Throughout much of its 500-year history, British painting has been dominated by portraiture, a mode of art that sustained its fascination amid continual fluctuations in style and taste. During the reign of Henry VIII (1491-1547) life-scale portraits came to be valued as an effective means of asserting status, wealth, and power. Foreign-born painters such as Hans Holbein (1497-1543), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), and Peter Lely (1618-80) achieved successful careers in England by adapting their styles to the taste of successive royal monarchs and their courtiers. Of all the northern European painters who transplanted their careers to England, the most enduringly influential was the Flemish artist, van Dyck, who served as principal painter to the court of Charles I after settling in London in 1632. Van Dyck’s theatrical presentation, psychological nuance, and delicate touch initiated a cosmopolitan phase in British painting. In paintings such as Queen Henrietta Maria with Jeffrey Hudson, he crystallized an air of effortless elegance and nonchalant grace that became synonymous with the English aristocratic ideal. Within a few decades of van Dyck’s death, Peter Lely (a native of Westphalia in the Netherlands) developed a sensual style appropriate to the court of his principal patron, Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685. Subsequent painters continued to refine van Dyck’s influential prototype for generations to come.

Notwithstanding the achievements of a handful of native-born painters, foreign artists continued to dominate British painting well into the eighteenth century. They profoundly influenced the character of British culture while simultaneously accommodating themselves to the idiosyncrasies of British taste. Born and bred in London, William Hogarth (1697-1764) aggressively promoted distinctively English traditions in art and became the first British painter to achieve international fame. Hogarth brought a new level of informality, narrative interest, and psychological complexity to his portraits. Equivalent complexities mark Hogarth’s narrative works, such as The Lady’s Last Stake, one of the artist’s innovative “Modern Moral Subjects.” Other seminal works by Hogarth, such as The Beggar’s Opera, demonstrate the formative influence the performing arts have exerted on British painting, an underpinning of several paintings in this exhibit. Hogarth also helped to popularize a form of private portraiture known as the conversation piece: small-scale informal group portraits reflecting the manners and occupations of daily life. Arthur Devis (1712-87), Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88), and Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) were among those who pursued portraiture on this intimate scale into the late eighteenth century. The refreshing naturalism and informality of the conversation piece also influenced portraitists such as Allan Ramsay (1713-84). In the intellectual and cultural ferment of eighteenth-century Britain, painters also pursued original experiments in natural observation, as seen in the detailed anatomical depictions of animals by George Stubbs (1724-1806), such as his powerful, documentary study of the Zebra, the first example of this exotic species to be seen in Britain.

The most influential British painter of the later eighteenth century was Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. In ambitious full-length paintings such as Col. George Coussmaker and The Hon. Diana Sackville, later Viscountess Crosbie, Reynolds sought to raise the tone of British portraiture by introducing imagery, themes, and techniques borrowed from the works of Europe’s venerated Old Master painters. Reynolds’s principal rival, Thomas Gainsborough, pursued the sheer splendor of bravura paint effects. The shimmering satins and frothy lace in such paintings as Jonathan Buttall: The Blue Boy and Ann Ford, later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse are enlivened by the bewitching mastery of Gainsborough’s brush. Reynolds and Gainsborough were alike in freely reinterpreting the poses and pictorial themes that van Dyck had developed in England, particularly that of the figure in the landscape, which merged the English love of portraiture with the high national regard for the countryside. Outdoor portraiture achieved a dazzling new incarnation in the art of Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), whose dashing paintings of the actress Elizabeth Farren and the young Sarah Moulton Barrett (“Pinkie”) initiated a series of glamorous full-lengths. Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence are further linked by the sentimental idealization of childhood that they developed in some of their best-loved paintings—an ideal that Reynolds deliberately undercut in vaguely sinister depictions of London street urchins, such as Cupid as a Link Boy.

Landscape painting had been pursued as an independent genre in Britain since the seventeenth century, but it was in the eighteenth century that it began to shed its early topographical quality and to take on imaginative and poetic resonances. As Reynolds had done for British portraiture, Richard Wilson (?1713-82) sought to elevate the stature of British landscape painting by working in the classical mode formulated by European Old Master painters. The measured, harmonious organization of his ideal landscapes contrasts with the more rustic approach to English scenery that Gainsborough derived from Dutch art. By the early nineteenth century, landscape painters increasingly took their cues directly from nature, rather than relying on artistic conventions. Outdoor sketching in oil became a favorite practice of such pioneering naturalists as John Constable (1776-1837) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28). While Bonington’s freshly executed paintings document his travels abroad, Constable’s early landscapes (such as Stour Valley and Dedham Church) attest to his total immersion in the scenery of his native Suffolk. Later, in View on the Stour near Dedham and a handful of other large-scale views along the Stour River, Constable filtered his close study of weather and natural light with a deepening sense of nostalgia for the rural scenes of his youth. Constable’s near contemporary, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1774-1851), was equally fascinated by transient effects of light and atmosphere. Turner adopted a dramatic approach to natural phenomena, however, creating increasingly abstract pyrotechnical works that often stunned and scandalized contemporary audiences. This romantic and visionary mode of landscape painting was revisited with more literary and moral significance by artists such as John Martin (1789-1854).

As the nineteenth century drew on, fidelity to nature became an increasingly vital aspect of British painting. Close study of nature underpinned the works of a revolutionary band of artists who in 1848 formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a name that reflects their admiration for the “primitive” naturalism of early Italian painting. Abandoning hackneyed conventions of composition and execution, the Pre-Raphaelites based their works on direct, painstaking natural observation. John Everett Millais (1829-96) typified the group in painting extensively out of doors (on a wet white ground, in strong local colors). Although the meticulous realism of the Pre-Raphaelites remained influential to the end of the nineteenth century, a more idealizing phase of British painting gained ground in the 1860s, as seen in the evocative, dreamlike scene Le Chant d’Amour by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98). The classical revivalist Frederic Leighton (1830-96) perfected the contours and proportions of natural form, whether painting imaginative subjects drawn from history and literature, or portraits of contemporaries, such as his young friend May Sartoris. Another classicizing artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) employed the latest archaeological evidence to reconstruct the ancient world with unprecedented accuracy and in the minute detail that appealed to Victorian taste. A very different approach to the ancient world was adopted by Albert Moore (1841-93). A key figure in the Aesthetic Movement, Moore experimented with the exclusion of conventional subject matter in order to create ideal arrangements of line, form, and color, synthesized from the art of classical Greece, Japan, and other diverse cultures.

The abstract formal properties of art were further explored by Moore’s closest associate, the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Whistler radically altered the course of British painting by supplanting the traditional preference for anecdote and detail with more evocative treatments of tone and mood, inspired by seemingly non-artistic subjects, such as the gritty industrial banks of London’s Thames River. Whistler’s students and disciples, among them Walter Sickert (1860-1942) and Gwen John (1876-1939), belonged to a new generation of anti-academic and anti-narrative painters who arose at the turn of the twentieth century and devoted themselves to uncovering artistic potential in the prosaic circumstances of modern life.

In recent decades British artists such as Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Bridget Riley (born 1931) have made important experiments in abstract painting. For the most part, however, modernism has been pursued in Britain through representational means, evincing a contrariness that some critics have dismissed as evidence of provincialism, but which has produced paintings of remarkable originality and power. Remaining stubbornly impervious to outside influences, Stanley Spencer (1891-1982) created idiosyncratic, visionary paintings such as The Builders, in which elements of the sacred merge with secular subject matter. Other British figurative painters have sustained and revitalized traditions that were largely abandoned among their American and European colleagues. In the postwar years Francis Bacon (1909-92) and Lucian Freud (born 1922) emerged as the most important champions of the human figure as the central subject of high art. In works such as Naked Girl Perched on a Chair, Freud pursued a highly personal and stylistically original approach to the portrayal of likeness and the body. The most celebrated British artist to settle in America, David Hockney (born 1937), continues the perennial British interest in the exploration of man’s relation to nature, but with a distinctly modern perspective, as seen in Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday.

Spanning the art production of nearly 500 years, Great British Paintings from American Collections provides ample testimony to the rich holdings of British art in this country. Drawn from museums and private collections throughout the United States, it is the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind ever held outside of the United Kingdom.