English Art Prints

About english art prints

English painting found its own voice in the eighteenth century, above all in two genres: the portrait, brought to aristocratic polish by the generation of Reynolds and Gainsborough, and the landscape, which English artists — working in oil and in the distinctively English medium of watercolor — elevated from topographical record to a vehicle for atmosphere and feeling. By the early nineteenth century, English landscape and watercolor practice was influential well beyond the country’s borders, admired by French painters of the Romantic generation.

London also drew outsiders. As the empire’s commercial capital it supported a dense market for pictures and prints, and foreign-born artists made important careers there — among them the American James McNeill Whistler, whose London river views and tonal experiments belong as much to English art’s story as to America’s. The works gathered here include both native painters and works made in England by such arrivals.