William Hogarth (1697 – 1764)

One of the most famous English artists. He observed life with a keen and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an exceptional capacity for dramatic composition.

Hogarth was a social painter who produced his own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of society’s social life and every aspect of its people. His art was a reflection, an interpretation, and a commentary on the social condition of his time.

“The marriage-a-la-mode”, “the Graham Children”, “Shrimp Girl”

 

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792)

One of the outstanding British portraitists who had an important influence on his contemporaries. Reynolds pained portraits, group pictures, and historical themes. His sitters included the socially prominent people of the time, representatives of highest aristocratic circles. He collected Old Master paintings and made carefully studies of them. He believed that by analysis of Old Masters he could build a composite style of great art. His aim was not to copy their individual works but to rival them in their own language.

His portraits were full complex work of art. Each sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but a story to be told. His people are no longer static, but caught between one moment and the next.

“Self-portrait”, “The Portrait of Nelly O’Brien”, “The Portrait of Samuel Johnson”.

 

Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788)

A portrait painter. He is capable of making even the traditional ceremonial portrait, profound psychological study, and conveying the transient mood, besides. Each of his portraits is districts and individual. He is an out-door painter. The figures are inseparable from the landscape in which they move.

“The morning Walk”, “The painter’s Daughters with a cat”.

 

John Constable (1776 – 1837)

The greatest of English landscape painters. Suffolk landscapes. He always attempted to depict the transient effects of nature: light, clouds and rain. Every movement of nature gave him pleasure. For him light was the means by which a tree or cloud could take on some particular significance in the ordinary scale of things.

His method of painting was nearest to that of impressionism.

All Constable’s works show picturesque variety of detail, a triumph of keen observation, truth of atmospheric color, and directness of handling.

“Hay Wain”, “The valley Farm”

 

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851)

A genius seascape painter. He performed the grand beauty of the sea, it’s dynamic force and movement, on the one hand, calm infinities of space, on the other. A somber harmony holds together all the varying and shifting sources of light. Those who look at the picture can smell the spray and hear the din of the water and the shout of the wind.

“Calais Pier”, “The fighting Temeraire”

 

Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959)

One of the most original of modern British artists. A painter of imaginative and religious subjects, landscapes and occasional portraits.

His work is well represented in Tate gallery collection and the exhibition reveals the full range of his output, from early drawings done while still a student to his late self-portrait.

His landscapes are sharply focused and refined in their use of paint to make precise rendering of nature. Spencer emerged from a strong school of painters as a killed technician, and he contributed much to twentieth century artistic development.