Art of The United Kingdom - 19th Century and The Romantics

19th Century and The Romantics

The late 18th century and the early 19th century characterized by the Romantic movement in British art includes Joseph Wright of Derby, James Ward, Samuel Palmer, Richard Parkes Bonington, John Martin and was perhaps the most radical period in British art, also producing William Blake (1757–1827), John Constable (1776–1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the later two being arguably the most internationally influential of all British artists. Turner's style, based on the Italianate tradition although he never saw Italy until in his forties, passed through considerable changes before his final wild, almost abstract, landscapes that explored the effects of light, and were a profound influence on the Impressionists and other later movements. Constable normally painted pure landscapes with at most a few genre figures, in a style based on Northern European traditions, but, like Turner, his "six-footers" were intended to make as striking an impact as any history painting. They were carefully prepared using studies and full-size oil sketches, whereas Turner was notorious for finishing his exhibition pieces when they were already hanging for show, freely adjusting them to dominate the surrounding works in the tightly-packed hangs of the day.

Blake's visionary style was a minority taste in his lifetime, but influenced the younger group of "Ancients" of Samuel Palmer, John Linnell, Edward Calvert and George Richmond, who gathered in the country at Shoreham, Kent in the 1820s, producing intense and lyrical pastoral idylls in conditions of some poverty. They went on to more conventional artistic careers and Palmer's early work was entirely forgotten until the early 20th century. Blake and Palmer became a significant influence on modernist artists of the 20th century seen (among others) in the painting of British artists such as Dora Carrington,Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Blake also had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg and songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison.

Thomas Lawrence was already a leading portraitist by the start of the 20th century, and able to give a Romantic dash to his portraits of high society, and the leaders of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars. Henry Raeburn was the most significant portraitist since the Union to remain based in Edinburgh throughout his career, an indication of increasing Scottish prosperity. But David Wilkie took the traditional road south, achieving great success with subjects of country life and hybrid genre and history scenes such as The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822).

John Flaxman was the most thorough-going neo-classical English artist. Beginning as a sculptor, he became best known for his many spare "outline drawings" of classical scenes, often illustrating literature, which were reproduced as prints. These imitated the effects of the classical-style reliefs he also produced. The German-Swiss Henry Fuseli also produced work in a linear graphic style, but his narrative scenes, often from English literature, were intensely Romantic and highly dramatic.