A Century of Exception

Almost since the days when Druidic warriors daubed themselves with woad, the notion has persisted that British painting is a barbarous and insular affair. By and large, the thesis is correct --but there is an important century of exception. Between 1760 and 1860, when Britain swept to the forefront among nations, its painters were as engaged and influential as its soldiers and diplomats were at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna.

It was an eventful century to be exceptional in. The hundred years witnessed the French Revolution, the comet streak of Napoleon, the expanding British Empire abroad, the Industrial Revolution at home. In art, the era was marked by the emergence of Romanticism, that peculiar cult of the divine in nature, the grotesque, the bizarre, the irrational and the emotional.

Sense & Sensibility. In painting, the Romantic era in France produced the art of David, Ingres and Delacroix, but Anglo-Saxon Britain far more nearly mirrored the chaotic spirit of the age through the diverse brilliance of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Blake and Turner. How strikingly they and other British artists staked out the realm of the new sensibility in the Romantic era can be seen in a display of 236 oils, watercolors and drawings, assembled from collections in America and Europe, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts (see color pages). "British Masterpieces," which will be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, pays little more than lip service to the aristocratic portrait and the studied landscape, the established prides and prejudices of English art. Instead, the era's sense and sentiment is often best il lustrated by the casual sketch, the minor masterwork by the relative unknown.

Thomas Gainsborough, for example, is represented most tellingly by a flamboyant "fancy picture" (a fantasy) of a sleeping country girl. John Constable's Study for "A Boat Passing a Lock" illustrates through its snapshot organization and cavalier brushwork his influence on Delacroix, Millet and Corot. Hardly less impressive are five canvases by the provincial Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), which range from a firelit Iron Forge to the protosurrealism of The Old Man and Death.

Miserable & Mad. Indeed, the slightly schizoid Romantic preoccupation with nature and the supernatural, physical reality and psychological mystery, rooted itself easily in English soil. Swiss-born John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) emigrated to England at 22 and took up painting with the encouragement of Sir Joshua Reynolds. His ghoulish portrayals of Shakespearean heroes and fantastic chimeras, such as The Nightmare, predated Goya's grotesques by more than a decade and were immensely popular on the Continent. In their desire to get back to nature, the English Romantics also abandoned the ruins of Italy in favor of the English countryside and Alpine vistas. Crusty J.M.W. Turner seems to have been the first artist to visit Switzerland for the sake of sketching its mountains, but his Cottage Destroyed by an Avalanche is a vision of nature's destructive forces rather than the record of any event.

To the Pre-Raphaelite group of English painters, who banded together in 1848, belongs the credit generally given to the French impressionists of being the first to paint finished landscapes in the open air. The results were revolutionary. When the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt's sun-drenched canvas, Strayed Sheep, was displayed in Paris in 1855, French Critic Theophile Gautier wrote: "In the whole salon, there is perhaps no painting that disturbs one's vision as much as this one." Carrying Corn, a harvest scene of almost hallucinatory brightness, was painted out of doors by another Pre-Raphaelite, Ford Madox Brown, in 1854, and the diary he kept reads not a little like Van Gogh's. "Intensely miserable," Brown noted at one point. "Very hard up, and a little mad."

Forever Sound. Throughout its survey, "British Masterpieces" blends together paintings with intellectual pretensions and popular successes. One of the surprises is that many of the once admired esthetes look downright banal today, while several of the philistines positively shine. William Powell Frith (1819-1909) had nothing but contempt for "the crazes in art," preferred to depict "the infinite variety of everyday life." His Derby Day (center color pages) drew such huge crowds to the Royal Academy in 1858 that it had to be protected by a guard rail.

Contemporary critics kissed off Derby Day as vulgar and commonplace, but it offers today's viewers a rare opportunity to rub elbows with a red-blooded race of Britons sporting in a roseate world when the pound seemed forever sound. In addition, Frith's breezy freshness and mundane subject matter mark him as an artist who did more to announce Manet and Degas than either he or they would have been prepared to admit.

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