AN OUTLINE OF ENGLISH PAINTING

Some of the greatest foreign masters were attracted to England loaded with honours and
even in some sort received into the nation by the titles of nobility conferred upon them. Hans
Holbein, Antonio More, Rubens, Van Dyck, were almost English painters during a longer or
shorter period of their lives. The last named in particular, called in England Sir Anthony Van
Dyck who married the daughter of a lord, and died in London is really the father of the English
portrait school. He trained a few English pupils, William Dobson, George Jameson and the
miniaturist Samuel Cooper. Nevertheless, his principal imitators and successors were like
himself foreigners settled in London; the German Godfrey Kneller, and especially the Dutchman
Van der Faes who became in England Sir Peter Lely (1617-80). Not until William Hogarth
(1697-1764) do we find a painter truly English, indeed violently so.
Van Dyck was the father of the English portrait school and set before it an aristocratic
ideal: Hogarth was a printer's son, uneducated but a curious observer of men and manners, who
with his frank, robust personality brought strength to the stripling's grace. Also, with his strong
rough hands Hogarth gave the decisive impetus to the national temperament. His first works date
from 1730. For rather more than a century England was to see a brilliant succession of geniuses,
Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence, John Constable and J.M.W.
Turner, responding to her highest aspirations. No country has had so exclusive and strongly
marked a love of the portrait. England and Holland alike were deprived of the religious painting
by the Reformation, and mythology met with no better fate. Scarcely any decorative painting is
found, and what little survived is mediocre. Holland compensated by inventing the small genre
picture, street scene or interior which she brought to an unheard of pitch of refinement. But
England practised genre painting only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in imitation,
moreover, of the Dutch, though diluted with sentimentality and humour in the little School of
anecdotal painters William John Newton, Charles Robert Leslie and others.
Now, if portrait painting is one of the glories of English art, landscape is another; in both
directions it rose to supreme heights. Nevertheless, the current of sentimental and anecdotal
painting, in spite of the many ways in which it is opposed to a strong and healthy conception of
art is not so artificial in England as it would be elsewhere, in France, for example.
The third characteristic of the English school is the moral strain emanating from the old
Puritan tradition. It sometimes favours a conception of art closely akin to that of the novel which
from the eighteenth century onwards is so living and original a part of English literature.
Sometimes it leans towards the pamphlet, which is, moreover, often one of the forms of the
English novel, or else towards caricature.
England had long shown a great love of natural beauty. The connoisseurs had collected in
their London salons and the galleries of their country houses the works of Jacob van Ruysdael,
Aelbert Cuyp, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Claude Lorraine; but no work bearing an English
signature was ever seen there. It was still in imitation of Canaletto that Samuel Scott, the
companion of Hogarth, painted his views of London, so precious as historical records. The real
creators of English landscape, however, are Richard Wilson (1714-1782) and Thomas
Gainsborough (1727-1788).
Impressionism found a focus in the New English Art Club, founded in 1886. Notable
members included Walter Sickert (1860-1942) and Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942), two
English painters with coterminous lives who became influential in the 20 th century. Sickert was
prominent in the transition to modernism. Steer's sea and landscape paintings made him a leading
impressionist, but later work displays a more traditional English style, influenced by both
Constable and Turner.
Paul Nash (1889-1946) played a key role in the development of modernism in English
art. He was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20 th century, and
the artworks he produced during World War I are among the most iconic images of the conflict.
Modernism's most controversial English talent was writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-
1957). He co-founded the vorticist movement in art, and after becoming better known for his
writing than his painting in the 1920s and early 1930s he returned to more concentrated work on
visual art, with paintings from the 1930s and 1940s constituting some of his best-known work.
Walter Sickert called Wyndham Lewis: "the greatest portraitist of this or any other time".
Lancastrian L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) became famous for his scenes of life in the
industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20 th century. He developed a distinctive
style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures often
referred to as "matchstick men".
Notable English artists of the mid-20th century and after include: Graham Sutherland
(1903-1980); Carel Weight (1908-1997); Ruskin Spear (1911-1990); pop art pioneers Richard
Hamilton (1922-2011), Peter Blake (b. 1932), and David Hockney (b. 1937); and op art
exemplar Bridget Riley (b. 1931).
English art was revitalised in 2014 by Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, a
collaboration between artist Paul Cummins (b. 1977) and theatre designer Tom Piper. The
installation at the Tower of London between July and November 2014 commemorated the
centenary of the outbreak of World War I; it consisted of 888,246 ceramic red poppies, each
intended to represent one British or Colonial serviceman killed in the War.

22. Answer the following questions.

1. Why were some of the greatest foreign masters attracted to England?
2. What painter is considered to be the father of the English portrait school?
3. What impact did William Hogarth make on the development of British painting?
4. Why were England and Holland deprived of the religious painting?
5. What can you say about genre painting in England?
6. What outstanding English landscape and portrait painters do you know?
7. Did England show love of natural beauty?
8. What entity was a hub of English impressionism?
9. What landscape painter played a key role in the development of English modernism?
10. What artist was modernism's most controversial talent?
11. What 20th-century artist is associated with urban landscapes?
12. What artists revitalised English art in the 21st century?