Rococo and Neoclassical Periods

English art and architecture

English art and architecture have had a continuous if varied history from the 6th century AD. Usually they have echoed developments on the European continent, although English artists have often interpreted these in their own way. Twice, however — at various times from the 8th to the 13th century and again in the 18th and 19th centuries — the English school has made an original contribution. Two long-standing characteristics seem to distinguish English art and architecture from other European schools. One is a feeling for line and atmosphere as opposed to three-dimensional form, and the other is a high degree of dependence, since the 16th century, on private rather than public patronage.

Anglo-Saxon Period

Despite the presence of earlier Celtic and Roman Art in Britain, the history of English art and architecture may be said to begin with the Anglo-Saxons, who came from north Germany in the 5th and 6th centuries and occupied the country as far as the modern Welsh and Scottish borders. The first major event was the reestablishment of Christianity ("re-establishment" because there had been Christian communities in Roman Britain). Missions began arriving in the late 6th century, both in the south-east, directly from Rome, and in the north, from Ireland.

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The Roman missionaries brought with them religious books, church plate, and vestments. They also introduced the techniques of building in stone. Beginning in the 7th century, abbeys and cathedrals and churches were erected all over Anglo-Saxon England, although most of them have long since disappeared or been rebuilt many times. The typical Anglo-Saxon church — for example, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire (8th century, altered probably in the 10th century) — evidently consisted of a central chamber with smaller chambers opening off it. It would have been small and dark, giving the sense of a tightly enclosed place of refuge.

The finest artistic achievements of the Anglo-Saxon period were monumental carved stone crosses and illuminated manuscripts (religious books made in monasteries, the pages containing both text and exquisite water colour ornamentation). In the beginning these were produced mainly in the north, including northern Ireland, a region that in the late 7th and early 8th centuries was one of the most civilised in Europe. The masterpieces of the Hiberno-Saxon school, as it is called, are the Ruthwell (Dumfriesshire) and Bewcastle (Cumbria) crosses, both late 7th century, and two superb illuminated manuscripts: the Lindisfarne Gospels (c.700; British Museum, London), made by the monks of Holy Island off the Northumberland coast, and the Book of Kells (c.800; Trinity College, Dublin), begun on the island of Iona and finished at Kells, northern Ireland.

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Although Mediterranean influence is apparent in the curvilinear forms used in these works, the degree to which the forms are stylised (in the figures) or spun into beautifully intricate patterns (in the decorative pages) is unique. These and other English manuscripts down to the 13th century were admired and imitated on the Continent.

In the 10th century the emphasis shifted to the south, where a reform of the monasteries gave rise to a new school of manuscript illumination; it was called the Winchester School, although it flourished at Canterbury and other places as well. The manuscripts created by this school are characterised by broad leaf forms, often arranged symmetrically, and by bolder figures than are found in Hiberno-Saxon work. An example is the Benediction of Saint Aethelwold (975-80; British Museum, London).

Norman Period

With the Norman Conquest in 1066, England became an integral part of medieval Europe. The country was now united under one king, although the church rather than the monarch remained the chief patron of the artist. Architecture in particular was transformed by the energies of the new regime, whose French-born bishops demanded much larger and better-designed cathedrals than had existed before. These cathedrals are the earliest major buildings in England to survive more or less in their original form. While the first examples, such as Saint Albans Abbey (c. 1080), Hertfordshire, closely followed Norman models, within 30 years the Norman style as developed in England the equivalent of continental Romanesque art and architecture had acquired a distinct character of its own.

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This is shown by Durham cathedral (1093-1133), the noblest English building of its period. Durham shares with Romanesque cathedrals everywhere the Latin cross plan (a plan with choir, transepts, and nave in the form of an elongated cross), the use of round arches, and generally massive construction. Durham is unusual, however, in the rich decoration of its interior, in the grandeur of its nave archade, and, above all, in having a stone rib-vault, the first in Europe, over the nave; previously, naves had been roofed in wood.

Mention should also be made of two other building types introduced by the Normans; unfortunately, in both cases most examples are now ruined or at best heavily restored. The first were new kinds of abbeys, which spread throughout England in the 12th century due mainly to the Cistercian, a monastic order founded at Citeaux in central France. The second were castles, which began as simple square keeps, for example, the White Tower at the Tower of London, built by William I in the 1070s. Later they became much larger and more elaborate, amounting to small fortified towns.

English sculpture of the 11th and 12th centuries is relatively unimportant, but manuscript illumination continued to flourish in the south and in the 12th century reached new heights. Magnificent Bibles with brightly coloured initials and busy, expressive figures are characteristic of this phase, for example, the Winchester Bible (mid-12th century; Winchester Cathedral).

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Gothic Period

Gothic architecture, like Norman, reached England from northern France. The first major example is the choir of Canterbury cathedral, started in 1175 and designed by a Frenchman, William of Sens. Quite soon, however, national characteristics once more began to assert themselves. Chiefly, English cathedrals arc broader, longer, and lower than French ones; they retain transepts, which were occasionally dispensed with in France; and whereas French cathedrals have rounded east ends with radiating chapels and flying buttresses, and deeply recessed portals at the west end, English cathedrals (with the exception of Canterbury) have square east ends, giving an opportunity for splendid east windows, and flat west fronts and transept facades. Another typically English feature is the detached or semidetached centrally planned (round or polygonal) chapter house, or meeting hall of the cathedral clergy.

English Gothic architecture is traditionally divided into three phases. The first is Early English Gothic, clear and austere in design but comparatively rich in colour and texture, which lasted from the end of the 12th to the late 13th century; its representative buildings are Lincoln Cathedral (1192-1235) and Salisbury cathedral (begun 1220). The next phase, preceded by another "French" building, Westminster abbey in London (begun 1245), is Decorated Gothic. In keeping with its name, Decorated Gothic is characterised by rich carvings on surfaces, gables, and arches, complicated vaulting patterns, and elaborate window tracery ‑ an innovation introduced at Westminster.

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Decorated Gothic also made extensive use of stained glass. It was the dominant style from about 1280 to the mid-14th century; its typical buildings include the naves of Exeter Cathedral (begun с. 1280) and York Minster (begun с 1290) and the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral (1321-49).

The third phase is Perpendicular Gothic, which lasted until the Reformation. This style, which first appeared in the choir of Gloucester Cathedral (c. 1337-57), was an English invention. Its basis was a grid consisting of repeated vertical strips or bars crossed at wider intervals by horizontals; this was either applied as decoration to a wall or used as a screen to form a vast window. By around 1500 in the most sumptuous buildings — often constructed under royal patronage — this system culminated in a fan vault, a type of vault in which the ribs, joined by finer cross-ribs, spread out from the tops of the wall shafts in the shape of a fan. The most famous example is King's College Chapel, Cambridge, which was begun in 1446 and vaulted between 1508 and 1515. The majority of surviving English parish churches were built in a simplified version of the Perpendicular Gothic style, without the fan vaulting.

By the end of the 14th century the great age of new cathedral building was over, although in many cases towers remained to be added. Besides parish churches and a few royal chapels, the 15th century is notable for the rise of domestic architecture.

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The center-piece of a domestic complex was a large hall of a size appropriate to the building, whether palace, trading center (guild hall), college, or private house; its crowning feature was a wooden roof of complicated design. Private houses were either built of brick, following Flemish practice, or were timber-framed, with tall gables and overhanging upper stories.

English Gothic sculpture is very provincial, and painting, although plentiful, is hardly less so. The best surviving work of sculpture is the array of standing figures onthe west front of Wells Cathedral (mid-13th century). Unfortunately, many religious statues were destroyed either during the Reformation or by the 17th-century Puritans. Most of the stained-glass windows depicting figures suffered a similar fate, but the windows of abstract design, such as the Five Sisters Window at York, were spared.

As to painting, by the late 13th century Paris had become the acknowledged center of manuscript illumination, but English work continued to be distinguished by the quality of its line and by the vividness of its naturally observed figures and animals in the page margins, as in the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1340; British Museum, London). Several artists active in this period are known by name, the most famous being Matthew Paris (d. 1259). Wall paintings exist at Chichester and elsewhere, and panel paintings became a feature for the first time. The finest of the latter is the Wilton Diptych (c. 1400; National Gallery, London), a work in the Gothic International style, although it is not quite certain that it is by an English artist.

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During the 15th century, however, England increasingly became an artistic backwater. Just how far this had gone by the early 16th century is shown by the fact that the Gothic fan vault of King's College Chapel is exactly contemporary with Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Renaissance Period

The 16th century saw religious and cultural changes as dramatic as those accompanying the Norman Conquest, although on balance their effect on the arts was depressive rather than uplifting. First a handful of works of Renaissance art were produced in England, all — significantly — by or from designs by foreign artists. They include the tomb of Henry VII (1512-18) in Westminster Abbey by the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano and a group portrait The Family of Sir Thomas More (1526-28), by Hans Holbein the Younger; it is lost but survives in Holbein's drawing (1526; Offentlichen Kunstsammlung, Basel, Switzerland) and in copies. With the coming of the Reformation in the 1530s, the monasteries ‑ the principal workshops of painters and sculptors for 800 years ‑ were dissolved, and religious pictures and statues were forbidden in churches. Nor was this all, for the court of Henry VIII, unlike courts on the Continent, failed to become a leading source of patronage for secular art. In the 17th century the art-loving Charles I tried to reverse this, but his activities proved so unpopular that his example was followed very cautiously by his successors.

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Thus by the mid-16th century the Gothic style was irrevocably superseded, and it was bound to be replaced by some form of Renaissance art. Yet the highest art forms — religious and mythological painting and grand churches and palaces — were not available to English artists, and a new national tradition thus had to find expression in the lesser categories of portraiture, tomb sculpture, and country houses. Fortunately, these were socially important at the time and in the 18th century were to become artistically important as well. During the later 16th and early 17th centuries, tombs and country houses gradually absorbed Renaissance influences. Portrait painting, notwithstanding a second, longer visit (1532-43) by Holbein, was very feeble. However, as taste improved toward the end of the period, Dutch and Flemish artists were brought in, and this remained the normal arrangement until the early 18th century. In one field, however, native English painters excelled the portrait miniature, an art form that carried on the delicate linear tradition, using transparent colours, of medieval manuscript illumination. Its most famous exponent was the Elizabethan artist Nicholas Hilliard.

Baroque Period

The patronage of Charles I brought Sir Anthony Van Dyck to England (1632-41); van Dyck was the most gifted and advanced portraitist in northern Europe, and his flattering image of the English aristocracy continued to inspire artists, and perhaps still more their sitters, down to the early 20th century. Charles also patronised Inigo Jones, who played a somewhat similar role in the history of English architecture. Jones visited (1613-14) Italy and was the first Englishman to understand thoroughly the principles of Italian Renaissance architecture, which were exemplified for him in the work of Andrea Palladio.

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In the Banqueting House (1619-22) of Whitehall Palace, subsequently adorned with a series of great baroque ceiling paintings (1629-35) by Peter Paul Rubens, glorifying the Stuart monarchy, Jones created the first building in central London to embody not only the classical orders (columns, capitals, and the like), correctly used, but also classical systems of proportion. By mid-century his influence was reflected in country houses, such as Wilton House, near Salisbury (c. 1650), by John Webb (1611-72) and Isaac de Caux (active 1625-56), and Coleshill House, Berkshire (c.I650; destroyed 1952), by Sir Roger Pratt (1620-84).

These two houses contained baroque features in their interior decoration, but it was not until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that the baroque style dominated English art and architecture, and even then it was used with restraint. The leading architect of this phase was Sir Christopher Wren, whose masterpiece is Saint Paul's Cathedral (1675-1709) in London. With its great dome, solemn interior, and finely chiselled detail, Saint Paul's was a worthy centrepiece for the huge modem city that rose beside the Thames in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wren, with his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, rebuilt nearly 50 City of London churches following the Great Fire of 1666. Wren also designed, or was involved in the design of, several large public buildings commissioned by the king, such as Greenwich Hospital in London (begun 1698). Meanwhile, his pupils and younger contemporaries were designing enormous country houses, such as Chatsworth, Derbyshire (begun 1686), by William Talman (1650-1719) and Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (1705-24), by Sir John Vanbrugh, and further London churches, — for example, Saint Martin-in-the-Fields (1721-26) by James Gibbs.

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Several of these buildings received baroque decorations by Sir James Thornhill or by foreign artists. The German-born Sir Godfrey Kneller was the principal portraitist of this phase. The climax of baroque sculpture was reached a little later, as in the tomb of the duke of Argyll (1745-49) in Westminster Abbey, by the French-born Louis Francois Roubiliac.

Rococo and Neoclassical Periods

The late 17th and early 18th centuries had been a period of growing national vigour in science, philosophy, political theory, and war. Now, after trailing behind the Continent for so long, England once more began to make an original contribution to the arts. The Palladian movement in architecture, started about 1715 and masterminded by Richard Boyle, 3d earl of Burlington, introduced a relatively pure, "post-baroque" classicism in the design of country houses — for example, at Holkham Hall (begun 1734), Norfolk, by William Kent — that was unique in Europe at the time. For the interiors of some houses, however, the Rococo style was adopted. A new informal type of garden design, the landscape or English garden was invented in the mid-18th century and was imitated all over the Continent. In painting, William Hogarth gained an international reputation and was the first English-born painter in oils to do so. His witty pictures and engravings — Marriage à la Mode, a set of six paintings, (1743-45; National Gallery, London), for example — captured the new secular, satirical, earthy yet morally concerned mood of the age.

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As national wealth accumulated further in the second half of the 18th century, the number of artists rose. A fashion for Italian art became widespread, and many English artists studied in Rome. Portraiture reached a peak in the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. A new, typically English genre emerged — sporting painting — whose greatest exponent was George Stubbs. This period also saw the rise of Landscape Painting in both oils (Gainsborough, Richard Wilson) and watercolours (Cozens family; Sandby family). The example of Italian Renaissance art prompted an attempt to revive historical painting, that is, the painting of themes from the Bible, classical mythology, and history, in a suitably grand style. Some of those, who did historical painting, such as Gavin Hamilton, were among the pioneers of international Neo-classicism. Such architects as Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers, and sculptors such as John Flaxman, were also contributors to this movement. The coming of age of English postmedieval art was crowned by the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768_; with Reynolds as its first president.

Neo-classicism, in view of its dependence on surviving Greek and Roman models, found expression chiefly in architecture and sculpture. Perhaps the most important single example of the style in English architecture was the Bank of England (1792-1823, rebuilt 1927) in London, by Sir John Soane. Neo-classical sculpture is well exemplified in Flaxman's tomb of the 18th earl of Mansfield in Westminster Abbey (1795-1801).

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