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By Rupert Maas

This is the second part of an article from the FBA archives written by Rupert Maas in 2009.

The Artist Explorer was generously funded by Foyle Foundation. 

Van Dyck brings oils to England 

It is through Rubens and his famous pupil van Dyck, both Dutchmen, that at last new ideas from Italy were introduced to England, and it was done with portraiture. The Royal court needed likenesses for, as Elizabeth I had discovered, portraits were the best propaganda. 

In the wider context of European art van Dyck contributed little that was new - but his influence in England from the 1630s was profound. Not since Holbein in the 1530s had we seen so radical a painter. As the critic Richard Dorment has put it: “By introducing into British art both the spatial dynamism of the high baroque and the Venetian technique of scumbling (laying a thin layer of colour over another to create the effect of light playing over surface), van Dyck instantly became the most progressive artist in the country”. 

Van Dyck had many followers. Sir Peter Lely (Dutch) and Sir Godfrey Kneller (German) worked in his shadow until the 1730s when Hogarth (English!) could be said to have initiated a uniquely English school. He treated modern life through narrative, with humour and sympathy and, of course, great skill. 

Reynolds and Gainsborough 

The way was paved for two English artists, one from the west country - Sir Joshua Reynolds - and one from Suffolk in the east - Thomas Gainsborough. Both relied as ever on painting portraits, but the popular and versatile Reynolds believed in a ‘Grand Style’, idealising nature and flattering his sitters. 

Gainsborough painted from nature in a peculiar, innovative, and anti-academic way. He loved the English landscape, which he painted in fluent, transparent and animated tones. 

Now prose and poetry had set up shop opposite one another in British painting. 

Constable 

Firmly in the camp of the poets was the Romantic painter John Constable, also from Suffolk, who painted out of doors directly from nature, in all weathers. His vibrant and spontaneous oil sketches were admired by Delacroix and Gericault, and by the Barbizon school of plein-airistes. 

The freedom for artists to roam about catching effects of light in all weathers, rather than having to mix their paints in their studios, was considerably furthered by the invention of the zinc paint tube in 1841, four years after Constable’s death. 

The Pre-Raphaelites 

In the revolutionary year of 1848, a group of very young artists calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling against the brown and boring pictures at the Royal Academy. They wanted to get back to a purer time, before Raphael, when colours were vivid and subjects unsophisticated. To this end they painted medieval scenes on a white ground, which reflected light back through the pigment and intensified their colours to a degree initially shocking to the Victorian public. 

Turner and the new British ‘mainstream’ 

The Pre-Raphaelites might have remained outside the mainstream were it not for the championship of the influential critic John Ruskin, author of Modern Painters. 

Ruskin analysed and eulogised J.M.W. Turner, whom he believed to be the greatest artist since the Renaissance. This helped to establish ‘the mainstream’, a fully mature British school of painting, with Turner at its head. 

Turner, Ruskin argued, instead of ‘composing’ artificial paintings in his studio, went directly to nature to find truth, and God - ‘the sublime’, amidst which Man is very small indeed. 

British art on the international stage 

Turner died in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, which helped to establish British art and industry as pre-eminent in the world. Many new ideas were flourishing in the newly wealthy and increasingly confident Britain, amongst them those of the Aesthetic movement. Burne-Jones and Albert Moore painted unearthly subjects, pale ghosts in dreamscapes or impossible colour-coordinated beauties draped about. An art-hungry middle class goggled at them at the Grosvenor Gallery from 1877, and the New Gallery from 1888. 

With railways and the telegraph, Britain became more permeable to foreign ideas. Frederic, Lord Leighton of Stretton, President of the Royal Academy, was a cosmopolitan who had studied in Germany, France and Italy. He owned several pictures by Corot. 

The American influence 

Some of the new ideas of the late 19th Century arrived with Americans. In 1875 Whistler painted his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, reaching to the very edge of abstraction. Whistler wanted his painting to have the same effect on the emotions as a passage of music, and only reluctantly added ‘Falling Rocket’ to the title to explain the picture to the public. Whistler boasted that it took two days to paint, and it sparked a famous libel case after Ruskin accused the artist of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." 

Another cosmopolitan American, John Singer Sargent, painted in London as well as in New York, following the tradition of Velasquez and van Dyck. He was very successful. The critic Robert Hughes has praised Sargent as “the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both.”

The Impressionist influence 

Whistler was a founder member of the New English Art Club in 1886, which was set up in emulation of the Salon des Refusés of the French Impressionists. Painters were required to work very fast, to catch the light before it changed. Represented in the first exhibition were George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes, Sargent and Wilson Steer.

Simultaneously, some of these same young artists colonized the fishing village of Newlyn, painting the light in the manner of La Thangue. 

In Scotland the Glasgow Boys responded to Impressionist influence with broad brushes and vivid palettes.

© Rupert Mass 2009

Image by Lucy Marks, 'Vineyard Under Low Sun'