Renaissance Period

The 16th century saw religious and cultural changes as dramatic as those accompanying the Norman Conquest, although on balance their effect on the arts was depressive rather than uplifting. First a handful of works of Renaissance art were produced in England, all — significantly — by or from designs by foreign artists. They include the tomb of Henry VII (1512-18) in Westminster Abbey by the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano and a group portrait The Family of Sir Thomas More (1526-28), by Hans Holbein the Younger; it is lost but survives in Holbein's drawing (1526; Offentlichen Kunstsammlung, Basel, Switzerland) and in copies. With the coming of the Reformation in the 1530s, the monasteries ‑ the principal workshops of painters and sculptors for 800 years ‑ were dissolved, and religious pictures and statues were forbidden in churches. Nor was this all, for the court of Henry VIII, unlike courts on the Continent, failed to become a leading source of patronage for secular art. In the 17th century the art-loving Charles I tried to reverse this, but his activities proved so unpopular that his example was followed very cautiously by his successors.

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Thus by the mid-16th century the Gothic style was irrevocably superseded, and it was bound to be replaced by some form of Renaissance art. Yet the highest art forms — religious and mythological painting and grand churches and palaces — were not available to English artists, and a new national tradition thus had to find expression in the lesser categories of portraiture, tomb sculpture, and country houses. Fortunately, these were socially important at the time and in the 18th century were to become artistically important as well. During the later 16th and early 17th centuries, tombs and country houses gradually absorbed Renaissance influences. Portrait painting, notwithstanding a second, longer visit (1532-43) by Holbein, was very feeble. However, as taste improved toward the end of the period, Dutch and Flemish artists were brought in, and this remained the normal arrangement until the early 18th century. In one field, however, native English painters excelled the portrait miniature, an art form that carried on the delicate linear tradition, using transparent colours, of medieval manuscript illumination. Its most famous exponent was the Elizabethan artist Nicholas Hilliard.

Baroque Period

The patronage of Charles I brought Sir Anthony Van Dyck to England (1632-41); van Dyck was the most gifted and advanced portraitist in northern Europe, and his flattering image of the English aristocracy continued to inspire artists, and perhaps still more their sitters, down to the early 20th century. Charles also patronised Inigo Jones, who played a somewhat similar role in the history of English architecture. Jones visited (1613-14) Italy and was the first Englishman to understand thoroughly the principles of Italian Renaissance architecture, which were exemplified for him in the work of Andrea Palladio.

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In the Banqueting House (1619-22) of Whitehall Palace, subsequently adorned with a series of great baroque ceiling paintings (1629-35) by Peter Paul Rubens, glorifying the Stuart monarchy, Jones created the first building in central London to embody not only the classical orders (columns, capitals, and the like), correctly used, but also classical systems of proportion. By mid-century his influence was reflected in country houses, such as Wilton House, near Salisbury (c. 1650), by John Webb (1611-72) and Isaac de Caux (active 1625-56), and Coleshill House, Berkshire (c.I650; destroyed 1952), by Sir Roger Pratt (1620-84).

These two houses contained baroque features in their interior decoration, but it was not until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that the baroque style dominated English art and architecture, and even then it was used with restraint. The leading architect of this phase was Sir Christopher Wren, whose masterpiece is Saint Paul's Cathedral (1675-1709) in London. With its great dome, solemn interior, and finely chiselled detail, Saint Paul's was a worthy centrepiece for the huge modem city that rose beside the Thames in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wren, with his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, rebuilt nearly 50 City of London churches following the Great Fire of 1666. Wren also designed, or was involved in the design of, several large public buildings commissioned by the king, such as Greenwich Hospital in London (begun 1698). Meanwhile, his pupils and younger contemporaries were designing enormous country houses, such as Chatsworth, Derbyshire (begun 1686), by William Talman (1650-1719) and Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (1705-24), by Sir John Vanbrugh, and further London churches, — for example, Saint Martin-in-the-Fields (1721-26) by James Gibbs.

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Several of these buildings received baroque decorations by Sir James Thornhill or by foreign artists. The German-born Sir Godfrey Kneller was the principal portraitist of this phase. The climax of baroque sculpture was reached a little later, as in the tomb of the duke of Argyll (1745-49) in Westminster Abbey, by the French-born Louis Francois Roubiliac.