painting

painting. The coming of Christianity with the building and decoration of churches marks a good point from which to look at recorded painting in Britain. Pope Gregory (late 6th cent.) agreed that paintings in church would assist the understanding of Christianity. Painting was done on manuscripts, walls, wood panels, glass, and tiles. The Anglo-Saxon artistic tradition was a mix of Roman and native British styles. One of the finest manuscripts, the Lindisfarne Gospels (c.698), illustrates this mixture. Illuminated manuscripts were painted on animal skins and richly decorated with subjects, including portraits of saints, stylized animals, and geometric designs.

Manuscript and panel painting continued throughout the Middle Ages, not always by monks, and covering subjects outside religion. Bestiaries were popular. The artists, who often travelled widely, rarely painted from life even when representing a living person. Sometimes, however, they needed a life model for a new experience, as the monk Matthew Paris did when he copied an elephant for a painting presented to Henry III (c.1255). There is small evidence in English painting of the 13th and 14th cents. of the skills shown in Italy and France at the same time, with little attempt to make the figures proportional or lifelike.

The Reformation brought a crisis to painting in Britain with protestants objecting to images of saints in church and home. Not only did religious commissions cease, except briefly under Mary I, but waves of iconoclasm during the reign of Edward VI, and intermittently until the final destructions in the Civil War, resulted in many examples of painting, sculpture, and glass being destroyed. The increased wealth of the nobility in the 16th and 17th cents. produced a vigorous demand for family portraits and most great houses contained a long gallery. But English artists did not have the prestige of foreign painters, which explains why William Hogarth is the first native artist represented in the National Gallery. The arrival in England of Hans Holbein momentarily changed the way in which portraits were painted. But although he was appointed court painter by Henry VIII, his skill as a painter was never fully exploited and his influence was minimal. After his death, his simple and direct style was replaced by more mannered paintings like the Hilliard miniature Portrait of a Young Man or the cult portraits of Elizabeth. Charles I was an important and knowledgeable collector of art and a patron of Van Dyck. The safe option of portrait painting got artists through the Civil War with the Restoration seeing the Stuart court looking abroad for portraitists. The Dutch artist Lely spanned both Commonwealth and Restoration portraiture, as did Samuel Cooper, the miniaturist.

The 18th cent. was the great age of country house building and decoration. Fashionable gentlemen linked painting with taste and bought old masters or used foreign portrait painters. Hogarth campaigned on behalf of English artists, but his greatest success was not in portraiture but in social and moral commentary, like The Rake's Progress (1735), highly successful as prints. But in the next generation, British painters came into their own with Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Ramsay offering dignified and beautiful portraits. At court, the German Zoffany painted informal family groups called conversation pieces, a genre repeated for Queen Victoria by Landseer and Winterhalter. The foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 acknowledged the improved position of the artist in society. Growing interest in art and new markets among the middle classes, who had less need for portraits, changed the rules of taste. New subjects, for example contemporary history in West's Death of Wolfe (1771), personal experience such as Blake's visions, and the portrayal of everyday life by Wilkie, signalled a change in attitude towards painting which led in turn to a reassessment of landscape painting. Turner and Constable represented very different interpretations of this genre, the latter breaking with tradition in attempting to paint only what he saw.

Breaks with tradition echoed the speed of change in the outside world. Artists wanted to be free to experiment while customers wanted to buy what they knew. Many 19th-cent. artists were underrated in their lifetime: the Pre-Raphaelites and later Whistler disregarded the conventions of their day and faced a barrage of criticism.

The spirit of modernism informed the whole of the 20th cent., with artists experimenting with ideas and media. Some find modern art difficult to understand, or even repellent, but artists of the standing of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland gave a deep insight into war, L. S. Lowry recorded the bleak factory spaces of an industrial society, and David Hockney introduced humour into painting. Though in many ways modern art has become over-specialized and divorced from everyday life, in another sense all are consumers of painting, which is everywhere—in advertising, in magazines, in greeting-card designs, on the street, and always variable.

June Cochrane