Art of The United Kingdom - Early 18th Century

Early 18th Century

The Acts of Union 1707 came in the middle of the long period of supremacy in London of Sir Godfrey Kneller, a German portraitist who had eventually succeeded as principal court painter the Dutch Sir Peter Lely, whose style he had adopted for his enormous and formulaic output, of greatly varying quality, which was itself repeated by an army of lesser painters. His counterpart in Edinburgh, Sir John Baptist Medina, born in Brussels to Spanish parents, had died just before the Union took place, and was one of the last batch of Scottish knights to be created. Medina had first worked in London, but in mid-career moved to the less competitive environment of Edinburgh, where he dominated portraiture of the Scottish elite. However after the Union the movement was to be all in the other direction, and Scottish aristocrats resigned themselves to paying more to have their portraits painted in London, even if by Scottish painters such as Medina's pupil William Aikman, who moved down in 1723, or Allan Ramsay.

There was an alternative, more direct, tradition in British portraiture to that of Lely and Kneller, tracing back to William Dobson and the German or Dutch Gerard Soest, who trained John Riley, to whom only a few works are firmly attributed and who in turn trained Jonathan Richardson, a fine artist who trained Thomas Hudson who trained Joshua Reynolds and Joseph Wright of Derby. Richardson also trained the most notable Irish portraitist of the period, Charles Jervas who enjoyed social and financial success in London despite his clear limitations as an artist.

An exception to the dominance of the "lower genres" of painting was Sir James Thornhill (1675/76 – 1734) who was the first and last significant English painter of huge Baroque allegorical decorative schemes, and the first native painter to be knighted. His best-known work is at Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and the cupola of Saint Paul's Cathedral, London. His drawings show a taste for strongly drawn realism in the direction his son-in-law William Hogarth was to pursue, but this is largely overridden in the finished works, and for Greenwich he took to heart his careful list of "Objections that will arise from the plain representation of the King's landing as it was in fact and in the modern way and dress" and painted a conventional Baroque glorification. Like Hogarth, he played the nationalist card in promoting himself, and eventually beat Sebastiano Ricci to enough commissions that in 1716 he and his team retreated to France, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini having already left in 1713. Once the other leading foreign painters of allegoric schemes, Antonio Verrio and Louis Laguerre, had died in 1707 and 1721 respectively, Thornhill had the field to himself, although by the end of his life commissions for grand schemes had dried up from changes in taste. From 1714 the new Hanoverian dynasty conducted a far less ostentatious court, and largely withdrew from patronage of the arts, other than the necessary portraits. Fortunately, the booming British economy was able to supply aristocratic and mercantile wealth to replace the court, above all in London.

William Hogarth was a great presence in the second quarter of the century, whose art was successful in achieving a particular English character, with vividly moralistic scenes of contemporary life, full of both satire and pathos, attuned to the tastes and prejudices of the Protestant middle-class, who bought the engraved versions of his paintings in huge numbers. Other subjects were only issued as prints, and Hogarth was both the first significant British printmaker, and still the best known. Many works were series of four or more scenes, of which the best known are: A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress from the 1730s and Marriage à-la-mode from the mid-1740s. In fact, although he only once briefly left England and his own propaganda asserted his Englishness and often attacked the Old Masters, his background in printmaking, more closely aware of Continental art than most British painting, and apparently his ability to quickly absorb lessons from other painters, meant that he was more aware of, and made more use of, Continental art than most of his contemporaries. Like many later painters he wanted above all to achieve success at history painting in the Grand Manner, but his few attempts were not successful and are now little regarded. His portraits were mostly of middle-class sitters shown with an apparent realism that reflected both sympathy and flattery, and included some in the fashionable form of the conversation piece, recently introduced from France by Philippe Mercier, which was to remain a favourite in Britain, taken up by artists such as Francis Hayman, though usually abandoned once an artist could get good single figure commissions.

There was a recognition that, even more than the rest of Europe given the lack of British artists, the training of artists needed to be extended beyond the workshop of established masters, and various attempts were made to set up academies, starting with Kneller in 1711, with the help of Pellegrini, in Great Queen Street. The academy was taken over by Thornhill in 1716, but seems to have become inactive by the time John Vanderbank and Louis Chéron set up their own academy in 1720. This did not last long, and in 1724/5 Thornhill tried again in his own house, with little success. Hogarth inherited the equipment for this, and used it to start the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1735, which was the most enduring, eventually being absorbed by the Royal Academy in 1768. Hogarth also helped solve the problem of a lack of exhibition venues in London, arranging for shows at the Foundling Hospital from 1746.

The Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay worked in Edinburgh before moving to London by 1739. He made visits of three years to Italy at the beginning and end of his career, and anticipated Joshua Reynolds in bringing a more relaxed version of "Grand Manner" to British portraiture, combined with very sensitive handling in his best work, which is generally agreed to have been of female sitters. His main London rival in the mid-century, until Reynolds made his reputation, was Reynold's master, the stodgy Thomas Hudson.

John Wootton, active from about 1714 to his death in 1765, was the leading sporting painter of his day, based in the capital of English horse racing at Newmarket, and producing large numbers of portraits of horses and also battle scenes and conversation pieces with a hunting or riding setting. He had begun life as a page to the family of the Dukes of Beaufort, who in the 1720s sent him to Rome, where he acquired a classicising landscape style based on that of Gaspard Dughet and Claude, which he used in some pure landscape paintings, as well as views of country houses and equine subjects. This introduced an alternative to the various Dutch and Flemish artists who had previously set the prevailing landscape style in Britain, and through intermediary artists such as George Lambert, the first British painter to base a career on landscape subjects, was to greatly influence other British artists such as Gainsborough. Samuel Scott was the best of the native marine and townscape artists, though in the latter specialization he could not match the visiting Canaletto, who was in England from nine years from 1746, and whose Venetian views were a favourite souvenir of the Grand Tour.

The antiquary and engraver George Vertue was a figure in the London art scene for most of the period, and his copious notebooks were adapted and published in the 1760s by Horace Walpole as Some Anecdotes of Painting in England, which remains a principal source for the period.

From his arrival in London in 1720, the Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack was the leader in his field until the arrival in 1730 of Louis-François Roubiliac who had a Rococo style which was highly effective in busts and small figures, though by the following decade he was also commissioned for larger works. He also produced models for the Chelsea porcelain factory founded in 1743, a private enterprise which sought to compete with Continental factories mostly established by rulers. Roubillac's style formed that of the leading native sculptor Sir Henry Cheere, and his brother John who specialized in statues for gardens.

The strong London silversmithing trade was dominated by the descendants of Huguenot refugees like Paul de Lamerie, Paul Crespin, Nicholas Sprimont, and the Courtauld family, as well as Georges Wickes. Orders were received from as far away as the courts of Russia and Portugal, though English styles were still led by Paris. The manufacture of silk at Spitalfields in London was also a traditional Huguenot business, but from the late 1720s silk design was dominated by the surprising figure of Anna Maria Garthwaite, a parson's daughter from Lincolnshire who emerged at the age of 40 as a designer of largely floral patterns in Rococo styles. Unlike in France and Germany, the English adoption of the Rococo style was patchy rather than whole-hearted, and there was resistance to it on nationalist grounds, led by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and William Kent, who promoted styles in interior design and furniture to match the Palladianism of the architecture they produced together, also beginning the influential British tradition of the landscape garden, according to Nikolaus Pevsner "the most influential of all English innovations in art". The French-born engraver Hubert-François Gravelot, in London from 1732 to 1745, was a key figure in importing Rococo taste in book illustrations and ornament prints for craftsmen to follow.

• Sir John Rushout, 4th Baronet, by Godfrey Kneller, 1716

• A Pastoral Landscape with Shepherds and their Flocks, George Lambert, 1744

• Thomas Hudson George Frideric Händel, (1749)

• The first of the Four Stages of Cruelty by William Hogarth, 1751

• Horse with Groom and Hounds, the unfinished last work of Peter Tillemans, 1734

• Allan Ramsay, Portrait of George III, c. 1761-1762