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Th century

English art at last became robustly independent, with great achievements in portraiture and landscape.

Portraiture was transformed by two outstanding figures, Gainsborough and Reynolds. Both brought a new subtlety and refinement to portraits, their images an expression of the wealth and confidence of English society. The Royal Academy was founded in 1768, and as its first president Reynolds was able to promote a classicism based on art of the Italian High Renaissance. Other important portraitists were Thomas Lawrence, George Romney, and John Hoppner. The German-born Johann Zoffany and England's Arthur Devis (1711–1787) were painters of portraits and ‘conversation pieces’. The fashionable portraiture of the 18th century was challenged by William Hogarth, who painted faces and scenes of contemporary life with a vigorous and unapologetic frankness. He was the first English artist to gain an international reputation.

Landscape painting was established in England by the work of foreign artists such as Canaletto. The first British artist to excel at landscape was Richard Wilson, who studied for some years in Rome. Whereas Wilson painted landscape in the ‘Italian manner’, based on the works of Claude Lorrain, Gainsborough brought to his landscapes a more personal and romantic feeling, his influences being Dutch 17th-century landscapists such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema. George Morland was his most successful follower.

The poet and etcher William Blake was a unique figure, fashioning his own highly individual style to express a complex personal mythology. His visionary creations, among the first powerful expressions of Romanticism, briefly inspired Samuel Palmer, who brought a strong note of mysticism to landscape painting. The nightmarish visions of Henry Fuseli reveal a darker strain of Romanticism.

Caricature flourished in the second half of the century, its leading practitioners, earthy and bitingly satirical, being James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Hogarth. Their favourite targets were the Georgian court, the follies and evils of society, and, during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon.

At the very end of the century John Flaxman became the leading exponent of neoclassical sculpture.

One of the Marriage a la Mode series by William Hogarth In the 18th century, English painting finally developed a distinct style and tradition again, still concentrating on portraits and landscapes, but also attempting, without much success, to find an approach to history painting, regarded as the highest of the hierarchy of genres. Sir James Thornhill's paintings were executed in the

Baroque style of the European Continent and William Hogarth reflected the new English middle-class temperament — English in habits, disposition, and temperament, as well as by birth. His satirical works, full of black humour, point out to contemporary society the deformities, weaknesses and vices of London life.


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 860


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