Painting was one of the earliest ways in which man sought to express his own

personality and his understanding of an existence beyond the material world. And
painting, like other arts, exhibits universal qualities that make it easy for viewers of
all nations and civilizations to understand and appreciate.

Kings and queens commissioned portraits from German, Dutch, and Flemish
artists. Holbein, Van Dyck, and other foreign portraitists were almost English painters
during a longer or shorter period of their lives.

The Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was the father of the
English portrait school. 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. One of the most popular of Van Dyck’s pictures is “The Family Portrait”.
The sitters’ individuality is expressed in this portrait. The artist managed to create the
impression of close spiritual relationship in spite of the difference in characters. The
colour-scheme of this canvas is very beautiful.

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, idle rich of the
18th century London. Hogarth hated symmetry, and his famous S-line enlivens his
series of pictorial satires. Among his pictures are “The Graham Children”, “Shrimp
Girl” and the story series “The Marriage-a-la-Mode”, “The Harlot’s Progress”.

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 (a curtain, a pillar, perhaps a hint of
landscape). The artist considered, “A mere copier of nature can never produce
anything great”. 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 the portrait “Lucy, Lady Strange”.
 Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), one of the greatest masters of the English
school, 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”. 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 Road through Wood, with Boy Resting and
Dog”.
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”.
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”, “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.