MASTERPIECES OF BRITISH PAINTING

FROM the days of medieval manuscript illuminators to the dawn of the 18th century, Britons relied mainly on foreigners for their art. Then, in a great burst of cultural enthusiasm, the demand for-first-rate art sparked a renaissance at home, producing local talents of such high accomplishment that for 150 years Britain could claim artistic standing with any nation in Europe.

To exhibit Britain's painting of the 18th century, the British Council has assembled 86 paintings, including four owned by Queen Elizabeth II, 16 by Canadian and U.S. owners (see color pages).* Opening last month at Ottawa's National Gallery, the show will move on to Toronto and Toledo, Ohio before the paintings are sent back to their owners. One indication that the four years spent in planning and collecting the show would pay off handsomely: despite the fact that Ottawa was charging admission for the first time, attendance in the first two weeks ran more than double the normal total and was headed for an alltime high.

Arcadia with British Accent. "During the 18th century, for the first and only time in British history, an interest in and knowledge of the arts became fashionable," writes the present Duke of Wellington, for the exhibition's catalogue. The English gentry, he points out, enthusiastically studied the architectural plans Lord Burlington published of the Italian villas by Palladio, proceeded to plan their parks and redesign their stately homes, hanging the walls with Spitalfields silk and decorating them with the furniture of Chippendale. To furnish them with art, English artists labored prodigious hours at their easels.

For those who liked romantic landscapes, Thomas Gainsborough borrowed the techniques of Rubens, but filled his canvases not with figures from Olympian allegory but the workaday life of English villages, to create a kind of Arcadia with a British accent. George Stubbs, Britain's finest horse painter, turned out landscapes populated with jockeys, grooms, owners and thoroughbred racers that not even hard-riding country squires found it possible to fault. One of Stubbs's best, Gimcrack with a Groom, shows Lord Bolingbroke's small, dark grey champion (27 firsts in 35 starts) being groomed (at left) and winning over the Newmarket course on July 12, 1765 (at right).

"Bonnets Off!" Since British landscape painting did not reach its peak until the igth century (with Turner and Constable), it is by its portraiture that 18th century British painting stands or falls. Sir Henry Raeburn (TIME, May 28, 1956), Scotland's greatest painter (he rated the cry of "Bonnets off!" from Highland chiefs), was largely self-taught. His portrait of the two older Ferguson boys, The Archers, was painted when Raeburn was only 31, but in its bold composition device and dramatic lighting it ranks with the best of his work. Allan Ramsay was another Scottish painter, whose paintings managed to catch the character of his sitters so definitively that Philosopher David Hume commissioned him to paint the famed French writer-philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his outlandish purple caftan and fur cap, while Rousseau was living in exile in London in 1766.

No one could have been at further remove from the new-found refinement of the great country houses than Satirist William Hogarth, whose province was the raucous underside of London. Hogarth painted The Painter and His Pug as an unframed self-portrait, propped up by volumes of Shakespeare, Swift and Milton, and intended it to be used as the frontispiece for his collected engraved works. Later, after he engaged in a ferocious political quarrel with John Wilkes and Charles Churchill (no kin), Hogarth issued a fresh impression. In it his portrait was replaced by a vitriolic caricature of "Bruiser" Churchill, drawn to look like a Russian bear.

* Included in the show: America's Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart.

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