English school summary

Joshua Reynolds was a portrait painter and aesthetician who 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

John Constable was a major figure in English landscape painting in the early 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, particularly those representing his native valley of the River Stour, an area that came to be known as “Constable country.” The son of a wealthy

Thomas Gainsborough was a portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Some of his early portraits show the sitters grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, c. 1750). As he became famous and his sitters fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner

J.M.W. Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, color, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Turner was the son of a barber. At age 10 he was sent to live with an uncle at Brentford, Middlesex, where he attended school. Several