rare, accolade was when a rail had to be put in front of a painting to protect it from the eager crowd; up to 1874 this had only happened to Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners, Frith's Derby Day and Salon d'Or and Luke Filde's The Casuals (see below). A great number of artists laboured year after year in the hope of a hit there, often working in manners to which their talent was not really suited, a trope exemplified by the suicide in 1846 of Benjamin Haydon
Benjamin Haydon
Benjamin Robert Haydon was an English historical painter and writer.-Biography:Haydon was born in Plymouth. His mother was the daughter of the Rev. Benjamin Cobley, rector of Dodbrooke, near Kingsbridge, Devon. Her brother, General Sir Thomas Cobley, was renowned for his part in the siege of Ismail...
, a friend of Keats and Dickens and a better writer than painter, leaving his blood splashed over his unfinished King Alfred and the First British Jury.
British history was a very common subject, with the Middle Ages, Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots and the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
especially popular sources for subjects. Many painters mentioned elsewhere painted historical subjects, including Millais (The Boyhood of Raleigh
The Boyhood of Raleigh
The Boyhood of Raleigh is a painting by John Everett Millais, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. It came to epitomise the culture of heroic imperialism in late Victorian Britain and in British popular culture up to the mid-twentieth century....
and many others), Ford Madox Brown (Cromwell on his Farm
Cromwell on his Farm
Cromwell on his Farm is a painting by Ford Madox Brown which depicts Oliver Cromwell observing a bonfire on his farm and thinking of a passage in the Book of Psalms: "Lord, how long wilt thy hide thyself - forever? And shall thy wrath burn like fire?"...
), David Wilkie, Watts and Frith, and West, Bonington and Turner in earlier decades. The London-based Irishman Daniel Maclise
Daniel Maclise
Daniel Maclise was an Irish history, literary and portrait painter, and illustrator, who worked for most of his life in London, England.-Early life:...
and Charles West Cope
Charles West Cope
Charles West Cope was an English Victorian era painter of genre and history scenes, and an etcher. He was responsible for painting several frescos in the House of Lords in London.-Early life and training:...
painted scenes for the new Palace of Westminster
Palace of Westminster
The Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament or Westminster Palace, is the meeting place of the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom—the House of Lords and the House of Commons...
. Lady Jane Grey
Lady Jane Grey
Lady Jane Grey , also known as The Nine Days' Queen, was an English noblewoman who was de facto monarch of England from 10 July until 19 July 1553 and was subsequently executed...
was, like Mary Queen of Scots, a female whose sufferings attracted many painters, though none quite matched The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, one of many British historical subjects by the Frenchman Paul Delaroche. Painters prided themselves on the increasing accuracy of their period settings in terms of costume and objects, studying the collections of the new Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
and books, and scorning the breezy approximations of earlier generations of artists.
Victorian painting developed the Hogarthian social subject, packed with moralizing detail, and the tradition of illustrating scenes from literature, into a range of types of genre painting, many with only a few figures, others large and crowded scenes like Frith's best-known works. Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience
The Awakening Conscience
The Awakening Conscience is an oil-on-canvas painting by British artist William Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which depicts a young woman rising from her position in the lap of a man and gazing transfixed out of the window of a room.Initially the painting...
(1853) and Augustus Egg
Augustus Egg
Augustus Leopold Egg 2 May 1816 in London, England – 26 March 1863) was a Victorian artist best known for his modern triptych Past and Present , which depicts the breakup of a middle-class Victorian family.-Biography:...
's set of Past and Present (1858) are of the first type, both dealing with "fallen women", a perennial Victorian concern. As Peter Conrad
Peter Conrad (academic)
Peter Conrad is an Australian-born academic specializing in English literature, currently teaching at Christ Church at Oxford University....
points out, these were paintings designed to be read like novels, whose meaning emerged after the viewer had done the work of deciphering it. Other "anecdotal" scenes were lighter in mood, tending towards being captionless Punch
Punch (magazine)
Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...
cartoons. Towards the end of the century the problem picture
Problem picture
A problem picture is a genre of art popular in the late Victorian era, characterised by a deliberately ambiguous narrative that can be interpreted in several different ways, or which portrays an unresolved dilemma. It is the pictorial equivalent of the problem play...
left the details of the narrative action deliberately ambiguous, inviting the viewer to speculate on it using the evidence in front of them, but not supplying a final answer (artists learned to smile enigmatically when asked). This sometimes provoked discussion on sensitive social issues, typically involving women, that might have been hard to raise directly. They were enormously popular; newspapers ran competitions for readers to supply the meaning of the painting.
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
, though not as common as in France at the same period, had many specialists, including John Frederick Lewis
John Frederick Lewis
John Frederick Lewis was an Orientalist English painter. He specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes and often worked in exquisitely detailed watercolour. He was the son of Frederick Christian Lewis , engraver and landscape-painter.Lewis lived in Spain between 1832 and 1834...
, who lived for nine years in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
, David Roberts
David Roberts (painter)
David Roberts RA was a Scottish painter. He is especially known for a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced during the 1840s from sketches he made during long tours of the region . These, and his large oil paintings of similar subjects, made him...
, a Scot who made lithographs of his travels in the Middle East and Italy, the nonsense writer Edward Lear
Edward Lear
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised.-Biography:...
, a continual traveller who reached as far as Ceylon, and Richard Dadd
Richard Dadd
Richard Dadd was an English painter of the Victorian era, noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail...
. Holman Hunt also travelled to Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
to obtain authentic settings for his Biblical pictures. The Frenchman James Tissot
James Tissot
James Jacques Joseph Tissot was a French painter, who spent much of his career in Britain.-Biography:Tissot was born in Nantes, France. In about 1856, he began study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Hippolyte Flandrin and Lamothe, and became friendly with Edgar Degas and James Abbott...
, who fled to London after the fall of the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
, divided his time between scenes of high society social events and a huge series of Biblical illustrations, made in watercolour for reproductive publication. Frederick Goodall
Frederick Goodall
Frederick Goodall was an English artist.Goodall was born in London, England in 1822, the second son of steel line engraver Edward Goodall . He received his education at the Wellington Road Academy....
specialized in scenes of Ancient Egypt.
Frederick Walker (painter)
Frederick Walker was an English social realist painter and illustrator described by Sir John Everett Millais as "the greatest artist of the century".__NOEDITSECTION__-Early Life and training:...
, Luke Fildes
Luke Fildes
Sir Samuel Luke Fildes RA was an English painter and illustrator born at Liverpool and trained in the South Kensington and Royal Academy schools....
(although he made his name in 1874 with Applicants for Admission to the Casual Ward at Saint Martin in the Fields- see above), Frank Holl
Frank Holl
Frank Holl , English painter, was born in London, and was educated chiefly at University College School.He was a grandson of William Holl, an engraver of note, and the son of Francis Holl, ARA, another engraver, whose profession he originally intended to follow...
, George Clausen
George Clausen
Sir George Clausen RA , was an artist working in oil and watercolour, etching, mezzotint, dry point and occasionally lithographs. He was knighted in 1927.-Biography:...
, and the German Hubert von Herkomer
Hubert von Herkomer
Sir Hubert von Herkomer , British painter of German descent. He was also a pioneering film-director and a composer. Though a very successful portraitist, especially of men, he is mainly remembered for his earlier works that took a realistic approach to the conditions of life of the poor...
. William Bell Scott
William Bell Scott
William Bell Scott was a Scottish poet and artist.-Life:The son of Robert Scott , the engraver, and brother of David Scott, the painter, he was born in Edinburgh. While a young man he studied art and assisted his father, and he published verses in the Scottish magazines...
, a friend of the Rosettis, painted historical scenes and other types of work, but was also one of the few artists to depict scenes from heavy industry. His memoirs are a useful source for the period, and he was one of several artists to be employed for a period in the greatly expanded system of government art schools, which were driven by the administrator Henry Cole
Henry Cole
Sir Henry Cole was an English civil servant and inventor who facilitated many innovations in commerce and education in 19th century Britain...
(the inventor of the Christmas card
Christmas card
A Christmas card is a greeting card sent as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to the Christmas and holiday season. Christmas cards are usually exchanged during the weeks preceding Christmas Day by many people in Western...
) and employed Richard Redgrave
Richard Redgrave
Richard Redgrave RA was an English artist.-Early life:Redgrave was born on 30 April 1804 in Pimlico, at 2 Belgrave Terrace, the second son of William Redgrave, and younger brother of Samuel Redgrave. While was employed in his father's manufacturing firm, he visited the British Museum to make...
, Edward Poynter
Edward Poynter
Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter, designer, and draughtsman who served as President of the Royal Academy.-Life:...
, Richard Burchett
Richard Burchett
Richard Burchett was a British artist and educator on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who was for over twenty years the Headmaster of what later became the Royal College of Art....
, the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser
Christopher Dresser
Christopher Dresser was an English designer and design theorist, now widely known as one of the first and most important, independent, designers and was a pivotal figure in the Aesthetic Movement, and a major contributor to the allied Anglo-Japanese branch of the Movement; both originated in...
and many others. Burchett was headmaster of the "South Kensington Schools", now the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, which gradually replaced the Royal Academy School as the leading British art school, though around the turn of the century the Slade School of Fine Art
Slade School of Fine Art
The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...
produced many of the forward-looking artists.
The Royal Academy was initially by no means as conservative and restrictive as the Paris Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
, and the Pre-Raphaelites had most of their submissions for exhibition accepted, although like everyone else they complained about the positions their paintings were given. They were especially welcomed at the Liverpool Academy of Arts
Liverpool Academy of Arts
The Liverpool Academy of Arts was founded in April 1810 as a regional equivalent of the Royal Academy, London. Two local art collectors, Henry Blundell and William Roscoe were its first Patron and Secretary, the Prince Regent gave his patronage for the next three years, and it was actively...
, one of the largest regional exhibiting organizations; the Royal Scottish Academy
Royal Scottish Academy
The Royal Scottish Academy is a Scottish organisation that promotes contemporary Scottish art. Founded in 1826, as the Royal Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, the RSA maintains a unique position in Scotland as an independently funded institution led by eminent artists and...
was founded in 1826 and opened its grand new building
Royal Scottish Academy Building
The Royal Scottish Academy Building, situated in the centre of Edinburgh, was designed by William Henry Playfair during the 19th century. Along with the adjacent National Gallery of Scotland, their neo-classical design helped transform Edinburgh in to a modern day Athens of the North.The building...
in the 1850s. There were alternative London locations like the British Institution
British Institution
The British Institution was a private 19th-century society in London formed to exhibit the works of living and dead artists; it was also known as the Pall Mall Picture Galleries or the British Gallery...
, and as the conservatism of the Royal Academy gradually increased, despite the efforts of Lord Leighton when President, new spaces opened, notably the Grosvenor Gallery
Grosvenor Gallery
The Grosvenor Gallery was an art gallery in London founded in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife Blanche. Its first directors were J. Comyns Carr and Charles Hallé...
in Bond Street
Bond Street
Bond Street is a major shopping street in the West End of London that runs north-south through Mayfair between Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It has been a fashionable shopping street since the 18th century and is currently the home of many high price fashion shops...
, from 1877, which became the home of the Aesthetic Movement, and the New English Art Club
New English Art Club
The New English Art Club was founded in London in 1885 as an alternate venue to the Royal Academy.-History:Young English artists returning from studying art in Paris mounted the first exhibition of the New English Art Club in April 1886...
, which from 1885 exhibited many artists with Impressionist tendencies, initially using the Egyptian Hall
Egyptian Hall
For the Glasgow building see The Egyptian Halls.The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, was an Exhibition hall built in the ancient Egyptian style in 1812, to the designs of Peter Frederick Robinson.-History:...
, opposite the Royal Academy, which also hosted many exhibitions of foreign art. The American portrait painter John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
(1856–1925), spent most of his working career in Europe and he maintained his studio in London (where he died) from 1886 to 1907.
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life, in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air...
, who was French by birth but had British nationality, painted in France as one of the Impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
; Walter Sickert
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
and Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer OM was a British painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.-Life and work:...
at the start of their careers were also strongly influenced, but despite the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists. He was one of the first modern art dealers who provided support to his painters with stipends and solo exhibitions....
bringing many exhibitions to London, the movement made little impact in England until decades later. Some members of the Newlyn School
Newlyn School
The Newlyn School is a term used to describe an art colony of artists based in or near to Newlyn, a fishing village adjacent to Penzance, Cornwall, from the 1880s until the early 20th century. The establishment of the Newlyn School was reminiscent of the Barbizon School in France, where artists...
of landscapes and genre scenes adopted a quasi-Impressionist technique while others used realist or more traditional levels of finish. The late 19th century also saw the Decadent movement
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
in France and the British Aesthetic movement
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
. The British based American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....
, and the former Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, and Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
are associated with those movements, with late Burne-Jones and Beardsley both being admired abroad and representing the nearest British approach to European Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. In 1877 James McNeill Whistler, sued the art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face." The jury reached a verdict in favor of Whistler but awarded him omly a single farthing in nominal damages, and the court costs were split. The cost of the case, together with huge debts from building his residence ("The White House" in Tite Street
Tite Street
Tite Street is a street in Chelsea, London, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, England, just north of the River Thames. It was created in 1877, giving access to the Chelsea Embankment. In the late nineteenth century the street was a favoured and fashionable location for people of an...
, Chelsea
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...
, designed with E. W. Godwin
Edward William Godwin
Edward William Godwin was a progressive English architect-designer, who began his career working in the strongly polychromatic "Ruskinian Gothic" style of mid-Victorian Britain, inspired by The Stones of Venice, then moved on to provide designs in the "Anglo-Japanese taste" of the Aesthetic...
, 1877–8), bankrupted Whistler by May 1879, resulting in an auction of his work, collections, and house. Stansky notes the irony that the Fine Art Society of London
Fine Art Society
The Fine Art Society is an art dealership with two premises, one in New Bond Street, London and the other in Edinburgh . It was formed in 1876...
, which had organized a collection to pay for Ruskin's legal costs, supported him in etching "the stones of Venice"
The Stones of Venice (book)
The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853. Intending to prove how the architecture in Venice exemplified the principles he discussed in his earlier work, The Seven Lamps of Architecture,...
(and in exhibiting the series in 1883) which helped recoup Whistler's costs.
Scottish art was now regaining an adequate home market, allowing it to develop a distinctive character, of which the "Glasgow Boys" were one expression, straddling Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
in painting, and Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
, Japonism
Japonism
Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term, was first used in 1872 by Jules Claretie in his book L'Art Francais en 1872 and by Philippe Burty in Japanisme III. La Renaissance Literaire et Artistique in the same year...
and the Celtic Revival
Celtic Revival
Celtic Revival covers a variety of movements and trends, mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries, which drew on the traditions of Celtic literature and Celtic art, or in fact more often what art historians call Insular art...
in design, with the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, watercolourist and artist. He was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had a considerable influence on European design...
now their best-known member. Painters included Thomas Millie Dow
Thomas Millie Dow
Thomas Millie Dow was a Scottish artist, a member of the Glasgow Boys school. He was a member of The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and the New English Art Club....
, George Henry
George Henry (painter)
George Henry was a Scottish painter, one of the most prominent of the Glasgow School. He was born in Irvine, North Ayrshire, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art, later in Macgregor's studio, but learned most from his nature studies at Kirkcudbright.He was influenced also by his collaboration...
, Joseph Crawhall and James Guthrie
James Guthrie (artist)
Sir James Guthrie was a Scottish painter, best known in his own lifetime for his portraiture, although today more generally regarded as a painter of Scottish Realism.-Life and work:...
.
New printing technology brought a great expansion in book illustration with illustrations for children's books providing much of the best remembered work of the period. Specialized artists included Randolph Caldecott
Randolph Caldecott
Randolph Caldecott was a British artist and illustrator, born in Chester. The Caldecott Medal was named in his honor. He exercised his art chiefly in book illustrations. His abilities as an artist were promptly and generously recognized by the Royal Academy. Caldecott greatly influenced...
, Walter Crane
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
, Kate Greenaway
Kate Greenaway
Catherine Greenaway , known as Kate Greenaway, was an English children's book illustrator and writer, who spent much of her childhood at Rolleston, Nottinghamshire. She studied at what is now the Royal College of Art in London, which at that time had a separate section for women, and was headed by...
and, from 1902, Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter
Helen Beatrix Potter was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life.Born into a privileged Unitarian...
.
The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
, led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility in the United Kingdom. British people
British people
The British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants...
used their art "to illustrate their knowledge and command of the natural world", whilst the permanent settlers in British North America
British North America
British North America is a historical term. It consisted of the colonies and territories of the British Empire in continental North America after the end of the American Revolutionary War and the recognition of American independence in 1783.At the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775 the British...
, Australasia
Australasia
Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes...
, and South Africa "embarked upon a search for distinctive artistic expression appropriate to their sense of national identity". The empire has been "at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art".
The enormous variety and massive production of the various forms of British decorative art during the period are too complex to be easily summarized. Victorian taste, until the various movements of the last decades, such as Arts and Crafts
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
, is generally poorly regarded today, but much fine work was produced, and much money made. Both William Burges
William Burges (architect)
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Amongst the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, Burges sought in his work an escape from 19th century industrialisation and a return to the values, architectural and social, of an imagined mediaeval England...
and Augustus Pugin were architects committed to the Gothic Revival, who expanded into designing furniture, metalwork, tiles and objects in other media. There was an enormous boom in re-Gothicising the fittings of medieval churches, and fitting out new ones in the style, especially with stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
, an industry revived from effective extinction. The revival of furniture painted with images was a particular feature at the top end of the market. From its opening in 1875 the London department store Liberty & Co. was especially associated with imported Far Eastern decorative items and British goods in the new styles of the end of the century. Charles Voysey
Charles Voysey (architect)
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a simple Arts and Crafts style, but he is renowned as the architect of a number of notable country houses...
was an architect who also did much design work in textiles, wallpaper furniture and other media, bringing the Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
into Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
and beyond; he continued to design into the 1920s. A. H. Mackmurdo
A. H. Mackmurdo
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo was a progressive English architect and designer, who influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement, notably through the Century Guild of Artists, which he set up in partnership with Selwyn Image in 1882.Mackmurdo was the son of a wealthy chemical manufacturer...
was a similar figure.
20th century
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism...
aimed to achieve artistic indeed painterly effects; The Linked Ring
The Linked Ring
The Linked Ring was a photographic society created to propose and defend that photography was just as much an art as it was a science, motivated to propelling photography further into the fine art world...
contained the leading practitioners. The American John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
was the most successful London portraitist at the start of the century, with John Lavery
John Lavery
Sir John Lavery was an Irish painter best known for his portraits.Belfast-born John Lavery attended the Haldane Academy, in Glasgow, in the 1870s and the Académie Julian in Paris in the early 1880s. He returned to Glasgow and was associated with the Glasgow School...
, Augustus John
Augustus John
Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....
and William Orpen
William Orpen
Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA was an Irish portrait painter, who worked mainly in London...
rising figures. John's sister Gwen John
Gwen John
Gwendolen Mary John was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. She is noted for her still lifes and for her portraits, especially of anonymous female sitters...
lived in France, and her intimate portraits were relatively little appreciated until decades after her death. British attitudes to modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
were "polarized" at the end of the 19th century. Modernist movements were both cherished and vilified by artists and critics; Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
was initially regarded by "many conservative critics" as a "subversive foreign influence", but became "fully assimilated" into British art during the early-20th century. The London-born Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats
Jack Butler Yeats
John "Jack" Butler Yeats was an Irish artist. His early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of...
(1871–1957), was based in Dublin, at once a romantic painter
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, a symbolist and an expressionist
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
.
Vorticism
Vorticism
Vorticism, an offshoot of Cubism, was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century. It was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.-Origins:...
was a brief coming together of a number of Modernist artists in the years immediately before 1914; members included Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
, the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg
David Bomberg
David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington...
, Malcolm Arbuthnot
Malcolm Arbuthnot
Malcolm Arbuthnot was a pictorialist photographer and artist....
, Lawrence Atkinson
Lawrence Atkinson
Lawrence Atkinson was an English artist, musician and poet. He began by moving to Paris and studying musical composition, but moved back to London and began to paint, apparently painting mainly landscapes in a style influenced by Matisse and the Fauves...
, the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn
Alvin Langdon Coburn
Alvin Langdon Coburn was an early 20th century photographer who became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism...
, Frederick Etchells
Frederick Etchells
Frederick Etchells was an English artist and architect.- Biography :The early education of Etchells was through William Lethaby at the London School of Kensington, now known as The Royal College of Art, which brought him into contact with the Bloomsbury GroupHe was a contributor to the Omega...
, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French sculptor who developed a rough hewn, primitive style of direct carving....
, Cuthbert Hamilton
Cuthbert Hamilton
Cuthbert Hamilton was a British artist associated with the Vorticist movement and later with Group X. He was one of the pioneers of abstract art in Britain.Cuthbert Hamilton went to the Slade School of Art and was a contemporary of Wyndham Lewis...
, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts
William Roberts (painter)
William Roberts was a British painter of groups of figures and portraits, and was a war artist.-Education and early career:Son of an Irish carpenter and his wife, Roberts was born in Hackney, London...
, Edward Wadsworth
Edward Wadsworth
Edward Alexander Wadsworth was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism. He painted, often in tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life...
, Jessica Dismorr
Jessica Dismorr
Jessica Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator and one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement.-Early life:Dismorr was born at Gravesend, England, and moved with her family to Hampstead in the 1890s...
, Helen Saunders
Helen Saunders
Helen Saunders was an English painter.Helen Saunders was born in Bedford Park, Ealing....
, and Dorothy Shakespear
Dorothy Shakespear
Dorothy Shakespear was an English artist, the daughter of novelist Olivia Shakespear, and the wife of the poet Ezra Pound. She was a member of the Vorticism movement, and had her work published in the literary magazine BLAST.Dorothy met Ezra Pound in 1909; after a long courtship the two were...
. The early 20th century also includes The Sitwells
The Sitwells
The Sitwells , from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, were three siblings, who formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London in the period roughly 1916 to 1930...
artistic circle and more notably the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
a group of mostly English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including painter Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....
, painter and art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
, art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
Clive Bell
Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.- Origins :Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881...
, painter Vanessa Bell
Vanessa Bell
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.- Biography and art :...
, painter Duncan Grant
Duncan Grant
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...
among others; very fashionable at the time, their work in the visual arts looks less impressive today. British modernism was to remain somewhat tentative until after World War II, though figures such as Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
kept in touch with European developments.
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
and the Camden Town Group
Camden Town Group
The Camden Town Group was a group of English Post-Impressionist artists active 1911-1913. They gathered frequently at the studio of painter Walter Sickert in the Camden Town area of London.-History:...
developed an English style of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...
with a strong strand of social documentary, including Harold Gilman
Harold Gilman
The British artist Harold John Wilde Gilman was a painter of interiors, portraits and landscapes, and a founder-member of the Camden Town Group.-Early life and studies:...
, Spencer Frederick Gore
Spencer Gore (artist)
Spencer Frederick Gore was a British painter of landscapes, music-hall scenes and interiors, usually with single figures...
, Charles Ginner
Charles Ginner
Charles Isaac Ginner was a painter of landscape and urban subjects. Born in the south of France at Cannes, of British parents, in 1910 he settled in London, where he was an associate of Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman and a key member of the Camden Town Group.-Early years and studies:Charles Isaac...
, Robert Bevan
Robert Bevan
Robert Polhill Bevan was an English painter, draughtsman and lithographer. He was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, the London Group, and the Cumberland Market Group.-Early life:...
, Malcolm Drummond
Malcolm Drummond
Malcolm Cyril Drummond was an English artist, noted for his paintings of urban scenes and interiors. Influenced by the Post-Impressionists and Walter Sickert, he was a member of the Camden Town Group and the London Group.-Life:...
and Lucien Pissarro
Lucien Pissarro
Lucien Pissarro was a landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver and designer and printer of fine books. His landscape paintings employ techniques of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, but he also exhibited with Les XX. Apart from his landscapes he painted only a few still-lifes and family...
(the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...
). Where their colouring is often notoriously drab, the Scottish Colourists
Scottish Colourists
The Scottish Colourists were a group of painters from Scotland whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art....
indeed mostly used bright light and colour; some, like Samuel Peploe
Samuel Peploe
Samuel John Peploe was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists...
and John Duncan Fergusson
John Duncan Fergusson
John Duncan Fergusson was a Scottish artist, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.- Early life :...
, were living in France to find suitable subjects. They were initially inspired by Sir William McTaggart
William McTaggart
William McTaggart was a Scottish landscape painter who was influenced by Impressionism.-Life and work:...
(1835–1910), a Scottish landscape painter associated with Impressionism.
The reaction to the horrors of the First World War prompted a return to pastoral subjects as represented by Paul Nash
Paul Nash (artist)
Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...
and Eric Ravilious
Eric Ravilious
Eric William Ravilious was an English painter, designer, book illustrator and wood engraver.-Career:Ravilious studied at Eastbourne School of Art, and at the Royal College of Art, where he studied under Paul Nash and became close friends with Edward Bawden.He began his working life as a muralist,...
, mainly a printmaker. Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life...
painted mystical works, as well as landscapes, and the sculptor, printmaker and typographer Eric Gill
Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was a British sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement...
produced elegant simple forms in a style related to Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...
. The Euston Road School
Euston Road School
The Euston Road School was a group of English painters, active in London between 1937 and 1939.William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers, Maurice Field and Graham Bell set up a School of Drawing and Painting in Euston Road in 1937; other associated artists included Lawrence Gowing, Tom...
was a group of "progressive" realists of the late 1930s, including the influential teacher William Coldstream
William Coldstream
Sir William Menzies Coldstream was a British realist painter and a long standing art teacher.-Biography:...
. Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, with artists including John Tunnard
John Tunnard
John Samuel Tunnard was an English Modernist designer and painter. He was the cousin of landscape architect Christopher Tunnard.-Life:...
and the Birmingham Surrealists
Birmingham Surrealists
The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s....
, was briefly popular in the 1930s, influencing Roland Penrose
Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom.- Biography :...
and Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
. Stanley William Hayter
Stanley William Hayter
Stanley William Hayter , CBE was a British painter and printmaker associated in the 1930s with Surrealism and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism. Regarded as one of the most significant printmakers of the 20th century, in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris...
was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and printmaker
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
associated in the 1930s with Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris. Since his death in 1988, it has been known as Atelier Contrepoint. Hayter became one of the most influential printmakers of the 20th century. Fashionable portraitists included Meredith Frampton
Meredith Frampton
Meredith Frampton was a British painter and etcher.Frampton was educated at St John's Wood Art School and the at the Royal Academy Schools. He was the son of sculptor George Frampton. Although his artistic career was short and his output was limited, his work is on display at the National...
in a hard-faced Art Deco classicism, Augustus John
Augustus John
Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....
, and Sir Alfred Munnings
Alfred Munnings
Sir Alfred James Munnings KCVO, PRA was known as one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken enemy of Modernism...
if horses were involved. Munnings was President of the Royal Academy 1944–1949 and led a jeering hostility to Modernism. The photographers of the period include Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.-Career and life:...
, Angus McBean
Angus McBean
Angus McBean , was a Welsh photographer, associated with surrealism.-Biography:Angus McBean was born in South Wales in June 1904. Despite the surname and the family's claim to be head of the sub-clan McBean, they had been Welsh for generations. Clem McBean was a surveyor in the mines and the family...
and the diarist Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre...
.
Henry Moore emerged after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
as Britain's leading sculptor, promoted alongside Victor Pasmore
Victor Pasmore
Edwin John Victor Pasmore was a British artist and architect. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.-Biography:...
and Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
by the Festival of Britain
Festival of Britain
The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition in Britain in the summer of 1951. It was organised by the government to give Britons a feeling of recovery in the aftermath of war and to promote good quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities. The Festival's centrepiece was in...
. The "London School" of figurative painters including Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (painter)
Francis Bacon , was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....
, and Michael Andrews
Michael Andrews (artist)
Michael Andrews was a British painter.-Life and work:Michael Andrews was born in Norwich, England, the second child of Thomas Victor Andrews and his wife Gertrude Emma Green. He completed his two years' National service between 1947 and 1949, nineteen months of which was spent in Egypt...
have received widespread international recognition, while other painters such as John Minton
John Minton (artist)
Francis John Minton was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London, and at the same time maintained a consistently large output of works...
and John Craxton
John Craxton
John Leith Craxton, RA, was an English painter. He was sometimes called a neo-Romantic artist but he preferred to be known as a "kind of Arcadian".-Career:...
are characterized as Neo-Romantics. Graham Sutherland
Graham Sutherland
Graham Vivien Sutherland OM was an English artist.-Early life:He was born in Streatham, attending Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. He was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey before going up to Goldsmiths, University of London...
, the Romantic landscapist John Piper
John Piper (artist)
John Egerton Christmas Piper, CH was a 20th-century English painter and printmaker. For much of his life he lived at Fawley Bottom in Buckinghamshire, near Henley-on-Thames.-Life:...
(a prolific and popular lithographer), the sculptor Elisabeth Frink
Elisabeth Frink
Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink, DBE, CH, RA was an English sculptor and printmaker...
, and the industrial townscapes of L.S. Lowry also contributed to the strong figurative presence in post-war British art. In 1952 at the 26th Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
a group of young British sculptors including Kenneth Armitage
Kenneth Armitage
William Kenneth Armitage CBE was a British sculptor known for his semiabstract bronzes.-Biography:...
, Reg Butler
Reg Butler
Reginald Cotterell Butler was an English sculptor. He studied and lectured at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from 1937 to 1939. He was a conscientious objector during the Second World War, being exempted from military service conditional upon setting up a small...
, Lynn Chadwick
Lynn Chadwick
Lynn Russell Chadwick CBE was an English artist and sculptor trained as an architectural draughtsman,but began producing metal mobile sculpture during the 1940s. Chadwick was born in London and went to Merchant Taylor's School.Chadwick was commissioned to produce 3 works for the 1951 Festival of...
, William Turnbull
William Turnbull (artist)
William Turnbull is a British artist. He is considered one of the finest British artists contributing today. He has always been both a painter and a sculptor And his sculpture is considered influential.- Early life:...
and Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
, exhibited works that demonstrated anti-monumental, expressionism. Scottish painter Alan Davie
Alan Davie
James Alan Davie is a Scottish painter and musician.He was born in Grangemouth and studied at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1930s. An early exhibition of his work came through the Society of Scottish Artists...
created a large body of abstract paintings during the 1950s that synthesize and reflect his interest in mythology and zen. Abstract art became prominent during the 1950s with Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
, Terry Frost
Terry Frost
Sir Terry Frost RA was an English artist noted for his abstracts....
, Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon was a Cornish painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. He also made constructions, pottery and collage....
and Patrick Heron
Patrick Heron
Patrick Heron , was an English painter, writer and designer, based in St. Ives, Cornwall.- Early life :...
, who were part of the St Ives school
St Ives School
The St Ives School refers to a group of artists living and working in the Cornish town of St Ives.-History:The town became a magnet for artists following the extension to West Cornwall of the Great Western Railway in 1877...
in Cornwall.
Independent Group
The Independent Group met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London from 1952-55. The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. They introduced mass culture into debates about high culture,...
formed; from which pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
emerged in 1956 with the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
This Is Tomorrow
This is Tomorrow
This Is Tomorrow was a seminal art exhibition in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.-History:...
, as a British reaction to abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. The International Group was the topic of a two-day, international conference at the Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
in March 2007. The Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
movement in Britain and the United States. The This is Tomorrow show featured Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
, Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
, and artist John McHale
John McHale (artist)
John McHale was an artist and sociologist. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies...
amongst others, and the group included the influential art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from the 1960s. In the 1950s he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US...
as well.
In the 1960s Sir Anthony Caro became a leading figure of British sculpture along with a younger generation of abstract artists including Isaac Witkin
Isaac Witkin
Isaac Witkin, internationally renowned modern sculptor, was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 10 May 1936, and he died 23 April 2006. Witkin entered St Martin’s School of Art in London, in 1957. Studying under Sir Anthony Caro and alongside other luminaries in training such as Phillip King,...
, Phillip King and William G. Tucker
William G. Tucker
William G. Tucker is a modernist British sculptor and modern art scholar. He was born to English parents in Cairo, Egypt in 1935. In 1937, his family returned to England, where Tucker was raised. He attended the University of Oxford from 1955-1958...
. John Hoyland
John Hoyland
John Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.-Life:...
, Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin
Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH, CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.-Early life:...
, John Walker
John Walker (painter)
John Walker is an English painter and printmaker.Walker studied in Birmingham. Some of his early work was inspired by abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, and often combined apparently three-dimensional shapes with "flatter" elements...
, Ian Stephenson
Ian Stephenson
Ian Stephenson was an English abstract artist. Stephenson trained at King's College, Durham along with Noel Forster and had his first solo show in London at the New Vision Centre in 1958...
, Robyn Denny
Robyn Denny
Robyn Denny, born in Abinger, Surrey in 1930, is one of a group who transformed British art in the late 1950s, leading it into the international mainstream. He studied at the Royal College of Art in the mid-1950s, among a generation that included Richard Smith and Alan Green...
and John Plumb
John Plumb
John Plumb was an English abstract painter who emerged in Britain after World War II. Plumb was born in Luton, and he went to the Byam Shaw School in London at the age of 20. He also studied at the Luton School of Art, and then the Central School in London with Victor Pasmore, and William Turnbull...
were British painters who emerged at that time and who reflected the new international style of Color Field painting. During the 1960s another group of British artists offered a radical alternative to more conventional artmaking and they included Bruce McLean
Bruce McLean
Bruce McLean is a Scottish performance artist and painter.McLean was born in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1961 to 1963, and at St Martin's School of Art, London,from 1963 to 1966...
, Barry Flanagan
Barry Flanagan
Barry Flanagan RA OBE was a Welsh sculptor, best known for his bronze statues of hares.-Biography:Barry Flanagan was born in Prestatyn, North Wales. He studied at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts before going on to St. Martin's School of Art in London in 1964. Flanagan graduated in 1966 and...
, Richard Long
Richard Long (artist)
Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...
and Gilbert and George
Gilbert and George
Gilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.-Early life:Gilbert Proesch was...
. British pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
painters David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
, Patrick Caulfield
Patrick Caulfield
Patrick Joseph Caulfield, CBE, RA was an English painter and printmaker known for his bold canvases, which often incorporated elements of Photorealism within a pared down scene.-Life and work:...
, Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier is a British pop artist works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, photography, film and sculpture....
, Peter Phillips
Peter Phillips (artist)
You also may be looking for Pete Rock.Peter Phillips is an English artist who is one of the pioneers of the Pop Art movement...
, Peter Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
(best known for the cover-art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles, released on 1 June 1967 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin...
), Gerald Laing
Gerald Laing
Gerald Ogilvie Laing was a British pop artist and sculptor. He lived in the Scottish Highlands.- Life :...
, the sculptor Allen Jones
Allen Jones (sculptor)
Allen Jones RA is a British pop artist, best known for his sculptures. He lives and works in London.Jones was born in Southampton and from 1955 to 1961 studied at the Hornsey College of Art...
were part of the sixties art scene as was the British based American painter R. B. Kitaj
R. B. Kitaj
Ronald Brooks Kitaj was an American artist who spent much of his life in England.-Life:Born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland, United States, his Hungarian father, Sigmund Benway, left his mother, Jeanne Brooks, shortly after he was born and they were divorced in 1934. His mother was the...
. Photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
in the hands of Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...
(who was awarded the first Turner Prize
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
in 1984) emerged in the 1960s as well as the op-art of Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley
Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of Op art.-Early life:...
. Michael Craig Martin was an influential teacher of some of the Young British Artists
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
and is known for the conceptual work, An Oak Tree
An Oak Tree
An Oak Tree is a conceptual work of art created by Michael Craig-Martin RA in 1973. The piece consists of two units; an object, a glass of water on a glass shelf, and a text...
(1973).
Contemporary art
Postmodern art
Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath...
, contemporary British art, particularly that of the Young British Artists
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
, has been said to be "characterised by a fundamental concern with material culture ... perceived as a post-imperial cultural anxiety". The annual Turner Prize
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
, founded in 1984 and organized by the Tate, has developed as a highly publicized showcase for contemporary British art. Among the beneficiaries have been several members of the Young British Artists
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
(YBA) movement, which includes Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
, Rachel Whiteread
Rachel Whiteread
Rachel Whiteread, CBE is an English artist, best known for her sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She won the annual Turner Prize in 1993—the first woman to win the prize....
, and Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin
Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....
, who rose to prominence after the Freeze exhibition
Freeze (exhibition)
Freeze is the title of an art exhibition that took place in July 1988 in an empty London Port Authority building at Surrey Docks in London Docklands. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst. It was significant in the subsequent development of the Young British Artists.-Organisation:Freeze was...
of 1988, with the backing of Charles Saatchi
Saatchi Gallery
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and...
and achieved international recognition with their version of conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. This often featured installations
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, notably Hirst's vitrine containing a preserved shark
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists" . It consists of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by...
. The Tate gallery and eventually the Royal Academy also gave them exposure. The influence of Saatchi's generous and wide-ranging patronage was to become a matter of some controversy, as was that of Jay Jopling
Jay Jopling
Jeremy "Jay" Jopling is an English art dealer and gallery owner. He is closely associated with the YBA artists and his gallery White Cube represents the commercial interests of YBAs Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, and Sam Taylor-Wood, whom he...
, the most influential London gallerist.
The Sensation exhibition of works from the Saatchi Collection was controversial in both the UK and the US, though in different ways. At the Royal Academy press-generated controversy centred on Myra
Myra (painting)
Myra is a large painting created by Marcus Harvey in 1995. It became notorious when it was exhibited at the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 8 September to 28 December 1997.-Painting:...
, a very large image of the murderer Myra Hindley
Moors murders
The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least...
by Marcus Harvey
Marcus Harvey
Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists .-Exhibitions:Harvey has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including ‘The Führer's Cakes’ at Galleria Marabini in Bologna, ‘Snaps’ at White Cube in London, ‘Sex and the British’ at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac...
, but when the show travelled to New York City, opening at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
in late 1999, it was met with intense protest about The Holy Virgin Mary
The Holy Virgin Mary
The Holy Virgin Mary is a painting created by Chris Ofili in 1996. It was one of the works included in the Sensation exhibition in London, Berlin and New York in 1997–2000...
by Chris Ofili
Chris Ofili
Chris Ofili is a Turner Prize winning British painter best known for artworks referencing aspects of his Nigerian heritage, particularly his incorporation of elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists, and is now based in Trinidad.-Early life:Ofilli was born in Manchester. He had a...
, which had not provoked this reaction in London. While the press reported that the piece was smeared with elephant dung, although Ofili's work in fact showed a carefully rendered black Madonna
Madonna (art)
Images of the Madonna and the Madonna and Child or Virgin and Child are pictorial or sculptured representations of Mary, Mother of Jesus, either alone, or more frequently, with the infant Jesus. These images are central icons of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity where Mary remains...
decorated with a resin-covered lump of elephant dung. The figure is also surrounded by small collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
images of female genitalia from pornographic magazines; these seemed from a distance to be the traditional cherubim. Among other criticism, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had seen the work in the catalogue but not in the show, called it "sick stuff" and threatened to withdraw the annual $7 million City Hall grant from the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
hosting the show, because "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion."
In 1999, the Stuckists
Stuckism
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...
figurative painting group which includes Billy Childish
Billy Childish
Billy Childish is an English artist, painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist...
and Charles Thomson
Charles Thomson (artist)
Charles Thomson is an English artist, painter, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art...
was founded as a reaction to the YBAs. The Federation of British Artists
Federation of British Artists
The Federation of British Artists consists of nine art societies, and is based at the Mall Galleries in London where the societies Annual Exhibitions are held. The societies represent living artists working in the UK who create contemporary figurative art...
hosts shows of traditional figurative painting. Jack Vettriano
Jack Vettriano
Jack Vettriano OBE born Jack Hoggan , is a Scottish painter.- Early life :Jack Vettriano grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, Fife. He left school at 16 and later became an apprentice mining engineer. Vettriano did not take up painting as a hobby until the 1970s, when a girlfriend...
and Beryl Cook
Beryl Cook
Beryl Cook, OBE was an English artist best known for comical paintings of people she encountered in her home city. She had no formal training and did not take up painting until middle age.- Early life :...
have widespread popularity, but not establishment recognition. Banksy
Banksy
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
made a reputation with street graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
and is now a highly valued mainstream artist. In 2004, the Walker Art Gallery
Walker Art Gallery
The Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England, outside of London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, and is promoted as "the National Gallery of the North" because it is not a local or regional gallery but is part...
staged The Stuckists Punk Victorian
The Stuckists Punk Victorian
The Stuckists Punk Victorian was the first national gallery exhibition of Stuckist art. It was held at the Walker Art Gallery and Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool from 18 September 2004 to 20 February 2005, and was part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial....
, the first national museum exhibition of the Stuckist
Stuckism
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...
art movement.
Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley
Antony Mark David Gormley OBE RA is a British sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1995 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site...
produces sculptures, mostly in metal and based on the human figure, which include the 20 metres (66 ft) high Angel of the North
Angel of the North
The Angel of the North is a contemporary sculpture, designed by Antony Gormley, which is located in Gateshead,formerly County Durham, England.It is a steel sculpture of an angel, standing tall, with wings measuring across...
near Gateshead
Gateshead
Gateshead is a town in Tyne and Wear, England and is the main settlement in the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead. Historically a part of County Durham, it lies on the southern bank of the River Tyne opposite Newcastle upon Tyne and together they form the urban core of Tyneside...
, one of the first of a number of very large public sculptures produced in the 2000s, Another Place
Another Place
Another Place is a piece of modern sculpture by Antony Gormley.Now permanently erected on Crosby Beach, England, it was due to be moved to New York in November 2006, but there was a controversial proposal to retain the work at Crosby...
, and Event Horizon
Event Horizon (sculpture)
Event Horizon is the name of a large-scale public sculpture installation by the English artist Antony Gormley.Originally mounted in London in 2007, the project consists of 31 life-size anatomically-correct male bodies, 27 constructed of fiberglass and four of cast iron, all cast from the body of...
. The Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor CBE RA is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai , Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice...
has public works around the world, including Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate, a public sculpture by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor, is the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park within the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The sculpture and AT&T Plaza are located on top of Park Grill, between the Chase Promenade and...
in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
and Sky Mirror
Sky Mirror
is a public sculpture by artist Anish Kapoor. Commissioned by the Nottingham Playhouse from the artist, it is installed outside the theatre in Wellington Circus, Nottingham, England. Sky Mirror is a six-metre-wide concave dish of polished stainless steel weighing ten tonnes and angled up towards...
in various locations; like much of his work these use curved mirror-like steel surfaces. The environmental sculpture
Environmental sculpture
The term environmental sculpture is variously defined. A development of the art of the 20th century, environmental sculpture usually creates or alters the environment for the viewer, as opposed to presenting itself figurally or monumentally before the viewer...
s of British earth works artist
Land art
Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy, OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.-Life and career:The son of F...
have been created in many locations around the world. Using natural found materials they are often very emphemeral, and are recorded in photographs of which several collections in book form have been published. Richard Long
Richard Long (artist)
Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...
is another land artist, often working with river mud. Grayson Perry
Grayson Perry
Grayson Perry is an English artist, known mainly for his ceramic vases and cross-dressing. Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of...
works in various media, including ceramics.
See also
- British Marine Art (Romantic Era)British Marine Art (Romantic Era)Marine art was especially popular in Britain during the Romantic Era, and taken up readily by British artists in part because of England's geographical form . This article deals with marine art as a specialized genre practised by artists who did little or nothing else, and does not cover the marine...
- List of Turner Prize winners and nominees
- Art of BirminghamArt of BirminghamBirmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design, dominated by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool,...
- Bristol SchoolBristol SchoolThe Bristol School is a term applied retrospectively to describe the informal association and works of a group of artists working in Bristol, England, in the early 19th century. It was mainly active in the 1820s, although the origins and influences of the school have been traced over the...
- List of equestrian statues in the United Kingdom
- Institute of Contemporary ArtsInstitute of Contemporary ArtsThe Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
- Tate BritainTate BritainTate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
- Walker Art GalleryWalker Art GalleryThe Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England, outside of London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, and is promoted as "the National Gallery of the North" because it is not a local or regional gallery but is part...
- National GalleryNational galleryThe National Gallery is an art gallery on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom.National Gallery may also refer to:*Armenia: National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan*Australia:**National Gallery of Australia, Canberra...
- Whitechapel Art Gallery
- Courtauld Institute of ArtCourtauld Institute of ArtThe Courtauld Institute of Art is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art. The Courtauld is one of the premier centres for the teaching of art history in the world; it was the only History of Art department in the UK to be awarded a top...
- National Portrait Gallery
- Dulwich Picture GalleryDulwich Picture GalleryDulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. England's first purpose-built public art gallery, it was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane and opened to the public in 1817. Soane arranged the exhibition spaces as a series of interlinked rooms illuminated naturally...