The English school of painting is an expression for English
(or British) painters who produced characteristically English paintings.
Generally, the term "school" is used to designate a special collection
of traditions and processes, a particular method, a peculiar style in design,
and an equally peculiar taste in coloring - all contributing to the representation
of a national ideal existing in the minds of native artists at the same time.
However, the term cannot be used in this way to characterize English art,
because there is an absence of any national tradition that strikes one most
forcibly in studying English painting. Each English painter seems to stand
by himself - isolated from his brother artists. For the sake of brevity, all
these separate manifestations are grouped together under the name of "English
school of painting". Therefore, the term, primarily used in late 18th- and
early 19th-century artists' biographies, may be called a construction.
Many scholars say there was no English school of painting before the 18th
century, as the most important painters who worked in England came from
abroad and English art lovers only liked paintings of foreign old masters. Others say English painting
was influenced by native Celts whose work was repressed by the Church's invasion
of the Island. During the 17th and 18th centuries the wealthy British nobility
visited foreign countries where they acquired a large acquaintance with European,
chiefly Italian, art and its many schools.
(See also Grand Tour.) As Sir James Thornhill's paintings were executed in
the Baroque
style of the European Continent, William Hogarth may be called the first genuine
English artist - English in habits, disposition, and temperament, as well
as by birth. His satirical works, full of black
humor, are originally English, pointing out to contemporary society the
deformities, weaknesses and vices of London life.
Some other experts are of the opinion that, in the 17th
century, the Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck, who came to London in
1732, may be called the founder of an English school of painting, as many
English portraitists were his artistic heirs. However, Van
Dyck was born in Antwerp. Many other important artists from abroad,
such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Peter
Lely or Sir Godfrey Kneller, settled for long periods in
Britain, where they had a great influence on native painting.
In the 18th and early 19th century, a number of outstanding British artists
produced portraits. Among them were Thomas Gainsborough; Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy of Arts; George Romney; Sir Henry
Raeburn; and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Joseph Wright of Derby was well known
for his minute candlelight pictures, George
Stubbs for his animal paintings. Paul
Sandby was called the father of English watercolor painting. Notable landscape
painters were Richard Wilson; George Morland; John Robert Cozens; Thomas
Girtin; John Constable; J.M.W.
Turner; and John Linnell. The Pre-Raphaelite movement, established
in the 1840s, dominated English art in the second half of the 19th century.
Its members - William Holman Hunt; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; John Everett Millais and others - concentrated
on religious, literary, and genre subjects executed in a colorful and minutely detailed
style.
Bibliography
- Ernest Chesneau. The English School of Painting (London, 1885)
- Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English
Art (London, 1956)
- William Gaunt, The Great Century of British Painting: Hogarth to
Turner (London, 1971)
- Joseph Burke, English Art, 1714-1800 (Oxford, 1976)
- David Bindman (ed.), The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of British
Art (London, 1985)
- William Vaughan, British Painting: The Golden Age from Hogarth
to Turner (London, 1999)
See also List of British painters
External Links
List of British painters
See also English school of painting
S.R. Gifford, painter of atmosphere
The American landscape painter Sanford Robinson Gifford was among the
artists, businessmen, art collectors, and philanthropists who founded the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1870. In 1880-1881, soon after
Gifford's death, the museum honored him with an exhibition of his work, which
had the distinction of being the first monographic show mounted at the museum.
Now, more than a century later, a traveling exhibition entitled Hudson River
School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, which includes some
seventy paintings, is on view at the museum through February 8, 2004. Future
locations will be listed in Calendar. The exhibition is made possible by Deedee
and Barrie Wigmore.
Perhaps no other artist of his generation was as skillful in capturing
light and its effect on the expansive views in the wilderness of the Hudson
River valley. Gifford had the uncanny ability to render, in a palpable way,
the damp haze that obscures a scorching noonday sun. The same genius for capturing
light is apparent in the canvases he painted of the mountains in the American
West, the landscapes of Europe, and the arid lands of the Middle East.
Gifford was raised in Hudson, New York, and thus was intimately familiar
with the breath-taking landscape of the region. He was a frequent exhibitor
at the National Academy of Design in New York City, to which he was elected
an associate member in 1851 and an academician in 1854. He traveled to Europe
in 1855, and when he returned two years later, he settled in the Tenth Street
Studio Building--the artistic center of New York City--where his neighbors
included Frederic Edwin Church, John William Casilear, John Frederick Kensett,
and Jervis McEntee, and later Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittridge.
In Europe Gifford met John Ruskin who advised him that he should look
at Joseph Mallord William Turner's work as representative of an artist's impressionistic
interpretation of his subject matter. Gifford's opinion of Turner's work
ran hot and cold, but when he came across "some really fine Turners," he
admitted they far outshone all the other paintings in the room. Critics of
the period often described Gifford's landscapes as impressions, not factual
recordings, of the views before him. He was also described as a painter of
atmosphere.
While the Catskill Mountains were a continuous source of inspiration
for Gifford, he was an inveterate traveler, and his writings from two European
trips give great insight into what he was seeing. During his second trip to
Europe in 1868 and 1869 he returned to many of the places that had impressed
him earlier, bat the Holy Land was entirely new territory. In Egypt he found
that the pyramids at Giza cast shadows "as blue and tender as the shadows
of the Catskills." The paintings he created from sketches made on his travels
were widely appreciated by American collectors.
The Far West provided compelling scenery for many Hudson River school
artists including Gifford, who went west in the summer of 1870. While there,
he joined an expedition to the Wyoming Territory sponsored by the United States
Geological Survey. Four years later he traveled west again, this time venturing
from northern California through western Canada and even to Alaska. The late
works demonstrate Gifford's consistent approach of interpreting the majestic
views he found in an entirely personal way.
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The catalogue of the exhibition contains four excellent essays (from
which this information is drawn) by Franklin Kelly, Kevin J. Avery, Heidi
Applegate, and Eleanor Jones Harvey. It is copublished by Yale University
Press and the Metropolitan Museum and may be obtained by telephoning 800-288-2129.
On January 23 the museum will host an all-day symposium, also made possible
by the Wigmores.
A new museum in New Orleans
The arts of the South have been the subject of publications, exhibitions,
and even museum collections for some time. Enriching this list is a new museum
devoted to southern art that has recently opened in the warehouse district
of New Orleans. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art is administrated by the University
of New Orleans and is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. The core of its collections consists of some twelve hundred works that
were assembled by a local businessman and philanthropist, Roger Houston Ogden,
who donated them. The permanent collection has grown to more than twenty-seven
hundred paintings, watercolors, prints, photographs, sculptures, and craft
objects made between 1733 and the present in fifteen states and the District
of Columbia. The museum's broad definition of southern includes art created
by professional and self-taught artists who were born in the South, lived
there for all or a part of their lives, or were born or lived elsewhere but
depicted a southern subject.
The Ogden Museum is composed of two structures and is opening in two
phases. Stephen Goldring Hall, a forty-seven-thousand-square-foot building,
was recently completed to the designs of the New Orleans architectural firm
Errol Barron/ Michael Toups Architects. It displays the collection of twentieth
and twenty-first century art. Howard Memorial Library (which was later renamed
the Patrick F. Taylor Library), built in 1889, was designed by the Louisiana-born
architect Henry Hobson Richardson. After its restoration (by Barron and Toups)
is completed, the library will display the collection of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century
art, and contain a library and a theater. Finally the Clementine Hunter Wing,
attached to the library, will house educational facilities and a technology
center. The library and Hunter wing are both scheduled to open in the autumn
of 2004.
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John and Thomas Seymour
In the tradition of the great eighteenth-century English cabinetmaker
Thomas Chippendale, a purveyor of everything from state beds to billiard balls,
John Seymour and his young son Thomas undertook all kinds of work after they
emigrated from Axminster, England, to Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, in
1784. Documentation cited by Laura Fecych Sprague reveals that in Maine they
made everything from painted fancy chairs to rolling pins, a checkerboard,
a mahogany ruler, and coffins. They also tacked down carpets, repaired an
ironing board, and made a hole for a stovepipe--in short, tasks that the
novice carpenter could do. John Seymour possessed remarkable woodworking skills
that he passed on to his son Thomas, and furniture made by them has always
been highly prized. The Seymour name is well known through the labels that
still exist on some of their furniture, and in the 1790s and early 1800s their
cabinet-making shop became one of the most important and innovative in Boston.
Scholarly attention has not focused on the Seymours since Vernon C. Stoneman
published his monograph in 1959 and a supplement six years later. While pioneering,
these volumes contain a number of overly enthusiastic attributions that are
no longer accepted. Now an exhibition and scholarly catalogue, largely the
fruits of a decade of research by the guest curator, Robert D. Mussey Jr.,
opens at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, on November 17.
The show is entitled Luxury and Innovations: Furniture Masterworks by John
and Thomas Seymour and may be seen through February 15, 2004. Some seventy
pieces of furniture are installed according to their intended use in domestic
settings: in the parlor, the dining room, and the bedroom. Other objects,
works on paper, and paintings are displayed with the furniture.
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John Seymour left England in search of greater economic opportunity,
although he was prosperous enough in Axminster to take on apprentices. His
arrival in Portland was perfectly timed. It had been a thriving British port
that was largely destroyed in the Revolution, and the leading merchants, shipbuilders,
and other families of means were reconstructing houses and needed furniture
and other appointments that the Seymours were poised to provide. John Seymour
had two sons working with him, John Jr., an adept painter, and Thomas, who
was apprenticed to his father until he reached his majority about 1791. John
Jr. most likely painted furniture for his father until his untimely death
sometime between 1792 and 1793, before the family moved to Boston.
The Seymour family hoped that by moving again, they would be able to
capitalize on the emergence of Boston as a major city following the Revolution.
Industrialization was changing the way artisans of all types made their products.
Once settled there, the Seymours sold most, if not all, of the furniture they
made at auction. Mussey has uncovered documents showing the alliances the
Seymours enjoyed with a network of specialized craftsmen, including turners,
carvers, upholsterers, hardware retailers, ivory turners, and clockmakers,
many of whom were also English immigrants. The Seymours' meticulous attention
to detail and fine craftsmanship, obviously a costly undertaking, could have
been a contributing cause of their undoing, for by 1799 the family was listed
in the tax records as living in one room and "poor."
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By 1804 Thomas was assuming responsibility for restructuring the business
and achieving the economic success that had eluded his father. He opened a
furniture warehouse, then an innovative way of selling furniture directly
to the client, eliminating the auctioneer's commission. He soon attracted
the patronage of the tastemakers in Boston society, and by 1805 he had a well-deserved
reputation. Given the conservative nature of the city and its inhabitants.
Seymour was wise to shift gradually from the entrenched neoclassical style
that had reigned in his father's heyday into the new, more flamboyant Empire
style.
His success was short-lived, however, for the Embargo Act of 1807 left
merchants and those involved in the maritime trade with little money to buy
luxury goods. Reflecting this shift in the economy, Thomas Seymour's designs
for furniture around the time of the War of 1812 are scaled back. By 1816
he was in straitened circumstances, and by the middle of the follow year he
closed his business. He was then retained by James Barker to supervise work
in his manufactory, and later he performed the same service for Isaac Vose
and Son. By 1828 Seymour had ceased making furniture. He spent his last years
in retirement in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, under the kind auspices of relatives
of his wife, Mary.
The vicissitudes of making a living in New England in the aftermath of
the Revolution are amply demonstrated in the careers of John and Thomas Seymour.
Thanks to new findings, expertly analyzed by Mussey and Sprague, we are better
able to understand how such remarkable and beautifully made pieces of furniture
did not guarantee financial security for the skilled and imaginative craftsmen
who made them.
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The catalogue, published by the Peabody Essex Museum and distributed
by the University Press of New England, may be obtained by telephoning 800-288-2129.
A symposium entitled "The Boston Furniture Symposium: New Research on the
Federal Period" will take place at the museum from November 14 to 16. For
information or to register, telephone 866-745-1876, extension 3213.
New galleries in Saint Louis
Earlier this summer the American paintings and sculpture galleries at
the Saint Louis Art Museum were reinstalled. The new galleries contain more
exhibition space, allowing the installation of some seventy works dating from
1800 to 1945. These highlight the major movements in the history of American
art and are presented chronologically and thematically, moving from early
portraiture to still life and landscape, particularly along the frontier and
the nearby Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. There is a gallery devoted to
landscape painters of the Hudson River school, and the European influence
on American artists, particularly on impressionist painters and early modernists,
is also explored. The final gallery presents early twentieth-century works
by realist and abstract artists. These works were formerly on view elsewhere
in the museum, making it difficult for the uninitiated visitor to place them
in the context of American art.
The reinstallation of these galleries was a collaborative effort between
curators at the Missouri Historical Society and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Mimesis
.
"The Cornfield", painted 1826
