English Painting

Charles I, King of England, from Three Angles by Anthony van Dyck.

English Painting has a long and rich history. It is believed that English painting had been influenced by the Celts. However some scholars affirm that real English painting started in the 18th century; this is because the most important painters who worked before in England were foreigners (Hans Holbein the Younger, Anthony van Dyck, etc.), from mainland Europe, and painting was essentially an aristocratic matter (Works from the masters of Italian Renaissance were in the collections of the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham). In late XIX century, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, a classical-subject painter, the most successful of the Victorian era, influenced English painting (in some list he appears as English painter).

William Hogarth

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) was one of the greatest innovators in English art.

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Hogarth was a professional rebel. He found English art sycophantic, and determined to make it independent. Instead of working for a few rich patrons, he evolved the idea of making his living out of popular engravings of his pictures. He believed that the lack of a native school of painting was largely due to the fashions imposed on a credulous public by connoisseurs and critics and he waged continual war on taste and the Old Masters.

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Sir Joshua Reynolds

Lady Caroline Howard

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Thomas Gainsborough

Lady Georgiana Cavendish, 1787.

Thomas Gainsborough (Sudbury, Suffolk, 1727 – London, 1788) was a landscape and portrait painter, considered one of the great English masters. In the aristocratic spa town of Bath and later in London, he became well-known for portraits like Mrs. Philip Thicknesse (1760), Mary, Countess Howe (about 1763-4), The Blue Boy (exhibited R.A. 1770), and the landscape The Harvest Wagon (exhibited S.A. 1767). In 1768 he became one of the foundation members of the Royal Academy, at which he exhibited annually until 1784.

In 1780, Gainsborough painted the King George III and Queen Charlotte, becoming the Royal Family's favorite painter. Before his death in 1788, he turned from portraiture to pictorial compositions, producing in all some 200 landscapes in addition to his prolific output of about 800 portraits of the English aristocracy.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, was in painting his most important rival.

William Turner

Dido building Carthage, 1815.

William Turner (Covent Garden 1775 - London 1851) was a British Romantic painter.

John Constable

Flatford Mill

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John Constable is today recognised as the major English landscape painter of the 19th century, matched only by his contemporary, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). But he was not particularly successful during his lifetime.

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See also

• English Painting Masterpieces
• Painting Masterpieces
• Painting Schools

External links

• Country Index:UK Olga's Gallery.
• British Biography Britain Express.
• Hogarth, Constable and Turner By SIR KENNETH CLARK.
• English Painting
• INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PAINTING

Bibliography

• Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Englishness of English Art, London: Architectural Press, 1956.