Crossed Palettes

Ronald Paulson

• Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in 18th-Century England by David Solkin
  Yale, 312 pp, £40.00, July 1993, ISBN 0 300 05741 5

There are two British world-class painters, Turner and Constable; but there are a number of others – at least as original and interesting as their contemporaries on the Continent – who created the English School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian scepticism. Turner acknowledged his allegiance to it when he donated Hogarth’s palette to the Royal Academy, while Constable donated Reynolds’s.