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BRITISH PAINTING
William Vaughan brings us close to these key personalities, and at the same time he analyzes the class structure and political background that made British art so distinctive. Using up-to-date research and critical theory, he shows us the colorful world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when British art was richer and more influential than at any time before or since. ISBN 0-500-20319-9 · 180 illustrations |
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From
Hogarth's first works around 1730 to the death of Turner in 1851,
Britain's status as an artistic nation was dramatically transformed.
Hogarth himself brought modern life into painting and treated it with
high moral seriousness disguised as satire. Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough,
and Lawrence revolutionized portraiture, introducing greater realism
and psychological truth. The unconventional genius of Blake gave form
to a unique mystic vision, while Constable virtually created the technique
that became Impressionism. Finally, Turner took painting into a realm
of sublime grandeur, expressing the age of Romanticism as vividly
as Byron, Shelley, and Keats were doing in poetry.