The Romantic and The Modernist Vision of Art

William Turner Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light".

Turner was born in Maiden Lane, London Turner was born in Maiden Lane, London. His father, William Gay Turner was a barber and wig maker. His mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, perhaps, in part, due to the early death of Turner's younger sister, Helen Turner, in 1786. On the banks of the River Thames he first expressed an interest in painting. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architcture but was advised to keep to painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick. Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice.

Turner's talent was recognised early in his life Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. His later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea.

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires.

John Constable John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape  paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home — now known as "Constable Country"— which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling". Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.

John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, who also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, and later he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections as well as studying and copying Old Masters. He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist.

In his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England, but in France he sold more than twenty in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man than a rich man abroad." He was elected to the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52, and in 1831 was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students. He also began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of such lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a threefold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught. He also later spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation".

Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches  convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape.

Paul Nash He was the son of a successful lawyer, and born in London on 11 May 1889. Nash was educated at St Paul’s School and spent a year at the Slade School of Art. Influenced by the poetry of William Blake and the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Dante Rossetti. Nash had one-man shows in 1912 and 1913, largely devoted to drawings and watercolours of brooding landscapes.

At the outbreak of  World War I, Nash enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. A few days before the Ypres offensive he fell into a trench. He broke a rib and was invalided home. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his front-line sketches to produce a series of drawings of the war. In November 1917 he returned to the Western Front where his drawings resulted in his first oil paintings. Nash used his opportunity as a war artist to bring home the full horrors of the conflict.

Nash was also a pioneer of modernism in Britain, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. During World War II Nash was employed by the Ministry of Information and the Air Ministry. Nash found much inspiration in the English landscape, particularly landscapes with a sense of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge.

John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent, the son of an American doctor, was born in Florence in 1856. He studied painting in Italy and France and in 1884 caused a sensation at the Paris Salon with his painting of Madame Gautreau. Exhibited as Madame X, people complained that the painting was provocatively erotic.  The scandal persuaded Sargent to move to England and over the next few years established himself as the country's leading portrait painter. Sargent made several visits to the USA where as well as portraits he worked on a series of decorative paintings for public buildings such as the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. 

Madame X

In 1918 Sargent was commissioned to paint a large painting to symbolize the co-operation between British and American forces during the First World War. Sargent was sent to France with the British painter, Henry Tonks. One day Sargent visited a casualty clearing station at Le Bac-de-Sud. While at the casualty station he witnessed an orderly leading a group of soldiers that had been blinded by mustard gas. He used this as a subject for a naturalist allegorical frieze depicting a line of young men with their eyes bandaged. Gassed soon became one of the most memorably haunting images of the war. 

William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Born in Walthamstow in north London, Morris was educated at Marlborough and Oxford. In 1856, he became an apprentice to Gothic revival architect G. E. Street. That same year he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, an outlet for his poetry and a forum for development of his theories of hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts.

The contribution as a designer In 1861, Morris founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which had a profound impact on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. Morris's chief contribution was as a designer of repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, many based on a close observation of nature. He was also a major contributor to the resurgence of traditional textile arts and methods of production.

The contribution as a writer Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere. He was also a well known publisher.

The contribution in politics Morris was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Great Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. Morris and his daughter May were amongst Britain's first socialists, working directly with Eleanor Marx and Engels to begin the socialist movement. This side of Morris's work is well-discussed in the biography by E. P. Thompson (subtitled Romantic to Revolutionary). It was during this period that Morris wrote his best-known prose works, A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere

At his death at Kelmscott House in 1896 he was interred in the Kelmscott village churchyard.