In the nineteenth century the Royal academy reached its apex as the dominant institution in English art, becoming a real showcase for what was officially approved.
In 1846 two talented students at the Royal Academy Schools met and became friends. They were John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. In the summer of 1848 they made friends with another student, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and began to meet at Millais’house, where they discussed extensively about art, criticizing the existing state of art in England.
They formed a secret society of artists and called it the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’.
We shall study a few great paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite before tackling the return to more traditional values in art in England with Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer, after the first World War brought an end to the innovative avant-garde activity that had developed in Britain in the pre-war years.
After the second World War, a distinctly humanist and representational current emerged in British art that was to flow through the fifties and beyond.
Imagery and feeling related to the War influenced a whole range of painters who would be essentially concerned with trying to capture the essence of what Francis Bacon called ‘exhilarated despair’.
Throughout that period and further in the sixties British painting was preoccupied with the human figure and the social world as Bacon and Lucian Freud’s paintings brightly testify.
Bibliography :
David Bindman (ed.) The Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of British Art. Thames and Hudson 1985.
The Pre-raphaelites (exhibition catalogue) Tate gallery 1984.
Christopher Wood, The pre-Raphaelites, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1981.
Frances Spalding. British Art since 1900, Thames and Hudson 1990.
James Fox : British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare), Cambridge university Press 2019.
Patrick Elliot, True To Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s, National Galleries of Scotland, 2017.
Robert Hewison, Too much : Art and Society in the sixties, Methuen 1986.
Rina Arya, Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World, Lund Humphries; 2012
Martin Harrison, Inside Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, 2020
William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Rizzoli, 2007
Lucian Freud: Painting People. Introduction by Martin Gayford, National Portrait Gallery 2012
- Enseignant: Demaubus Thierry