PAINTING in GREAT BRITAIN

Painting in Great Britain in the 17 th–19th centuries is represented by a number of

great artists. During this period it was greatly influenced by foreign painters. There
was little pictorial art in England until the great miniaturists of the Tudor epoch.
The Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was really the father of the
English portrait school. The English king personally invited Van Dyck to London,
and during his first year in England the painter spent most of his time painting the
king and the queen. Van Dyck created the impressive formal type of portrait.The
most popular of Van Dyck’s pictures are “The Family Portrait”, “Portrait of Sir
Robert Shirley”, “Portrait of Lord George Stuart", “Equestrian Portrait of Charles I”.
During the 18th century a truly national school of painting was created in
England. William Hogarth (1697-1764) was the first great English painter and
pictorial satirist who raised British pictorial art to a high level of importance. He
wasn’t a success as a portrait painter but his pictures of social life which he called
“modern moral subjects” brought him fame and position. Hogarth’s actors are the
citizens and tradesmen, soldiers and politicians, beggars and thieves. Among his
pictures are “The Graham Children”, “Shrimp Girl” and the story series “The
Marriage-a-la-Mode”, “The Harlot’s Progress”, “The Enraged Musician”.
In Reynolds’ days (1723-1792) society portraiture had become a monotonous
repetition of the same theme with the limited number of variations. The sitter was to
be posed centrally against the background. It was Joshua Reynolds who insisted in
his practice that a portrait should be a full, complex work of art on many levels and
each sitter was no longer static. Reynolds was the first president of the Royal
Academy of Arts, developed his own style known as the “grand manner”, executed
portraits, group pictures and historical themes. Among his best canvases are the
family portrait “Lady Elizabeth Delme and her Children” and “Lucy, Lady
Strange”,”The Age of Innocence ”,”The Infant Samuel ”,”Admiral Hood ”.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), was a portraitist and a landscape painter.
He became a sought-after and fashionable artist portraying the aristocracy,
wealthy merchants, artists and men of letters. Gainsborough’s portraits are painted in
clear and transparent tone, in colour-scheme where blue and green predominated.
The most famous of them are ‘Mrs. Sarah Siddons”, “The Blue Boy”, “Robert
Andrews and Mary, His Wife”, “Lady in Blue”. The particular discovery of
Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the
background merge into a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the
background, but in most cases man and nature are fused in a single whole through the
atmospheric harmony of mood. His landscapes contain much poetry and music,
among them are “The Market Cart”, “The Mall in St. James's Park ",”Landscape in
Suffolk ” ,“Road from Market ”.
By the end of the 18th century a school of landscape painting was firmly
established in Great Britain. It reached its culmination in the early 19 th century in the
works of John Constable and Joseph Turner.
John Constable (1776-1836) was the first English landscape painter to ask no
lessons from the Dutch. Being a home-keeping artist, he enjoyed clouds, sunshine,
trees and fields for their own sake. The peace and quietness of nature attracted his
attention becoming the main subject of his pictures. The most interesting thing about
his technique was making quick sketches setting down his first spontaneous
emotional reaction to natural beauties. These sketches are even more valued than his
finished works. Besides, Constable was the first who introduced green into painting,
the natural green of lush meadows. He also used broken touches of colour in his
canvases. He is famous for his “The Cornfield”, “The Haywain”, “Dedham Lock and
Mill”,”Weymouth Bay ”.
Unlike realist Constable, Joseph Turner (1775-1851) was a romanticist and liked
to travel. He dissolved the forms of his landscape altogether in the play of light and
shade. More than anything else in nature Turner loved the sea to which he devoted
many of his canvases. He painted waves and storms. Elements in his works were at
the most extreme and battling. Turner used the colour-scheme where red, violet,
brown and dark blue predominated. Among his famous pictures are “Snow Storm at
Sea”, “Fire at Sea”, “The Shipwreck”, “Fishermen at Sea”,“The Fighting Temeraire”,
“Rain, Steam, Speed”. Turner became more and more absorbed in problems of light
and atmosphere as French Impressionists. In this he was far in advance of his time.
In the second half of the 19th century there existed a number of trends in
European continental painting – impressionism, expressionism, fauvism which later
in the 20th century gave way to cubism, futurism and surrealism, and eventually to
abstractionism.The New English Art Club founded in 1885 became the centre of
English impressionism. Instead of trying to represent nature in its entirety the
impressionists selected one element – light to be treated as an independent and
organic element of style. The leading representatives of the school were Sickert,
John, and younger English artists Gore and Gilman.
During World War II when all contacts with continental Europe were severed,
there was a notable increase in artistic vitality in Britain. “Modern” artists were
accepted as they had never been before. Sutherland, Nash, Moore all did outstanding
paintings and drawings and achieved through their absorption of modern means of
expression a dramatic vividness of imagery. Since the war the development of
painting in Britain has been diverse and therefore difficult for definition. Some
British painters like Pasmore and Nicolson turned to abstractionism.