An outline of English painting

Some of the greatest foreign masters were attracted to England loaded with honours and even in sonic some received into the nation by the titles of nobility conferred upon them. Holbein, Antonio More, Rubens, Van Dyck, were almost English painters during a longer or shorter period of their lives. The last named in particular, called in England Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who married the daughter of a lord, and died in London is really the father of the English portrait school. He trained a few English pupils, Dobson, Jameson and the miniaturist Cooper. Nevertheless his principal imitators and successors were like himself foreigners settled in London; the German Kneller, and especially the Dutchman Van der Faes who became in England Sir Peter Lely (1617—80). Not until William Hogarth (1697—1764) do we find a painter truly English, indeed violently so. Van Dyck was the father of the English portrait school and set before it an aristocratic ideal: Hogarth was a printer's son, uneducated but a curious observer of men and manners, who with his frank, robust personality brought strength to the stripling's grace. His first works date from 1730. For rather more than a century England was to see a brilliant succession of geniuses, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Constable and Turner, responding to her highest aspirations. No country has had so exclusive and strongly marked a love of the portrait. England and Holland alike were deprived of the religious painting by the Reformation, and mythology met with no better fate. Scarcely any decorative painting is found, and what little survived is-mediocre. Holland compensated by inventing the small genre picture, street scene or interior which it brought to an unheard of pitch of refinement. But England practiced genre painting only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in imitation, moreover, of the Dutch, though diluted with sentimentality and humour in the little School of anecdotal painters Newton, Leslie, Morland, Wilkie and

29 The Graham Children