British pictorial Art. Famous painters.

The oldest art in the United Kingdom can be dated to the Neolithic period, but it is in the Bronze age that the first innovative artworks are found. The Beaker people, who arrived in Britain around 2500 BC, were skilled in metal refining. At first, they worked mainly in copper, but around 2150 BC they learned how to make bronze.

In the Iron Age, the Celtic culture spread in the British isles, and with them a new art style. Metalwork, especially gold ornaments, was still important, but stone and most likely wood was also used.

The Romans, arriving in the 1st century BC, brought with them the Classical style. Many monuments have survived, especially funerary monuments, statues and busts. They also brough glasswork and mosaics.

Other peoples, such as the Saxons, Jutes and Danes, brought with them Germanic and Scandinavian art styles. Celtic and Scandinavian art have several common elements, such as the use of intricate, intertwined patterns of decoration.

There was little change in the art style at first, but new elements were added. The Celtic high crosses are well-known examples of the use of Celtic patterns in Christian art. . One new form of art that was introduced was mural paintings.

A notable event in British art history is the adoption of Protestantism by Henry VIII of England in 1536 and the subsequent seizure of property belonging to the Catholic church by the state. This resulted in the destruction of much of England and Wales' art tradition, which had previously been under the patronage of the church. Another result was isolation from the trends of catholic Europe, including many of those at the centre of the Renaissance.

Painting in England (17—19th c) it was greatly influenced by foreign painters. The Flemish painter Van Dyck was really the father of English portrait school. The' English king personally invited Van Dyck to London, the painter spent most of his time painting the King and the Queen. Van Dyck created the impressive, formal type of portrait and such masters as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence owed much to their study of his works. He created a genre of aristocratic and intellectual portrait.

1) the 18th century the truly national school of painting was created, William Hogarth - first great English painter who raised

British pictorial art to a high level of importance. Among his favourite works are six pictures united under the title "Marriage a la Mode." This famous series is really a novel in paint telling the story of the marriage of an earl's son and city merchant's daughter, a marriage made for reasons of vanity and money.

2)the second half of the 18th century narrative and satirical themes lost their leading role. The ruling classes tried to show in art a confirmation and glorification of their social position. Sir Joshua Reynolds- the most outstanding portraitist of the period. He usually painted his characters in heroic style and showed them as the best people of the nation. As a result his paintings are not free of a certain idealization of the characters.

3)The furious apostle of the philosophy of romanticism was William Blake who was strongly opposed to the rules of Reynolds proposing that the guiding force for creative spirit should come from imagination not reason.

Joseph Turner was an outstanding painter whose most favourite topic was to paint sea ("The Shipwreck"). He painted waves and storms, clouds and mists with a great skill.

4)The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an association of painters, formed in London in 1848. They determined to paint direct from nature, with objective truthfulness, emulating the work of the great Italian artists before Raphael. They appreciated nothing but beauty and turned to the Bible and classical mythology for inspiration.

Paul Nash (11 May, 1889 – 11 July, 1946) was an English landscape painter, surrealist and war artist. He is widely considered one of the most important English artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He was educated at St Paul's School. However, he failed his exams, and decided instead to take up art as a career. He attended the Slade School of Art in London.

Nash's fellow students included Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. However, he struggled with figure drawing, and spent only a year at the School. Influenced by the poetry of William Blake and the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Nash had shows in 1912 and 1913 (sometimes alone, sometimes with his brother John), largely devoted to drawings and watercolours of brooding landscapes.

The major art movement at the beginning of the 20th century was vorticism which

counted among its members important artists such as Sir Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg and others. Later on in the century Britain produced such important artists as Henry Moore, Lucian Freud Frank Auerbach, as well as highly idiosyncratic painters such as John Tunnard and Francis Bacon.

Notable visual artists from the United Kingdom include John Constable, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake and J.M.W. Turner. In the 20th century, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and the pop artists Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake were of note.