This is one of the best-known paintings in the National Gallery's collection,
The Hay Wain, by John Constable.
It's an idyllic scene that he first exhibited in 1821.
A cart meanders through the shallow waters of a river,
on its way to gather hay from workers
who appear as tiny dots in the fields on the right-hand side.
It's a hot summer's day,
and you can imagine that the heavy, still air will soon be refreshed by rain
that's gathering in the clouds overhead.
Many visitors to the gallery love this painting.
It's a beautiful, calm view of the English countryside.
It's also perhaps feels familiar to people,
because so many of us have lived with this painting as a print on our walls
or on a tea towel or a decorative plate.
This very familiarity has bred a certain degree of contempt in some minds, too.
The Hay Wain is a painting that seems now to epitomise tradition.
For quite a few art lovers, it's safe and unchallenging,
the painting that launched a thousand table mats.
But when it was first made, that's not what people thought at all.
In fact, The Hay Wain was avant-garde in its day.
Constable's landscapes were seen as a new and rather shocking kind of art.
So too were many of Turner's landscape paintings.
This is Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, which Turner first showed in 1829.
He's taken a story from an ancient epic poem, Homer's Odyssey.
His painting shows the moment when the hero Ulysses
has managed to blind the one-eyed giant Cyclops Polyphemus,
and escape from the island where he and his men have been held captive.
Ulysses is a tiny figure in red, jumping up and down in victory
as he taunts the giant, who appears as a vaporous figure,
his arm curled up ready to throw boulders at the escaping ship.
Arguably, though, the main character in this scene is the sky,
in particular the clouds lit up by this Technicolor sunrise.
It's hard now to see
how something that is basically a painting of a ship on sunlit waters
could be considered radical or challenging.
So why did paintings like this raise eyebrows when they first went on show?
What was the British art scene like at the time?
What was the context
for the apparently revolutionary art of Constable and Turner?
To answer these questions, we need to find out more
about the ideals and expectations of the British art world
in the early 19th century.
The National Gallery's unique collection of British paintings
is a great place to trace the story
of the nation's artistic ambitions and achievements.
By the time that Constable and Turner were at work,
there was a recognised art establishment in London,
centred on the Royal Academy of Arts.
This organisation promoted a fairly narrow set of ideals for painting,
and it was these artistic rules that Constable in particular often broke.
These were guidelines that artists who were part of the Academy
felt had been very hard won,
the result of some 50 years' worth of campaigning
during the previous century.
To find out what these rules were,
and why some painters felt they were so important,
we need to look back to the early 18th century.
In some ways,
not that much has changed between Hogarth's print from 1738
of early morning in Covent Garden Piazza in London,
and a scene you might see there now.
The clothes are different, but many buildings are the same,
and people are still eating, drinking, flirting and watching the world go by.
It's a place that's full of life and activity.
London in the 1730s was a particularly vibrant city.
This was a period of extraordinary economic prosperity
for the nation as a whole,
and London was at the centre of the action.
Britain was enjoying a period of comparative peace and stability,
and business began to pick up.
World trade had long been dominated by the Dutch.
Now, however, their power was declining,
and British merchants moved swiftly to take their place,
using the substantial shipping experience
that had grown out of Britain's island location.
Produce flooded in from around the world,
including colonial territories like the Americas and the West Indies.
Sugar, tobacco and, of course, slaves came in and were re-exported,
and profit was made on every deal.
London became the place to do business, and its population exploded.
By 1750, it was the largest city in the world.
700,000 people lived here,
a tenth of the population of the whole country at the time.
By comparison, just two percent of the French
lived in their capital city, Paris.
Some of the new Londoners were immigrants from other countries,
like the Huguenots expelled from France as a result of religious intolerance.
Many others came from the British countryside,
forced off the land they had farmed as tenants by new cultivation methods.
Cities all over the country grew rapidly as people arrived looking for work.
As the century progressed,
they would find it increasingly in small urban factories.
Already by the 1730s, London was becoming industrialised.
5,000 people made watches,
12,000 manufactured silk in Spitalfields,
and others produced everything from horse-drawn carriages to porcelain cups.
Art, of course, was another part of the luxury-goods industry.
In the 18th century,
it's clear that more people than ever wanted to buy art.
Aristocratic patrons and wealthy landowners
were still important customers.
Their tastes expanded as many of them went off to do the grand tour,
taking in the cultural hot-spots of Europe.
They arrived home with packing cases filled with purchases,
including portraits of themselves with some of the great art objects
that they'd seen on their travels,
like this one of Richard Milles by Pompeo Batoni.
He has been depicted with a bust of the emperor Marcus Aurelius,
and a map showing some of the places to which he travelled.
Many grand tourists came home having caught the collecting bug,
and sought to purchase more art as they refined their connoisseurial skills.
These patrons were joined
by members of the rapidly expanding mercantile and professional classes.
As more people profited from trade, they used their wealth
to buy the services of professionals like lawyers and doctors,
who in turn also grew rich.
Many of these people sought to display their status
through the purchase of grand new homes, and art for their walls.
One such man was Daniel Graham,
a successful apothecary. Indeed, he became apothecary to the King.
He commissioned this portrait of his four children
from the painter William Hogarth in 1742.
It's a wonderful portrait.
Hogarth captures the freshness and energy of the children as they play.
The oldest boy, Richard Robert,
makes music on a little organ to encourage his pet bird to sing.
We soon realise, however, that Hogarth has done this
in order to highlight the innocence of the state of childhood.
Richard is completely unaware that the bird is in fact squawking in terror
because of the cat that fixes it with a hungry, menacing stare.
Like many children from the more privileged classes,
this boy is blissfully ignorant of the real danger that exists in the world.
The portrait is also a poignant reminder
of how short children's lives could be in the 18th century,
even when they were well fed and cared for.
By the time this painting was finished, baby Thomas had already died.
His portrait is a memorial to him.
Symbolic flowers near his gilded baby carriage
have had their stems cut short in honour of his brief life.
The images that William Hogarth made are a great place to start exploring
how 18th-century British painters responded with energy and innovation
to the changing society in which they lived.
For Hogarth, reform was a top priority.
He saw all sorts of pitfalls
in the ways that people increasingly led their lives.
He sought to produce imagery
that might persuade them to change their behaviour.
Hogarth invented contemporary tales
that became known as modern moral subjects.
They were series of paintings with stories rather like soap operas,
which aimed both to shock and amuse viewers into re-thinking their actions.
He made prints of these series, too, so that more people would see the images,
and perhaps take their morals to heart,
and of course, this maximised his profit potential, too.
Having had success with pictures that warned of the perils
awaiting innocent girls arriving in the city from the countryside,
and equally the problems facing young men with more money than sense,
Hogarth turned his attention to the practice of arranged marriage.
This is Marriage �-la-Mode, which Hogarth made in about 1743.
It tells the unhappy tale of two young people,
married off to each other by their fathers
according to the agendas of the older generation,
with no thought as to how these two complete strangers will get along.
The young man's father is an impoverished Earl,
who has an impressive family lineage, shown here as a family tree
literally coming right out of William the Conqueror.
The girl's father is a businessman with money but no class,
so, they each have something that the other wants.
In the first picture,
the fathers hammer out their business deal
while the young couple to be married off ignore each other.
A lawyer, named appropriately Silvertongue, chats up the girl,
while the young man gazes adoringly at his own reflection in a mirror.
Hogarth uses well-known symbols to hammer home his point.
Look at these two dogs, for example.
Dogs were the symbol of marital fidelity,
but these two are miserable,
shackled to one another
rather than nestling close because they want to be together.
Over five more paintings, Hogarth develops the story.
We see signs of infidelity. The young man has an even younger mistress,
her cap sniffed out by the dog.
Here, we see that this mistress is just a child.
The pair are involved in some medical consultation
with this terrifying quack doctor and his equally scary nurse.
Notice that the young man is himself diseased.
He wears a black plaster to cover up a syphilitic sore.
His wife behaves little better.
Later in the series, when her husband has inherited his noble title,
she sits around with her cronies,
planning to go to a masked ball with Silvertongue, who is now her lover.
This piece of smooth coral hanging on a ribbon over the back of her chair
is to help a teething child.
She has had a baby, but it's nowhere to be seen,
not part of her packed social life.
The black servant is horrified at the behaviour he witnesses.
Hogarth is making the point
that it is the high society figures who are uncivilised,
not the man of colour they treat as their social inferior.
Of course, this story is going to end badly.
In the penultimate painting, we see the young Countess on her knees,
begging forgiveness for what she has done.
Her husband has discovered her in a rented room with her lover.
He has challenged Silvertongue, and in a panic the lawyer has stabbed him,
and is escaping out of the window.
The Countess is powerless to save her husband, and he dies.
In the final painting, the Countess has committed suicide,
upon reading of the execution of her former lover.
At last, we see her child, lifted up to kiss his mother goodbye.
We are shocked and saddened
to see that he has inherited his father's venereal disease.
He, too, has the black plaster,
and callipers to help support his weakened legs.
But the blame for this tragedy
is laid squarely at the feet of the parents of this foolish young couple.
Even at the moment of his daughter's death,
the girl's father thinks only of money.
He quickly takes off her wedding ring,
as he knows that the personal property of suicide victims pass to the state
under the laws of the time.
A starving family pet takes advantage of the disruption to wolf down their dinner
and Hogarth uses it to make one last symbolic point,
painting a visualisation of a verbal pun.
The dog's bite draws our attention to the pig's ear,
to illustrate the saying that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
This situation was doomed from the start,
because the marriage was made for all the wrong reasons.
The horror of the interior scene
is contrasted with a beautiful view through the window.
Hogarth shows us old London Bridge, shining in the sunshine,
an example perhaps of how the city could be a better place
if only its inhabitants would start to behave
with a little more sense and humanity.
The story of Marriage �-la-Mode is an engrossing tale,
which Hogarth tells with wit and poignancy.
Once again, he issued prints of the series.
On this occasion, Hogarth employed engravers to reproduce his paintings.
He was also able to make his own prints,
having started his career as an engraver.
Sometimes he produced original prints that weren't based on paintings,
and that were increasingly aimed directly at London's poorer residents.
The boom time of the early 18th century
had not resulted in wealth for everyone.
As the merchant and professional classes grew,
so, too, did the numbers of urban poor.
Many of the city's newer residents lived in filthy, overcrowded conditions.
Increasingly they took comfort
in the cheap, and sometimes lethal, moonshine gin on sale everywhere.
This print was part of a pair by Hogarth
that offered a straightforward alternative,
drink gin and ruin your life, or switch to beer and feel the benefits
not just to your health, but to the nation's prosperity as a whole.
At a shilling each,
these prints were unlikely to have been bought by the poor themselves,
but Hogarth's visual propaganda was part of a successful campaign.
The Gin Act of 1751 introduced severe penalties
for anyone caught distilling this dangerous brew.
Hogarth clearly used his art
to meet the challenges that he perceived in the society he saw around him.
But not all of his campaigns were so immediately successful.
Even though there were more people wanting to buy art,
and there was more disposable wealth in some sections of society,
British artists still faced one big problem in the early 18th century.
A considerable number of their potential patrons
were initially reluctant to buy from them at all.
There was a perception that British art was provincial,
and that you'd do better to buy either on art from abroad,
or from one of the many foreign painters
who had arrived in London from the Continent and set up shop.
There was a long tradition
of non-native artists taking the best jobs in British painting.
In the 16th century, the most famous artist working at the English court
was Hans Holbein the Younger, a German artist,
who made outstanding portraits for King Henry Vlll and his courtiers.
In the 17th century,
Anthony Van Dyck was persuaded to come and paint for King Charles I.
Originally a Flemish artist,
he had worked all over Europe before settling in England.
His portraits of Charles,
and of the lavishly attired young noblemen of his court,
like Lords John and Bernard Stuart, set the style for British portraiture
during the rest of the century and beyond.
British-born artists in the 18th century
were keen that the pattern should not be repeated in their generation.
They were however at a disadvantage
compared to their Continental competitors, on a number of counts.
In France and Italy, there were large, well-established academies
offering formal training to artists. There were also regular exhibitions
where painters could see the work of their contemporaries,
and learn from it.
There was very little that could compare in Britain.
There was also a wealth of earlier painting and sculpture
that artists could study if they lived on the Continent,
on display in public spaces and in Catholic churches in particular.
This was far less often the case in Protestant Britain.
Hogarth was just one of the artists
who sought to challenge the preference for foreign painters head on.
It was particularly strong
with commissions for large-scale decorative work,
which required skill in painting anatomically correct bodies,
and in combining them into grand, complex compositions.
This is a sketch for a ceiling decoration
that the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens designed
for the Duke of Buckingham in about 1625,
showing Minerva, the goddess of wisdom,
and Mercury, the god of eloquence,
taking the Duke to a temple of virtue,
where they crown him with a laurel wreath.
This was the most revered kind of painting, and was just the sort of job
that was usually given to artists from the Continent.
Hogarth perhaps took heart from his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill,
who had proved a serious rival
to foreign painters in this field on occasion,
and had won commissions like this decoration of the ceiling
of the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital.
This is the grand staircase of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
The hospital was rebuilt in the early 18th century
and its governors were keen to decorate it with great art.
In 1735, Hogarth heard that they were considering giving the commission
to a Venetian painter, Jacopo Amiconi.
He stepped in and offered his services for free,
as a charitable donation.
Not surprisingly, he won the commission.
This is the end result.
Hogarth's extraordinarily ambitious paintings, The Good Samaritan
and The Pool at Bethesda.
Both were highly appropriate subjects for a hospital.
The Good Samaritan stops to help a badly injured man
who has been passed by and ignored by others.
Here, even this horse seems impressed by his human kindness
and practical charity.
The Pool at Bethesda is a more complex scene,
showing this time the divine aspect of healing.
Crowds of sick people have gathered at a pool in Jerusalem
that was sometimes visited by an angel.
Whoever first stepped into the water after the visit,
was cured of any illness.
When Christ went there, he met a paralysed man
who said that he was never able to get to the pool first.
Everyone else was more mobile than him.
Christ said, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk,"
and the man found that he was miraculously cured.
Hogarth has clearly taken different approaches to researching his subject.
Some of his figures are idealised nudes,
based on drawings he'd seen of works by the Renaissance artist Raphael.
He also seems to have spent time
looking at patients being treated at St Bartholomew's.
He has painted figures with convincing symptoms of illness,
like this severely anaemic woman.
The two approaches don't always sit comfortably together.
Perhaps we're more aware of this
because the composition is rather fragmented.
It lacks coherence.
Even though Christ is in the centre, he seems an ineffectual figure,
and doesn't unite the different elements of the composition.
Our eyes are distracted by other figures such as the angel,
whose diagonal pose is repeated by this reclining nude at the right.
Both take our eyes away from Christ,
and indeed direct us off out of the picture.
Overall, it's a work that seems to mix Baroque flourishes
with exaggerated real-life observation,
and it doesn't quite come together into a believable whole.
To me, that doesn't really matter. I think these paintings are wonderful.
They represent a truly heroic effort on Hogarth's part.
What a task to take on
when you're used to painting pictures a fraction of this size.
Hogarth's work for St Bartholomew's
did not, however, win over everyone who saw it.
He didn't receive a flood of new commissions for subjects of this sort.
Nor were British art patrons apparently more convinced
that native painters were the right choice
for this sort of large-scale decoration.
It's hardly surprising that Hogarth had difficulty with this commission.
He had not had the right training
for this kind of grand-manner history painting.
He himself had tried to improve study opportunities for British artists,
setting up a school in St Martin's Lane, and publishing aesthetic theories.
In his Analysis of Beauty,
Hogarth tried to define just what it is that makes something look beautiful.
For him, sensuous, serpentine lines were a key factor.
He saw them as a form that occurred everywhere in nature,
and indeed, you can see them in many of his paintings.
Hogarth's peers, however, did not give him a great deal of credit for his work.
The Analysis of Beauty was satirised by some contemporaries.
Here, Paul Sandby pokes fun at the idea of the serpentine line,
instead showing unattractive curving forms found in nature.
Others felt uneasy about his modern moral subjects,
seeing them as little more than caricatures,
which were considered a very lowly art form.
Some of Hogarth's contemporaries were also suspicious
of his passionate devotion to observation from life.
This was one way that he thought artists might improve,
simply by studying the human forms around them.
This is a rapidly painted sketch that he made
of a girl with a basket of shrimps and other shellfish on her head.
Hogarth celebrates her youth and beauty with fluid, curving brushstrokes
and warm earth tones.
The artist was so fond of this portrait
that he kept it in his studio throughout his life.
After his death, his wife used to show it to visitors,
scoffing at those who had criticised her husband,
"They say he could not paint flesh and blood."
"There's flesh and blood for you!"
Hogarth himself maintained that the principal object of study for an artist
should be not the stony features of a Venus,
but a blooming young girl of 15.
That sort of view was bound to put Hogarth at odds
with the rising young stars of the next generation of British artists,
men like Joshua Reynolds.
He thought quite the opposite, believing that the world around him was flawed,
and needed to be perfected with a little artistic intervention,
just as ancient sculptors
had created an idealised version of reality in their work.
After training as a portrait painter,
Reynolds had set off to travel and study on the Continent.
He soon saw for himself evidence of the superior training
and exhibition opportunities on offer to artists in France and Italy.
He also noted that his Continental counterparts
had a higher social standing, too.
Upon his return, he became a leading voice among a group of artists
who lobbied for the same benefits for British artists,
their own Academy of Arts.
With support from the new king, George III, a great art patron,
artists eventually organised themselves into a professional body.
The Royal Academy of Arts opened its doors in 1768,
originally housed here at Somerset House on the Strand.
In this portrait of Academicians from 1772, now in the Royal Collection,
we see the artists who brought this institution into being,
including Reynolds, who became its first president.
Zoffany, who painted the picture,
has also included himself in the foreground.
The setting is a life-drawing class,
with examples not just of casts of classical sculptures to study,
but the real thing, too, nude male models.
Of course, this form of training,
while ideal for teaching artists the difficult task
of representing the human figure,
was completely closed to female painters on grounds of decency.
There were two women artists who were founder members of the Academy,
Mary Moser and Angelica Kaufmann.
However, they're shown here only via their portraits hanging on the wall.
It would have been unacceptable
for them to be in the public presence of male nudity.
This remained a considerable problem for women artists,
who had to try to teach themselves anatomy
without the benefit of the new classes.
This is the present home of the Royal Academy, Burlington House.
A statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds has pride of place in its courtyard.
Reynolds hoped that the Academy's training schools, annual exhibitions,
and his regular theoretical lectures would transform British art.
In his ideal, painters would stop focusing on portraiture
and other lesser forms of art, and would start making history paintings.
Such depictions of subjects from antiquity and great literature
would surely move spectators, improving them with grand ideas.
This was a man with serious ambitions for his nation's art.
But as we look around the British rooms at the National Gallery,
it's clear that the walls
are not lined with paintings of grand historical or literary themes.
Instead, portraits and landscapes dominate the display.
We see animals, too.
This huge portrait of the racehorse Whistlejacket
is a particularly stunning example.
British art buyers in the 18th century loved to own pictures of animals,
and if they had the financial means,
would commission portraits of their favourites.
Lord Rockingham hired the great horse painter George Stubbs
to immortalise his stallion in 1762.
He's captured with extraordinary realism,
his glossy flanks standing out against a background left deliberately plain.
Stubbs has contrasted a controlled move,
where the horse has been trained to balance on his back legs,
with the sense of wildness in his eyes and flaring nostrils.
We're left wondering if at any moment
Whistlejacket might just jump out of the picture.
Occasionally, we see a painting
that treats what could be seen as a big philosophical question,
like Joseph Wright's Experiment on a bird in the air pump, made in 1768.
A wealthy family and their friends have gathered to see a private demonstration
of experiments that show the principles of pneumatics, the science of air.
It's as much about showmanship as it is about science, however.
In order to show that living creatures need air to survive,
a bird has been placed in a glass jar attached to a vacuum pump.
The air has been taken out,
and the bird flutters in the bottom of the jar, struggling for breath.
It's a dramatic moment.
The demonstrator's hand is poised on the tap
that will open a valve to let fresh air in.
Will he do it in time to revive the bird, or will it die?
A servant boy reaches for the bird's cage. Will it be needed again?
The two daughters of the family are terrified.
Perhaps this is their pet whose life hangs in the balance.
This is a painting that's hard to categorise.
It could be a series of portraits, although it wasn't bought
by anyone that can be identified in the picture.
It's in part a study in dramatic lighting effects.
Wright was very interested in what was known as candlelight painting.
It's probably also a painting that aims to address a serious issue.
With scientific knowledge comes responsibility,
and we should ask, "Is it right for man to play God
in the way that the demonstrator does in this experiment?"
Joseph Wright was not however part of the mainstream
of British art production.
He quarrelled with the Academy soon after joining it,
and retreated to his base in Derby.
Other artists did not follow his lead
in painting such arguably philosophical subjects.
Reynolds was disheartened to find that despite his best efforts,
change was slow.
Artists were responding
to the new opportunities for training and exhibition on offer.
British art patrons were certainly now much more interested
in buying from home-grown painters.
However, the art-buying public was not yet convinced
that it wanted to spend its hard-earned profits on stuffy moralising scenes
from the Bible or ancient history.
British art patrons remained stubbornly attached
to buying images of themselves, and of their interests.
So, portraiture continued to develop,
particularly at the hand of Reynolds's great rival, Thomas Gainsborough,
seen here in a self-portrait with his wife and child.
He had begun his career in the middle of the 18th century,
painting outdoor conversation pieces,
informal group portraits in landscape settings.
This is one of Gainsborough's most famous early works,
his portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews.
This newly married couple display their status to the world,
or at least to their peers in Suffolk.
First and foremost, the portrait marks them out as landowners.
Indeed, their marriage had long been planned by their fathers
so that two parcels of land would be united.
Every detail of the farm is carefully painted in.
Of course, the sheaves of corn could also symbolise their own fertility,
although at this point they had not yet had children.
Perhaps their hopes for a large family were signalled
by the way the oak tree grows out from behind Mrs Andrews.
She could be the root of a strong dynasty.
Mr Andrews stands casually beside her,
his hunting equipment more evidence that he is a landowner.
His pose has been taken from etiquette books
that gave instructions on how to appear relaxed.
It also serves to emphasise his fine calf.
This was an important part of the male body ideal in the 18th century.
Indeed, if you felt that your calves were not quite plump and firm enough,
you could buy special padded forms to place inside your stockings.
Having satisfied customers in Suffolk for some time,
Gainsborough left to seek his fortune at the society hot-spot of Bath,
where he stayed for 15 years.
He painted Dr Ralph Schomberg here in about 1770.
We can see that his painting technique is becoming more sketchy,
particularly in the background.
In his private work, such as his paintings of his own family,
Gainsborough's technique was often even looser.
Parts of this portrait of his daughters with a cat
are barely sketched in.
The cat, for example, is almost invisible,
and the fabric of their dresses is just suggested by highlights.
Even thought it's unfinished,
the painting captures perfectly the glowing skin of these girls,
and the intimacy of their relationship.
By the time Gainsborough had established his practice in London,
he'd developed a freer painting technique for his paid work, too.
This is a portrait of another newly married couple, Mr and Mrs Hallett,
which he made in 1785.
It's known as The Morning Walk,
since this fashionable pair are shown as if they're taking the air
with their equally beautiful dog.
It's a fantastic piece of painting,
gauzy sleeves melt into the woodland setting,
and the breathless devotion of their snowy Pomeranian sheepdog
seems to be expressed in the very brushstrokes used to create him.
These curling dashes are a visual shorthand,
creating an impression of hair, feathers, fur and fabric,
a symphony in subtle tones of white.
Even the disapproving Joshua Reynolds, now Sir Joshua,
Gainsborough's main rival in the portrait market,
grudgingly had to admit that "all those odd scratches and marks"
did in fact "by a kind of magic, at a certain distance,
seem to drop into their proper places."
So, Reynolds was Gainsborough's rival as a portrait painter.
Surely that wasn't what he'd planned when he set up the Royal Academy.
Aren't there grand paintings
of historical or literary themes by him, at least?
Well, the answer to that is no, not really.
Reynolds suffered from two big disadvantages
when it came to actually practising what he preached.
One was the market itself, which as we've seen consisted of patrons
who did not want to hang huge scenes of exemplary classical morals
above their mantelpieces, no matter how much he urged them.
Reynolds had to make a living,
and if there was no market for history painting,
then he couldn't focus his production on that kind of art.
The other problem was that Reynolds himself
had not had the benefit of the training system that he had now put in place.
We see from the very few history paintings that he did make
that his ability to paint complex compositions
involving convincing human anatomy was limited.
This is his painting, now in the Royal Collection,
of Dido, Queen of Carthage,
committing suicide after she has been abandoned by her lover Aeneas.
Her sister, Anna, reacts with horror at this sight.
When Reynolds exhibited this painting in 1781 at the Royal Academy's exhibition,
it was ridiculed by the press,
who laughed in particular at the terrible anatomy of Dido's body.
Perhaps the most cutting remark came from the writer Mrs Thrale,
"A rage for Sublimity ill-understood,
to seek still for the Great, by forsaking the Good."
The message was clear. Critics and the chattering classes
felt that Reynolds was so set on creating great history paintings
that he'd lost sight of the fact
that he personally just didn't have the skills to carry it off.
Reynolds therefore spent most of his career painting portraits,
a type of art he considered to have a lower status than history painting.
He didn't, though, give up on his grand ideas and ambitions
for his nation's art.
Reynolds sought to elevate portraiture wherever possible,
by bringing in elements from history painting.
This meant dressing his sitters up as nymphs or goddesses,
and making references to well-known pieces of art from the past.
For example, when Reynolds painted
Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons in 1773,
he decided to present her as an allegorical figure,
a woman who personifies a particular quality or virtue.
In this case, Lady Cockburn appears as Charity,
a virtue that had a long history of being represented
as a woman caring for small children,
as in this 16th-century painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
She's dressed in timeless classical robes,
surrounded by her pink, chubby little boys.
The youngest is positioned as if she might soon breast-feed him,
the ultimate gesture of maternal nurturing.
Women of Lady Cockburn's class were increasingly being encouraged
to end the practice of paying wet-nurses to suckle their babies,
so this visual suggestion that she may breast-feed this child herself
presents her in positive terms as a very modern mother.
The client was of course very happy to be shown like this.
But Reynolds was also operating according to his own agendas.
He's made two artistic references here
to paintings by earlier masters he admired.
The overall concept has been inspired
by Van Dyck's representation of Charity, also in the National Gallery.
Notice that he's varied the pose, not copied it entirely.
Reynolds wanted to make the portrait his own.
He's also taken the pose of the eldest boy, James,
from another famous painting in the National Gallery,
Vel�zquez's Toilet of Venus, known as The Rokeby Venus.
He'd seen a drawing of this famous work,
and used it here as an extra source of inspiration.
Blending elements from history painting with portraiture
was a technique that could work for male subjects, too.
Colonel Banastre Tarleton fought on the British side
in the American War of Independence,
and by all accounts was a foolhardy and sometimes brutal commander.
In Reynolds's portrait, however, he appears as an oasis of calm resolution
in the midst of the smoke and chaos of battle.
His body is coiled around itself, as if he is readying himself
to spring into action for his country.
Reynolds has taken this pose from a figure in a painting
by the 16th-century Italian artist Tintoretto,
of Christ washing his disciples' feet,
now in the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead.
The artist has also exaggerated the plumage decorating Tarleton's head,
so that it looks more like the bulbous helmets
worn by revered ancient commanders,
known to the educated art public through rediscovered classical statues.
Combined with the training and exhibition opportunities
provided by the Academy, Reynolds's repeated demonstrations
that British artists could and should aim high
did eventually make an impact.
So, too, did the work of Gainsborough,
which showed just how beautiful paint could be,
as we see for example in his elegant portrait
of the actress Sarah Siddons.
Both the expectations and skill levels of British artists began to climb.
We see the results in the next generation of painters,
like Thomas Lawrence, who made this portrait of Queen Charlotte.
He was just at the start of his career when he painted this,
but was already capable of achieving wonderful effects with his materials,
building on Gainsborough's example.
This portrait of the Ferguson brothers
by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn
combines a similarly fluid painting technique
with an interest in ideas and originality.
Raeburn visited Italy,
and may well have met the ageing Reynolds upon his return.
In this portrait, he's used the brothers' hobby of archery
to set up a complex network of shapes and lines across the composition.
The action also allows him to place the elder brother, Robert,
in a position that deliberately overshadows
the younger brother, Ronald.
He looks out with a wry smile on his face,
perhaps accepting his lesser status in life.
This thoughtful portrait is just one example of the ways
in which artists were able to find practical means
of moving towards the ideals that Reynolds had suggested.
Long after his death, those ideals remained
firmly part of the intellectual climate
in which art was produced in Britain.
The Academy promoted a set of values that placed paintings of people
at the top of the scale,
and pictures of inanimate objects and landscape firmly at the bottom.
It was simply felt that if you were going to aim high,
and bring ideas and invention into your work
in ways that would keep art patrons buying British,
your subject matter simply could not be a bowl of fruit or a landscape.
And this is one of the main reasons
why the grand paintings of Constable and Turner were such a shock.
Landscape painting in Britain had never had a high status,
even though people loved it.
Aristocrats had collected the sun-soaked classical landscapes
of the French 17th-century artist Claude for generations.
They also snapped up works by the Dutch artist Cuyp,
who translated Claude's light effects into views of his native countryside,
creating gilded visions of the new Dutch Republic
as a fertile, peaceful land.
This particular scene by Cuyp, now in the National Gallery,
was the first work by the artist to enter Britain.
It started a real enthusiasm for his work among collectors here
in the 18th century.
Some British artists had already emulated
these popular classics in their own work.
We can see this in Richard Wilson's Italianate view
of the River Dee, from 1761.
He has turned a vista across the countryside towards Chester
into a golden, idealised scene,
with clumps of trees carefully framing the composition,
just like you'd find in a painting by Cuyp or Claude.
Similarly, Gainsborough's wooded scenes looked back
to picturesque Dutch landscapes
that had also proved popular with British patrons.
He emulated paintings like this one,
by the Dutch 17th-century artist Ruisdael.
It explores the grey skies, dark foliage and water
that are familiar parts of both the Dutch and British countryside.
Many patrons preferred the realism they perceived in these scenes
to the less recognisable golden hues of Claude and Cuyp.
Gainsborough's landscapes were well received,
although never as commercially viable for him as portraits.
When this painting, The Watering Place, was exhibited in 1777,
the Public Advertiser's reviewer declared,
"'Tis hard to say in which branch of the art Mr Gainsborough excels,
landscape or portrait painting."
With this particular scene, the artist was making reference
to a landscape by the 17th-century Flemish painter Rubens,
also known as The Watering Place.
Gainsborough had seen it in the Duke of Montagu's collection in London,
when he was commissioned to paint portraits
of the 3rd Duke and his Duchess.
He was so excited by the Rubens painting that he wrote to his friend,
the actor David Garrick, urging him to call at Montagu House
as soon as possible, not to see his own portraits,
but so that his friend could see the Rubens.
The great private painting collections in Britain
in the early 19th century were rich in this subject matter.
Sir George Beaumont, whose collection became the nucleus
of the National Gallery's holdings when the Gallery was formed in 1824,
owned this spectacular autumnal landscape by Rubens.
John Constable used to admire this painting when, as a young man,
he stayed with Beaumont, studying his collection of old-master art.
You can see how it might well have influenced Constable's Hay Wain.
So, many art collectors owned and enjoyed landscape painting,
but in the artistic climate set up by the Academy,
which included most art critics,
it wasn't thought of as a serious or difficult task
to which to devote your talents.
Nor was it considered to be something that might move the spectator
or express ideas or emotions.
Constable and Turner both spent time studying in the Academy schools,
within this framework of ideas,
and then they both set out to challenge
the status and scope of landscape painting.
John Constable constructed a series of large, high-profile landscapes
that he showed at the Royal Academy's exhibitions.
He drew on the countryside of his childhood
to create idealised visions of Suffolk,
constructed on a scale that hadn't been seen before.
The Hay Wain was one of his six-footers,
the name given to these canvases that are six feet in length.
It looks like a scene that could have existed in reality.
We can see that to some extent even now,
in what's become known as Constable Country.
There are clearly elements of this landscape in his paintings.
Constable resolutely disagreed with the idea
that one should only study artists from the past,
arguing that you should look at the world around you.
In his view, there ought to be room for at least some artists
who painted naturalistic landscapes,
made after they'd actually looked at the countryside.
However, Constable did not simply sit down
and paint what he saw in front of him.
He did sketch outside.
This painting of Weymouth Bay is an example of a rapidly executed work
that may well have been made out of doors.
Constable has tried to capture the exhilarating effect
of clouds scudding past overhead.
He thought that the sky was one of the most important parts
of any landscape, because it gave the artist scope to be really expressive,
using the expanse of space and infinite variety of cloud patterns
to suggest different ideas or emotions to the viewer.
Constable's aim, though, was always to transform his sketches
into much larger, more finished, works.
It's interesting to see how Constable Country
differs from his paintings, as well as looks like them.
Modern farming has, of course, changed the landscape to some extent.
But the differences are also because the paintings themselves
are imagined, idealised versions of Suffolk,
transformations of the raw material of the actual landscape.
In his large-scale finished paintings,
Constable would carefully rearrange elements like buildings,
groups of trees, or a waterway,
so that he achieved precisely the effect of nature
that he was looking for.
This was no different
from how artists were taught to make history paintings.
You were supposed to take different elements and combine them creatively
to make your idealised essential vision.
Constable created idealised essential visions of the English countryside,
idyllic scenes like this one, known as Stratford Mill,
exhibited in 1820.
Children are fishing, a horse stops for a drink on this warm day,
man and nature are in harmony.
In fact, we see that nature has been harnessed and managed by man,
through the wheel of the water mill,
and the timbers that protect the island on which it stands.
But the people in Constable's painting are able to enjoy the benefits
of small-scale industrialisation without any of its uglier side.
We see a barge, not an unsightly factory.
We never see in Constable's beautiful country views, such as The Cornfield,
any evidence of the unrest that occurred in rural England
in the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, from 1815 onwards.
Soldiers returning from the wars
found that there were shortages of food and work in rural areas.
They protested by burning hayricks,
damaging property and assaulting landowners.
Constable was well aware of this,
as his family owned land and businesses in the areas affected.
None of that ever makes it onto the canvas.
Did Constable have broader political aims
when he painted such idyllic scenes?
Was he reassuring his patrons, most of whom owned land just as he did?
Perhaps he was producing images which showed
what he thought was the best of England
as an ideal worth preserving in these difficult times.
These are big ideas for a subject so lowly as landscape,
but they didn't win Constable too much praise from his peers.
His colleagues in the Academy made Constable wait a humiliating 35 years
before electing him as a full member of their group.
A different reaction initially greeted the landscapes of JMW Turner.
The son of a London barber, and a child prodigy,
his talents were recognised by the Academy almost immediately.
He was only a year older than Constable,
but was elected to full membership of the Academy when he was just 26,
decades before Constable would receive the same honour.
Some of his peers clearly responded to Turner's ambitious aims
to move and astonish the spectator,
evident in early works like Calais Pier, exhibited in 1803.
Just like Gainsborough before him,
Turner was initially very much influenced by Dutch painters,
particularly their seascapes.
This is one of several paintings that he made
very much in the dark, dramatic Dutch style.
Here, though, Turner adds the element of visible human drama.
An English packet boat, or ferry,
is trying to dock at Calais pier in stormy seas.
French fishing boats go out to help her in,
while fishwives on the pier hunch down for protection against the wind,
and get on with the business of preparing the catch of skate
that has just been landed.
Turner has managed to capture the very real dramas
involved in sea travel at the time,
in a composition constructed of destabilising diagonals.
He adds to the effect of instability by painting the sea
right up to the front of the picture, almost engulfing the viewer.
But Turner was also making a reference to the political situation
between England and France at the time.
The painting was made during a brief lull in the Napoleonic Wars,
the Peace of Amiens.
The shifting waves perhaps suggest that this vision
of Anglo-French cooperation is not built on the firmest of foundations.
Indeed, just 16 days after the painting went on show,
the peace treaty failed and hostilities resumed.
Perhaps if he had sought to express such serious ideas
only through recognisable scenery, Turner might have faced
the same lack of recognition that met Constable.
He certainly did paint real places, and worked out of doors,
just as Constable did.
There was, however, one part of Turner's practice
that made critics and academicians warm to him, at least initially.
He often sought to use landscape
to explore the stories of ancient history and literature.
His monumental canvas of Dido building Carthage,
exhibited in 1815, shows just such a scene.
It's taken from Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid.
Dido surveys the land that she has bought to start her new city.
She is queen of an empire that will rise to greatness,
and will eventually fall into ruin.
We have of course met Dido before,
committing suicide in Reynolds's painting,
brought down by a broken heart.
The half-built classical constructions
on either side of Turner's vision of Carthage
make it hard to determine whether these edifices
are going up or falling down.
He is perhaps already alluding to the fall
that will follow this ambitious start.
Turner returned to such themes as the end of empires,
the shape of historical cycles, and the fates, both noble and tragic,
of some key players of ancient history and great literature
over and over again throughout his career.
Of course, representing such grand historical subjects
met with broad approval from the Academy.
They could also see that Turner was paying homage
to the 17th-century artist Claude,
whose light effects were such a strong influence on his work.
Turner wished to make clear the debt he felt he owed to Claude.
When he bequeathed this painting to the National Gallery,
it was on the understanding that it should always be shown
next to paintings by Claude, so that the link would be evident.
But as Turner's career progressed, and as he travelled
more extensively on the Continent and was able to experience for himself
the extraordinary effects of Mediterranean light,
he began to move far beyond what his peers felt
one might do with a historical landscape.
His representation of Ulysses is a good example of this.
As we saw, the human hero is a tiny part of the picture.
It is nature that is dominant and expressive here.
All of the action and drama of the story
have been transferred to the landscape itself,
to the dramatically illuminated sky.
Some critics were a little alarmed
by the extraordinary range of colours that Turner used in his sunsets.
For example, when he first saw this painting,
the reviewer of the Morning Herald said that this was,
"Colouring run mad... All the most glaring tints
of green, yellow and purple contend for mastery on the canvas
with all the vehement contrasts of a kaleidoscope."
An even more spectacular sunset bursts out over
Turner's painting of a celebrated warship from the Napoleonic Wars,
the Fighting Temeraire.
Turner pictured her in 1838, no longer on active service,
being towed up the River Thames to the shipyard
where she was to be broken up for timber.
Just like the best history painter, he idealises his scene,
choosing not to represent the ship as she actually was on this voyage,
already stripped of her elegant masts,
but showing her instead as a ghostly beauty,
suffering the indignity of being pulled along by the squat little tug boat.
Nor was the sun actually setting
when she drew close to her final resting place.
Turner makes it so because he was far more interested in
the poetic possibilities of a fabulous sunset
than he was in documentary reality.
He paints the sun going down in a blaze of glory,
to honour this ship that fought so valiantly and successfully
at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Ultimately, Turner had such big ideas
about what you could do with landscape painting
that he would break more boundaries
than his contemporaries could ever have imagined, or could accept.
They tended to see him as an outsider,
an odd little man with a strong Cockney accent
and a mysterious personal life
that wasn't at all their idea of the gentleman artist.
He would tackle subject matter that few others considered,
with startling results.
This is his evocation of train travel in 1844,
entitled Rain, Steam and Speed, The Great Western Railway.
Turner has used steep single-point perspective
so that the viaduct and the train on it
appears to hurtle straight out at the viewer.
This is a painting that isn't just innovative in terms of subject matter.
The way that the paint has been applied was ground-breaking, too.
Sometimes there are thin glazes of colour,
while in other areas the paint has been spread on in thick crusts,
known as impasto. It's incredibly varied.
Both Constable and Turner compounded the shock of what they had done
with the genre of landscape, by treating paint
in a much more adventurous way than many of their contemporaries.
Art critics wrote in horrified tones about Turner's seas
that looked like marble or mashed potato.
Equally, they complained about Constable's flickering white highlights
and textured dots and dashes of colour.
In this painting of a cenotaph erected in memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Constable used a palette knife to apply paint in short, choppy strokes
in order to represent the damp woodland scene.
His technique was roundly criticised by reviewers as "impertinent"
and "utterly ruinous" to the sentiment of the painting.
Ironically, it was precisely this new, radical technique
that would lead to British artists finally impressing the French,
something that Reynolds had wanted his whole life.
Constable was invited to exhibit The Hay Wain at the Salon,
the French Royal Academy of Art's big exhibition, in 1824.
It was such a success that it was awarded a medal,
which was for many years incorporated into the painting's frame.
French artists excitedly discussed its textured surface,
and some, like Delacroix,
tried adding touches of pure colour to their own work.
This began a process of technical experimentation
by some French painters that would later play a significant role
in the development of lmpressionism.
Perhaps getting up close to Constable's Hay Wain
is a good way to remind ourselves of the challenging,
rather shocking status that this painting once had.
Its surface does have a kind of nervy energy to it,
which you never see in reproductions.
That texture signals cutting-edge far more than chocolate box.
This painting turned the Academy's value systems upside down.
When we remember that, we can perhaps begin to see it
once again as the radical painting that it was
when it was made and seen by the public.
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