English Painting

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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). Nineteenth Century, "The Great Century of British Painting", produced a variety of outstanding works. In late XIX century, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, a classical-subject Dutch painter, the most successful of the Victorian era, enriched English painting (in some list he appears as English painter). [1] J.M.W. Turner and John Constable influenced not only subsequent generations of British painters, but American and European as well. Portraits and landscape painting have been the great English specialism.

Victorian watercolors (c.1835 - c.1900), was an era in which the English watercolor tradition reach such popularity that everyone from the Royal couple Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to common schoolchildren was "en plain air" painting the English countryside; paintings by W. Turner, David Cox and Peter DeWint increased their prices. [2]

Watercolor: Burnham Beeches by Miles Birket Foster (1825-1899)

Nicholas Hilliard

The Elizabethan Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), was the most celebrated of English miniaturists. His reputation extended to France. Hilliard was a follower of Hans Holbein. He was also the author of a treatise on miniature painting, "The Art of Limning".

Hilliard was the author of the miniatures of Elizabeth I, 1572, Sir Walter Raleigh, 1585, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, and other members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James I of England.


William Hogarth

Graham Children.

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) was one of the greatest innovators in English art. He 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. [3]

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Lady Caroline Howard

Sir Joshua Reynolds (Plympton, Devon 1723- London 1792) was an English Rococo Painter and distinguished member of London's intellectual society. In 1768, he founded with Thomas Gainsborough the Royal Academy of Arts.

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. [4]

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. [5] Gainsborough is the master of the English Rococo.

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

William Turner

Dido building Carthage, 1815.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (Covent Garden 1775 - London 1851) was a British Romantic painter. In 1799, he was elected to the Royal Academy where he exhibited watercolors from 1790 to 1820.

In satisfying the fashion for ruins, mountains and waterfalls, he was pleasing and nourishing himself. Ruined abbeys awoke his feelings of history and so charged his mind with the fallacies of hope that this became the title of a chaotic, illiterate epic from which, throughout his life, he quoted mottoes for his pictures. (cfr: Clark, Ibidem)

After W. Turner’s death, in 1856, the "Turner Bequest" was settled by a decree; this contains around 300 oil paintings and nearly 30,000 sketches and watercolors by his own hand, all found in his studio.

It is said that Turner created landscape paintings that are revolutionary even today. [6]

John Constable

Flatford Mill

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. [7]

Constable, as the son of a prosperous miller, was brought up in one of the most beautiful parts of the English country. "These scenes," said Constable, "made me a painter--and I am thankful". His life had always the intense images of his childhood contemplation, trees, horses, water, clouds.

See also

External links

Bibliography

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

References

  1. ↑ Short Biographies of Leading Victorian Painters
  2. ↑ Victorian watercolors
  3. ↑ Sir Kenneth Clark: "Hogarth, Constable and Turner" - appeared in "Masterpieces of English Painting" by Hans Huth (page 9)
  4. ↑ Biography of Thomas Gainsborough
  5. ↑ Thomas Gainsborough
  6. ↑ Joseph Mallord William Turner Watercolor artists.
  7. ↑ John Constable: The Man and His Work