British Art from Holbein to the present day

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Art history and criticism is all too often the province of the specialist, but here is a book for the general reader or the young adult who wants a reference framework for their gallery visiting. It traces the mainstream of the rich tradition of art in Britain that stretches unbroken from the time of Henry viii to the present day. This tradition was founded when the Reformation brought an end to medieval religious art and opened the way to the development of secular art.
Until the twentieth century overwhelmingly the most important medium for art in Britain was the easel painting. Early on, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, portraiture predominated, reaching great heights in the work of the native-born Elizabethan genius Nicholas Billiard and the incomparable Dutchman... Tovább

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Art history and criticism is all too often the province of the specialist, but here is a book for the general reader or the young adult who wants a reference framework for their gallery visiting. It traces the mainstream of the rich tradition of art in Britain that stretches unbroken from the time of Henry viii to the present day. This tradition was founded when the Reformation brought an end to medieval religious art and opened the way to the development of secular art.
Until the twentieth century overwhelmingly the most important medium for art in Britain was the easel painting. Early on, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, portraiture predominated, reaching great heights in the work of the native-born Elizabethan genius Nicholas Billiard and the incomparable Dutchman Anthony Van Dyck, court painter to Charles i and one of the many foreign artists who settled in England during this period.
Even Van Dyck adapted his style to the needs of British patrons, and the establishment of an art firmly rooted in English life and culture was accelerated in the first half of the eighteenth century by William Hogarth, who extended the range of subject matter beyond portraiture into a depiction of the life of his times, and also founded a tradition of imaginative literary subject painting from which later emerged the eccentric genius of William Blake. At the same time landscape and sporting painting gained popularity and found great exponents in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Stubbs, Turner and Constable. After Blake, subject painting declined, but it was revitalised from 1848 by a band of young artists, the Pre-Raphaelites, whose influence remained dominant until, at the end of the century, artists such as Sickert began to look abroad to the new movements of Realism and Impressionism for inspiration.
In the twentieth century the rise of sculpture produced such outstanding and internationally appreciated figures as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Anthony Caro, and painting has also flourished, not least in the art of Francis Bacon, perhaps the world's greatest living painter. Recent decades have seen important developments in the field of Pop Art, abstraction and most recently Conceptual Art.
All this is described by Simon Wilson in a Uvely and readable text. He treats modern art as continuous with the art of the past, and explains the significance of some of its most extreme recent forms. Vissza