Great English portraitists

Read the following paragraphs about four outstanding English portrait painters of the 18^th – 19^th centuries. Point out the main features of their work.

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764)

William Hogarth was the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad. He is best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings--e.g., A Rake's Progress (eight scenes, begun 1732). His attempts to build a reputation as a history painter and portraitist, however, met with financial disappointment, and his aesthetic theories had more influence in Romantic literature than in painting.

As a boy, he enjoyed mimicking and drawing characters. At about the age of 15, Hogarth was apprenticed to a silversmith. He moved to his master's house, where he learned to engrave gold and silver work.

Hogarth was dissatisfied with his training and had to exploit unorthodox methods of self-instruction in order to make up for lost time. His originality and flexibility as an artist owed much to this pragmatic and unconventional approach to his career.Hogarth's years of apprenticeship were by no means devoted exclusively to hard work, however. Sociable and fond of fun, a keen and humorous observer of human behaviour, with a special love of the theatre and shows of all kinds, he was evidently a cheerful and friendly companion. He knew well the exuberant life of the London streets, fairs, and theatres and derived from them inspiration for his works. His sympathies rested with the middle classes.

From close observation of the everyday scene, Hogarth trained his unusual visual memory until he could manage without preliminary studies, committing his ideas directly to paper or canvas. This inspired improvisation was supplemented by a deep knowledge of the European tradition in art. He had a great success as an book illustrator.

Hogarth believed in art as a vital creative force in society. He despised the connoisseurs' exclusive admiration for the Old Masters and their prejudice in favour of foreign artists.

For his own enjoyment Hogarth began to record humorous scenes from everyday life. The crowded canvas of Southwark Fair (1733) captures the noisy and exuberant vigour of a popular festival. The picture shows Hogarth feeling his way toward a completely new kind of narrative art based on vivid appreciation of contemporary life. Friends he made in the theatrical world, the actor-manager David Garrick and writer Henry Fielding, shared his enthusiasm for honest naturalism in art. Like his great predecessor, the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hogarth wanted to extract entertaining and instructive incidents from life.

He was interested in series of pictures telling stories from life. In the series of pictures telling of a young country girl's corruption in London and her consequent miseries, he not only ridiculed the vices of society but painted an obvious moral. The engravings were aimed at a wide public, and their tremendous success immediately established Hogarth's financial and artistic independence.

The famous Self-portrait: the Artist with his Pug (1745) was also Hogarth's artistic manifesto. He mischievously juxtaposed his own intelligent features with those of his pug dog, Trump, and placed volumes of the great English writers William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift beside a palette inscribed with the "line of beauty," his shorthand symbol for the variety, intricacy, and expressiveness of Nature. In the same year he published the long-announced prints of Marriage a la Mode criticizing the marriage customs of the upper classes, for which he had completed the paintings in May 1743.

As the 19th-century English painter John Constable rightly remarked, "Hogarth has no school, nor has he ever been imitated with tolerable success." His immediate influence had been more strongly felt in literature than in painting, and after his death it was significantly the Romantics, many of whose ideas Hogarth had anticipated, who first recognized his greatness. Though never neglected, Hogarth was chiefly remembered for his satiric engravings, and like J.M.W. Turner, he was better understood on the Continent than in England.

Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792)

Joshua Reynolds dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style. With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president and knighted by King George III.

As a beginning artist Reynolds thoroughly studied great masterpieces of the ancient Greco-Roman sculpture and Italian painting which inspired his work. His own original style was marked by bold brushwork and the use of impasto, a thick surface texture of paint, such as in his portrait of "Captain the Honourable John Hamilton" (1746).

In 1753 Reynolds settled in London, where he was to live for the rest of his life. His success was assured from the first, and by 1755 he was employing studio assistants to help him execute the numerous portrait commissions he received. The early London portraits have a vigour and naturalness about them that is perhaps best exemplified in a likeness of "Honourable Augustus Keppel" (1753-54; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London). The pose is not original, being a reversal of the "Apollo Belvedere," an ancient Roman copy of a mid-4th-century-bc Hellenistic statue Reynolds had seen in the Vatican. But the fact that the subject (who was a British naval officer) is shown striding along the seashore introduced a new kind of vigour into the tradition of English portraiture.

In these first years in London, Reynolds' knowledge of Venetian painting is very apparent in such works as the portraits of "Lord Cathcart" (1753/54) and "Lord Ludlow" (1755). The Venetian tradition's emphasis on colour and the effect of light and shading had a lasting influence on Reynolds.

Of his domestic portraits, those of "Nelly O'Brien" (1760-62) and of "Georgiana, Countess Spencer, and Her Daughter" (1761) are especially notable for their tender charm and careful observation.

After 1760 Reynolds' style became increasingly classical and self-conscious. As he fell under the influence of the classical Baroque painters of the Bolognese school of the 17th century and the archaeological interest in Greco-Roman antiquity, the pose and clothes of his sitters became more rigid, losing much of the sympathy and understanding of his earlier works.

It has been suggested that Reynold's deafness gave him a clearer insight into the character of his sitters, the lack of one faculty sharpening the use of his eyes. His vast learning allowed him to vary his poses and style so often that once Thomas Gainsborough remarked, "Damn him, how various he is!"

Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788)

Portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Of all the 18th-century English painters, Thomas Gainsborough was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques.

Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of his time also devoted serious attention to landscapes. The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background, but in most cases man and nature are fused in a single whole through the atmospheric harmony of mood. This can be vividly seen in his early portraits, e.g."Mr. and Mrs. Andrews".

As he became famous and his sitters fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner that owed something to Anthony Van Dyck ("The Blue Boy," c. 1770). His landscapes are of idyllic scenes. During his last years he also painted seascapes and idealized full-size pictures of rustics and country children.

Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting. An instinctive painter, he delighted in the poetry of paint.

Gainsborough is famous for the elegance of his portraits. His pictures of women in particular have an extreme delicacy and refinement.

As a colourist he has had few rivals among English painters. His best works have those delicate brush strokes which are found in Rubens and Renoir. They are painted in clear and transparent tone, in a colour scheme where blue and green predominate.

In his letters Gainsborough shows a warm-hearted and generous character and an independent mind. His comments on his own work and methods, as well as on some of the old masters, are very revealing and throw considerable light on contemporary views of art.

Thomas Lawrence (1769 – 1830)

London painter and draftsman who was the most fashionable English portrait painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

He was the son of an innkeeper and in his childhood Lawrence won a reputation as a prodigy for his profile portraits in pencil of guests. Later he began to work in pastel, and in 1780, when his family moved to Bath, he set up professionally. He had little regular education or artistic training, but was working in oils by the time he moved to London in 1787. There he studied at the Royal Academy schools for a short time and was given encouragement by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was handsome, charming, and exceptionally gifted.

His early success was phenomenal, and when he was 20 years of age he was summoned to Windsor to paint the portrait of Queen Charlotte. He was elected academician at the age of 25. Lawrence was a highly skilled draftsman. He soon abandoned pastels but continued to make portraits in pencil and chalks. It was his usual practice to make a careful drawing of the head and sometimes the whole composition on the canvas itself and to paint over it. After the death of Reynolds, Lawrence was the leading English portrait painter.

His works exhibit a fluid touch, rich colour, and an ability to realize textures. He presented his sitters in a dramatic, sometimes theatrical, manner that produced Romantic portraiture of a high order.

In 1818 Lawrence painted 24 large full-length portraits of the military leaders and heads of state of the Holy Alliance. Executed with sovereign vigour and elegance, these works now hang together in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle--a unique historical document of the period. By these works Lawrence was recognized as the foremost portrait painter of Europe.

In 1820 he was elected president of the Royal Academy.

Lawrence was also a distinguished connoisseur. His collection of old-master

drawings was one of the finest ever assembled.

After learning about these four masters of English pictorial art, describe some reproductions of their works, looking for things mentioned in the text as characteristic of their art.