In the 18th century, British artists developed a new self-confidence and, for the first time, the taste of the general public was deliberately educated by art theorists and connoisseurs. Nature and art were both looked at in new ways, leading to the enormous popularity of landscape gardening and to a much wider appreciation of the architectural styles of the past. Taste in painting developed beyond portraiture, and sculptors found new opportunities other than carving busts and funerary monuments.

 

Thomas Gainsborough painted "Countess Howe" in the mid-1769s at Bath where he lived for 15 years. He studied the Old Masters in his clients' collections, in particular the portraits by Van Dyck, and developed an elegance of pose and delicate handling of paint that far surpassed his contemporaries.

 

The influence of Italy

The Georgian achievement was due to conditions that fostered a widespread interest in the arts and patronage of numerous competent, intelligent, and ambitious artists. Continental travel, especially the Grand Tour, helped to educate rich young aristocrats. In Florence and Rome they could admire the remains of antiquity and the artistic achievements of the Renaissance. Then they could start their own collections of works of art.

 

Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787) painted many rich young English "milords" in Rome on their Grand Tours. They were often posed casually in front of a major classical monument. This portrait is of Cardinal York (1725–1807), a Stuart claimant to the throne.

 

It was architecture that first felt the effect of these ideas and experiences. Palladianism was a deliberate system of rules and patterns for beautiful buildings, derived partly from antiquity but far more from the sixteenth-century Italian, Andrea Palladio. Inigo Jones (1573–1652) had been a follower of Palladio and gave a patriotic justification for imitating the Italian architect. The leaders of Palladianism were Colen Campbell (1676–1729), whose Vitruvius Britannicus (1715, 1717, 1725) first promoted the new style, which superseded the Baroque of Wren and his school; and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), who was an architect, a patron of architects and theorists of architecture, and an arbiter of Palladianism. Through numerous books of pattern designs, English style spread far and wide, especially to America, where Palladianism flourished (Figure 5) long after it had become outmoded in the mother country.

 

Later Georgian architecture

In the 1750s, young architects began to study architecture outside the Renaissance tradition, exploring for the first time Greece and the Near East. They studied the fragments of antique interior stucco decoration hitherto largely ignored, and began to take more interest in long-neglected medieval buildings. Of their generation, the conservative William Chambers (1723–1796) refashioned Palladianism with greater suavity; his major work was Somerset House, London, begun in 1776. Robert Adam (1728–1792) was the prolific exponent of a new form of interior decoration (Fig 4). Strawberry Hill (Figure 3), built from 1751 by Horace Walpole (1717–1797), is the most famous piece of pioneering Gothic revival. At the end of the century the most original architect was John Soane (1753–1837), who concentrated on the problems of space and mass, and whose masterpiece was the Bank of England.

 

Georgian architecture achieved a high standard not only in the design and construction of country houses but in urban design. Of this period are the great squares of north London and the grandiloquent sequences of square, circus, and crescent at Bath (Figure 2). Most memorable are Regent Street and Regent's Park in London, the work of John Nash (1752–1835). Meanwhile, landowners created England's most important original contribution to the visual arts, the landscape garden (Figure 6). William Kent (1686–1748), Lord Burlington's friend and protégée, was an important early exponent, but from the middle of the century the two busiest landscapists were Lancelot ("Capability") Brown (1716–1783) and, from the mid-1790s, Humphrey Reston (1752–1818), whose designs embody the taste for the "picturesque" – rougher, more irregular, and "natural" than the shaven slopes and demure clumps of brown.

 

Georgian painting

In painting, the first great figure of the century was William Hogarth (1697–1764). He is most famous for his paintings, and prints based on them, satirizing contemporary life (Figure 1). He was a theorist of painting who emphasized the sinuous line as the basis of beauty, and was a delightful portraitist.

 

In 1768 the Royal Academy was founded with Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) as president. Its main aim was to train painters, sculptors, and architects. Reynolds enshrined its philosophy that "history pictures" of noble themes from the bible, classical mythology, and ancient or modern history, ranked highest in the types of painting.

 

In practice, Reynolds made his career one of portraiture, and he developed a type of "historical" portrait in which the sitter, usually female, wore classical costume and took up a pose derived from the Old Masters. This was indeed the golden age of English portraiture, with painters of the caliber of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) producing fresh and sparkling portraits set in imaginary landscapes; the master of the English "conversation piece", or group portrait, was Johann Zoffany (1734–1810).

 

While the art of landscape was significantly developed by a series of minor artists, incipient Romanticism had already touched the work of the history-painter James Barry (1741–1806) and the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). It is equally prominent in the engravings of the poet William Blake (1757–1827), which make a great contrast with the classical purity of the sculptor and illustrator John Flaxman (1755–1826).