The value and rank of every art is

in proportion to the mental labour employed in it,

or the mental pleasure produced by it.

Joshua Reynolds. Discourses on Art (1771)

Unit 1. British painting

What do you know about the origins of British art? When were the first works of English art created? What were the major influences on English art? Do you know any particular works of genuine English art that have come down to us? Now, read about British art and learn more about its history and distinctive qualities.

Text a. Introduction

Britain, which throughout her long history has produced men of literary genius in such profusion, in the visual arts for centuries lagged behind her European neighbors. The general character of English painting is defined for us by the work of great individuals. In Hogarth its inclination towards the illustration of social life has a supreme example. In Gainsborough there is all of a native poetry of feeling. Devotion to landscape, ranging from a patriotic delight in the local scene to a romantic sense of far horizons, is summed up by Constable and Turner. An imaginative vein, warring at times with the observant description of natural fact, finds its exemplar in Blake. In none of these aspects can English painting be called 'classical'. Its excellence is of a different kind from that which belongs to the European tradition, the grandeur of Renaissance and Baroque art, the lucidity of aesthetic aim and reasoning which so distinguishes French painting. It takes on in the course of time the complexity and waywardness which are rather to be termed 'romantic'.

The complexity is in part due to the processes of social and economic change which so clearly separate one period from another; the age of the Tudors from the Middle Ages, the eighteenth from the seventeenth century, the nineteenth from the eighteenth, the modern age from that of Queen Victoria. English painting correspondingly proceeds in a fitful fashion. When the medieval tradition founders, it must slowly start again. It alternates between conservatism and individual ascents into freedom of expression. It changes in aspect with the variable relation of island and neighbouring continent.

Medieval and Renaissance Art

It is usual to regard English painting as beginning with the Tudor period and for this there are several reasons. When Henry VIII abolished Papal authority in England in 1534 and ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 he automatically brought to an end the tradition of religious art as it had been practiced in the Middle Ages and in monastic centres. The break was so complete that painting before and after seem entirely different things, in subject, style, and medium. Yet it is not only because the illuminated manuscript and devotional wall painting were replaced by secular portraiture that the subjects have been divorced. Medieval painting was not national in the modern sense, and often enough there is no telling whether it was the work of a native or foreign artist even when produced in England. A notable instance is the Wilton Diptych, showing Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by two Patron Saints. The subject is English, the conception French. There remains the unverified or unverifiable possibility that it was painted by an Englishman trained in the French manner, though the evidence of style causes it to be ascribed in the National Gallery Catalogue to Trench School, c. 1395. We may say that although during the age of Chaucer, English builders, stonemasons, stained-glass workers, ivory carvers, and manuscript illuminators, as skilled as any in Europe, had created many works of art across the length and breadth of the land, this art was in large measure derivative from French and other continental artistic traditions.

Partly because of the strength of this medieval heritage, which was combined with a persistent feudalism, a geographic remoteness on the periphery of European civilization, and a decline of the power and artistic patronage of the Church, England did not play a significant part in the surge of creative activity which marked the early Renaissance of other countries. During the age of Shakespeare English painters were content to follow the time-honored customs of the manuscript illuminators using flat patterns of color, precise outlines, and stiff heraldic poses. This backward state of native inventiveness prompted English royalty to import foreign talent into England to record the faces, pomp, and pageantry of the court. Among the first of the guest artists was Hans Holbein, the Younger, who was brought over from Germany to trace meticulously outlined portraits of the courtiers, ministers, prelates, and wives who surrounded the king. A century later the Stuart kings, with their urbane tastes and cosmopolitan education, chose a very different foreign painter, Anthony van Dyck, Rubens' most gifted protégé, whose style was the quintessence of Baroque flourish and poise. English courtiers were delighted to see their native roughness distilled by van Dyck's subtle flattery into the perfect archetype of aristocracy, handsome, elegant, and aloof. Van Dyck may be considered the father of English portrait painting, since he formulated the abstract ideals which English fashionable portraitists from that day to this have recognized as the goal of their art.

So after the 'Channel Bridge' of the Middle Ages is broken under the Tudors European influence becomes 'foreign', though for a long stretch of time, and with some remarkable exceptions, painters from the Continent working in England predominate. They cannot be dissociated from the history of English art though it is a native evolution that results in the great creative outbursts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historically the affinities of English painting have been stronger with northern than with southern Europe, with the Netherlands in particular. A recurring tendency to isolationism has not perhaps been without some adverse effect in causing English painters to lag behind or exclude from view other and later developments of art on the European mainland. On the other hand their place apart from the European 'mainstream' has created a situation never lacking in interest. Independence of spirit has animated achievement as distinctive and original as that of Hogarth and Blake; at the same time a renewal of contact with vital developments elsewhere, such as is to be found in the twentieth century after a long separation in the Victorian Age, has given English painting a new impulse of creative energy. There has been in the past some tendency to be apologetic about or deprecate various aspects of its tradition, the 'literary' character of poetic or narrative products, the limiting demands of portraiture against which artists themselves have chafed, the prevalence of good taste as distinct from the expression of strong feeling, the want of 'plastic' virtues which has accompanied its linear bent, yet in each respect there are compensating values to be appreciated. Surveyed as a whole, in present-day perspective, the history of English painting reveals an immense amount to be enjoyed and a number of outstanding individual contributions to art, the value of which is probably more evident now than at any previous time.

Grand Style: New Times, New Rules, New Ideas

During the period between 1769 and 1834 England emerged as the world's great mercantile power. Wealth and leisure were increasing; personal liberty and civil peace were secure. The continual wars of the century were waged on the other side of the globe and were for the most part limited-liability adventures which did not require expensive financing. Australia was picked out of the sea by Captain Cook in 1770. Canada was won from the French without the cost of an expensive expedition. The loss of some farmlands owned by fractious colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America was regrettable, but not serious when compared to the wealth that was flowing in from other colonies.

At home in England prosperity raised the Englishman's standard of living to the highest point ever known. The population of England increased from five and one-half to nine million (due largely to improved medical services). A new class of wealthy traders and bankers assumed an ever-increasing degree of control in English social and political life, and England during the eighteenth century became filled with beautiful things, old and new, native and foreign. Houses in town and country were as rich as museums and art galleries, with books, porcelains, engravings, furniture, and paintings, not crowded and roped off for exhibition but set in their natural places in stately homes.

As usual during periods of sudden wealth and changing social values, portraiture flourished, and in fact the interest of art patrons during this period was almost exclusively confined to portraiture. Those who had achieved success wished to have a record to hand down to posterity. This demand for fashionable portraits was most successfully met by an English painter as gifted as he was shrewd. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the son of a schoolmaster, inherited a disposition to lay down rules and wag his finger at those who erred from the path which his researches had proved was narrow but right. His teachings are contained in a series of lectures or discourses which were delivered at the annual prize-giving at the Royal Academy, a society of which he was the first president. A copy of these fifteen discourses is still given to the winner of the gold medal in painting at the Royal Academy, and since they constitute in a sense the bylaws by which English fashionable portrait painters have played the game even up to our own time, they are worth careful study.

First of all, Reynolds was by no means convinced that anything as intangible and elusive as innate artistic ability really existed. «He, who begins», he wrote, «by presuming on his own sense, has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them. Every opportunity . . . should be taken to discountenance that false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius.» «The greatest natural genius,» he taught, «cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will soon be reduced ... to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself.» The would-be painter, therefore, must put his faith in time-honored masters. «The duration and stability of their fame, is sufficient to evince that it has not been suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice.» In other words, the fledgling painter must be an eclectic ready to borrow from a select group of Old Masters, and for Reynolds these were Italian artists headed by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Lodovico Carracci.

Another most revealing section of the discourses concerns the question of truth in portraiture. «Even the Historian», Reynolds said, «takes great liberties with facts, in order to interest his readers, and makes his narration more delightful; much greater right has the Painter to do this.» More specifically he advised: «Even in portraits, the grace, and, we may add, the likeness, consists more in taking the general air, than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.» The proportions of a sitter's figure, similarly, should be altered in accordance with a fixed ideal. The models in this case were to be ancient classical statues. Exact canons of proportions were published in the textbooks. Thus a young woman should have the proportions of the goddess Diana, and her height should be exactly ten times the length of her face. Also we learn that the hand should be the same length as the face, and the big toe should be as long as the nose. English aristocracy, in fact, was poured into a mold of ancient classical statuary, and if the ladies of the eighteenth century seem to be impossibly tall and willowy, it is Sir Joshua's theories rather than the physical properties of English maidenhood which are responsible.

Drapery and clothing, those most abstract and variable elements in Baroque art, also are the subject of rules. We learn with surprise that it is only the inferior style of painting which distinguishes one variety of material from another. Painters in the Grand Style, according to Reynolds, should paint clothing as «neither woolen, nor linen, nor silk, satin, or velvet: it is drapery; it is nothing more.» Moreover, the painter in the Grand Style shall not portray his sitters in contemporary costume, «the familiarity of which alone is sufficient to destroy all dignity. But dresses his figure something with the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity, and preserves something of the modern for the sake of likeness.» Thus the billowing draperies which are so important in English eighteenth-century portraits do not represent the costume of the period but are imaginary pieces of haberdashery carefully arranged to form an impressive frame for the aristocratic personage in their midst. Finally, these draperies must be arranged with great skill. «It requires the nicest judgment», wrote Sir Joshua, «to dispose the drapery, so that the folds shall . . . gracefully follow each other, with such natural negligence as to look like the effect of chance, and at the same time show the figure under it to the utmost advantage.»

An appearance of unstudied naturalness was, in fact, one of the characteristics of eighteenth-century English art in many forms. The parks, for example, which appear in the backgrounds of many of these portraits, with their mossy banks and woodland glades, were in the eighteenth century often carefully planned with artificial lakes, antique ruins, and rocky hillocks. Even in cities the effect of casual negligence was desirable. «The forms and turnings of the streets of London . . ,» Reynolds wrote, «are produced by accident, without any original plan or design; but they are not always less pleasant... on that account. On the contrary, if the city had been built under the regular plan ... the uniformity might have produced weariness, and a slight degree of disgust.»

Reynolds laid down precepts not only for English painting, but also for English painters. Thus we read that a painter should not talk about a painting before he undertakes it or show it in an unfinished state because this «makes the finishing afterwards irksome.» Also a painter must avoid «a little circle of friends,» who may admire his work and thus make him complacent and blind to the larger audience around him. There is, in fact, hardly any aspect of the painter's life and work for which Sir Joshua did not supply some aphorism. He himself was the living embodiment of the success of his system. Commissions, given often around the whist table in the evening, came thick and fast. Starting at twelve guineas a head, Reynolds at the end of his career asked and got fifty. A full-length portrait cost 200 guineas; in contrast to the twenty-five pounds which van Dyck had charged a century and a half earlier. When Reynolds died, in 1792, his pallbearers for the funeral procession to Westminster Abbey included three dukes, two marquises, three earls, and two lesser lords, living symbols of the fact that English painting had become an honored profession and was no longer a guild trade. The English whom Reynolds had warned against being a people whose attention is absorbed in «Trade and its consequential riches,» and who, therefore, «can aspire but little above the rank of a barbarous nation,» had within a generation produced a flourishing and indigenous school of painting.

English painting up to about the third quarter of the eighteenth century consisted almost entirely of portraiture. The reason for this was not a lack of interest in other forms of art so much as the conviction that other types of painting were the unchallenged monopolies of Italian and Flemish masters, and that it was therefore unfashionable to own an English painting of this type. «You surely,» an English collector in the 1760's was quoted as saying when a friend urged him to buy an English historical painting, «would not have me hang up a modern English picture in my house, unless it were a portrait?»

Reynolds did his best to overcome this snobbish aversion by fusing portraiture with historical painting, which he, like most of his contemporaries, considered to be a higher form of art. However, the painter who did most to introduce another type of subject matter into English art was Thomas Gainsborough. Of a poetic nature, he was the antithesis of the businesslike Reynolds. He abhorred rules and knew very little about the Old Masters. By necessity a portraitist, he was by inclination and disposition a landscapist, and his dreamlike interpretations of the rolling downs, woods, and heath lands of his native Sussex ushered in the great English school of landscape painting. His lead was followed in the next generation by perhaps the greatest of English landscapists, John Constable.

Romantic Era

Like Gainsborough, Constable knew or cared little about rules or Old Masters. He was the graphic interpreter of that poetic realism which found such perfect expression in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. His art was based on direct observation of nature as revealed in the meadows and sparkling dew along the waterways of his native land. «Painting is with me,» he wrote, «but another word for feeling, I associate my 'careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.»

Constable, with his emphasis on feeling rather than logic and reason, was the herald of romanticism, which swept over England during the early nineteenth century. The impassioned apostle of this new philosophy was another artist who was bitterly opposed to the rules of Reynolds. William Blake, the mystic poet and artist, who as a boy was punished by his father because he claimed he saw angels in the trees, recorded not the world of nature but the visions of his inner eye. In thus recognizing the unseen world of imagination as a valid subject for the painter, he typified an important aspect of the romantic philosophy. He insisted that imagination, not reason, was the guiding force for the creative spirit, and that the hapless artist who was governed by the pedantic dictates of the academic tradition was doomed by his stupidity to fall from grace. Academicism stood for the tyranny of rules, romanticism for the free expression of individuality. Romanticism asked for no abstract theories of line or design, but insisted on the forms and colors which could be observed directly in nature. Genius, the romantic artists insisted, was above prescription, rules, or criticism. This was a time when Englishmen, dismayed by the chilly standardization of their life under Victorian ethics, and the disfigurement of their countryside by the sooty smokestacks of the industrial revolution, were seeking to escape to warmer and more colorful harbors of refuge.