English school

English school, dominant school of painting in England throughout the

second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th. Its establishment
marked the rise of a national tradition that began with the emergence of native
artists whose works were no longer provincial but rivaled continental art in
quality and ended by exercising considerable influence on the course of
European painting.
William Hogarth, a London painter and engraver, was an early representative
of the English school and the first modern English master. Hogarth worked in
the playful, elegant Rococo style of contemporary French art but perfected
between 1730 and 1750 two new, peculiarly British forms: a type of genre
painting, the “modern moral subject,” which satirized contemporary life and
manners with a highly narrative approach, and the small-scale group portrait,
or “conversation piece.”

English full-scale portraiture was revitalized by two painters, Sir Joshua

Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Reynolds introduced the “Grand
Manner” into English portraiture, using an extensive repertory of poses
derived from Italian art in his strongly characterized portraits. His theoretical
“Discourses,” delivered yearly to Royal Academy students, were the single
most important influence on subsequent English art. Gainsborough, who
never left England, nevertheless produced a Rococo lyricism not evident in
Reynolds’s work, revealing a light, fluid technique, delicate colouring, and a
sensitivity to character that surpassed Reynolds’s own.

The 18th-century Scottish-born painter Gavin Hamilton was an early

practitioner of historical painting, but that genre was seldom successfully
attempted by English artists in the 18th century. Nevertheless, Benjamin
West and John Singleton Copley, two American-born painters, gained
impressive reputations in England with their innovative, if largely uninspired,
depictions of current history. Genre paintingflourished with such notable artists
as George Morland, Joseph Wright, and the animal painter George Stubbs.

The early phase of the English school also included the beginning of the
English landscape tradition, the founder of which was Richard Wilson.
Applying the Classical principles of clarity and order to the depiction of the
English countryside, Wilson contributed a delicate sense of light and distance
and a grandeur of design to the English tradition. Though the bulk of his work
was portraiture, Gainsborough was also a master of landscape and treated it
with the same light touch that characterizes his portraits.
Before the turn of the 19th century, the spirit of Romanticism had begun to
grow in England, and it remained dominant in English art until the mid-19th
century. Among the enduring works produced are the visionary drawings of
the poet William Blake and the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir
Henry Raeburn.
The flowering of English Romantic art, however, came with the work of
England’s two greatest landscapists, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Both
artists built on the tradition of Wilson and Gainsborough, as well as on the
works of earlier continental painters, but they developed their mature styles
with complete disregard for convention and according to their own very
different personalities. Turner expressed in his highly poetic art a troubled
search for peace in nature. His late work approaches abstraction—light
dissolves all but the slightest indications of mass, producing pictures of almost
disembodied colour. Constable limited himself almost entirely to the
countryside of southern England and evolved a profoundly innovative style,
characterized by a use of rough, broken touches of colour and of a fresh,
bright palette free of the conventional browns within a Classical composition of
receding planes. This style was especially suited to capturing the effects of
light on the landscape, with which he was particularly concerned. Constable’s
influence on European painting was far-reaching, providing considerable
inspiration to the French Impressionists.

After about 1850 the fresh observation and direct approach that had become
traditional in the best English art was superseded by a self-conscious revivalism and a
concern with involved theory. Though England continued to produce active
movements, truly innovative development passed to other centres.