Romanticism
Turner and Constable made landscape the great British genre, while William Blake created an entirely personal world of visions.
Around 1790 a new view of art began to take hold in Britain. Emotion, imagination and the experience of nature became more important than the rules of antiquity and the order of reason. Poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about nature and the simple life. Painters headed out into the landscape, to the mountains of Wales and the Lake District and to the coasts. Romanticism was a European movement, but in Britain it found its strongest expression in landscape painting.
Two painters dominate the era. John Constable painted his native Suffolk with a new sensitivity to weather, light and everyday detail. J.M.W. Turner travelled all over Europe and painted storms, sunsets and steamships in an increasingly free idiom in which light and colour seemed to dissolve everything solid. Alongside them worked William Blake, poet and printmaker, who created his own myths in image and text and was almost unknown in his lifetime.
Watercolour became a speciality of British artists, with masters such as Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman. At the same time the nation acquired its first major public art collections: the National Gallery was founded in 1824, and the British Museum bought the Parthenon sculptures. In architecture classicism lived on, but the Gothic style had its breakthrough with the new Houses of Parliament. In 1839 photography was unveiled, an invention that would change the way images were seen for ever. It was of great importance to painters too.