EARLY PAINTING: The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church decorations in England,decorative paintings, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire, and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England. Mabuse,art oil paintings for sale, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller—all were there at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until the beginning of the eighteenth century—that century so dead in art over all the rest of Europe. abstract oil paintings
FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Aside from a few inconsequential precursors the first English artist of note was Hogarth (1697-1764). He was an illustrator, a moralist, and a satirist as well as a painter. To point a moral upon canvas by depicting the vices of his time was his avowed aim, but in doing so he did not lose sight of pictorial beauty. Charm of color, the painter's taste in arrangement, light, air, setting,paintings reproductions, were his in a remarkable degree. He was not successful in large compositions, but in small pictures like those of the Rake's Progress he was excellent. An early man, a rigid stickler for the representation, a keen observer of physiognomy, a satirist with a sense of the absurd, he was often warped in his art by the necessities of his subject and was sometimes hard and dry in method, but in his best work he was quite a perfect painter. He was the first of the English school, and perhaps the most original of that school. This is quite as true of his technic as of his point of view. Both were of his own creation. His subjects have been talked about a great deal in the past; but his painting is not to this day valued as it should be. abstract paintings on canvas
The next man to be mentioned, one of the most considerable of all the English school, is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). He was a pupil of Hudson, but owed his art to many sources. Besides the influence of Van Dyck he[245] was for some years in Italy, a diligent student of the great Italians, especially the Venetians, Correggio, and the Bolognese Eclectics. Sir Joshua was inclined to be eclectic himself, and from Italy he brought back a formula of art which,original oil paintings wholesale, modified by his own individuality, answered him for the rest of his life. He was not a man of very lofty imagination or great invention. A few figure-pieces, after the Titian initiative, came from his studio, but his reputation rests upon his many portraits. In portraiture he was often beyond criticism, giving the realistic representation with dignity, an elevated spirit, and a suave brush. Even here he was more impressive by his broad truth of facts than by his artistic feeling. He was not a painter who could do things enthusiastically or excite enthusiasm in the spectator. There was too much of rule and precedent,oil painted portraits, too much regard for the traditions, for him to do anything strikingly original.His brush-work and composition were more learned than individual, and his color, though usually good, was oftentimes conventional in contrasts. Taking him for all in all he was a very cultivated painter, a man to be respected and admired, but he had not quite the original spirit that we meet with in Gainsborough. oil paintings of flowers
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense,oil paintings wholesale, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself.Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament,dafen oil painting village, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters—a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art. wall art oil paintings
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