The Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Art: Ten British Pictures 1740-1840

The ten pictures presented here offer vivid proof of the richness and versatility of British painting during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. All are in the Huntington collection, and in discussing them the author has brought into perspective a fascinating period in European art. At no previous time, he says, "is there such a radical variety of forms produced by artists working at the same time under the same circumstances." The history of art epochs prior to the 18th century is largely the study of a series of clearly defined styles, each of them remarkably consistent throughout Europe. In the second half of the 18th century, however, there is a fundamental departure from this orderly procession, and nowhere is this departure more apparent than in England. We find not one style but many; artists borrow from ancient Greece or from India and China, from the Byzantine or from the just-closing rococo period. Nor is it unusual to find these variations in style within the work of a single artist. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, uses widely different approaches in two Huntington paintings; the portrait of Mrs. Siddons, majestically enthroned between her two shadowy attendants, draws heavily on Classic and Renaissance symbolism, while that of Lavinia, Countess Spencer, is simply the charmingly intimate portrayal of a mother and her little boy. The ten pictures are presented in chronological order, from Hogarth's Bishop Benjamin Hoadly (about 1739) to Turner's The Grand Canal, Venice (1837). Some such as Pinkie and The Blue Boy, are well known; others, such as Richard Wilson's River Scene with Bathers, will be less familiar. All have been chosen for the light they cast on a period of profound change, which starts as English painting takes leave of the rococo, and ends in the beginnings of modern art.