"In the 120 years that divide Hogarth's early works around 1730 from the death of Turner in 1851, Britain's status as an artistic nation was dramatically transformed. From being a provincial backwater, it became one of the most progressive in Europe. Hogarth himself brought modern life into painting and treated it with high moral seriousness disguised as satire. Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence revolutionized portraiture, introducing a new grandeur and sensibility. The strange genius of Blake gave form to a unique mystic vision. Constable explored nature in a new, vivid manner that would lead to Impressionism. Finally Turner took painting into a realm of epic sublimity, expressing the age of Romanticism as vividly as Byron, Shelley and Keats were doing in poetry. William Vaughan brings us close to these key personalities, and at the same time analyses the class structure and political background that made British art so distinctive. He shows us the colourful world of the 18th and 19th centuries, when British art was richer and more influential than at any time before or since."--Jacket.
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