The Georgian age
Hogarth satirised London, Gainsborough and Reynolds painted the new fortunes, and the Royal Academy gave British artists an institution of their own for the first time.
In the 18th century Britain gained a strong body of native artists for the first time. Previously the leading painters at court had been foreigners. Now a home-grown public emerged among merchants, landowners and a reading middle class. William Hogarth addressed them with engraved series of pictures about the vices and follies of London, which sold in their thousands. He also campaigned for artists’ rights and financial independence, and became a symbol of a self-confident English art.
Portraiture remained the most important genre, but it was changing. Thomas Gainsborough placed his sitters in English landscapes, while Joshua Reynolds lent them the dignity of antiquity and the Renaissance. The Royal Academy was founded in 1768, with Reynolds as its first president, and gave artists both training and annual exhibitions. The horse painter George Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby, who painted scientific experiments in dramatic light, showed that new subjects could become great art. Artists thereby gained a status they had previously lacked.
Architecture was dominated by Palladianism, a severe classicism that took Inigo Jones and Andrea Palladio as its models. Around country houses, landscape parks were laid out that looked natural but were carefully planned, with lakes, winding paths and small temples. The English landscape garden became an export that spread across Europe, Sweden included. At the same time the Industrial Revolution was beginning, and entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood made beautiful objects for a growing market. Gothic Revival buildings, meanwhile, revealed a new interest in the Middle Ages.