British art. The United Kingdom has a long history of excellence in the arts. British contributions to literature are remarkable in their richness, variety, and consistency. For many centuries in Britain and elsewhere, art and music were the domain of the nobility, who patronized the arts and set the tone and style.
The earliest visual arts in Britain were most likely ornamentations on ordinary objects. . Decorative arts were particularly notable in early Christian Ireland, especially from the 6th to the 9th century. Huge stone crosses, exquisitely decorated, still stand in northern Britain and Ireland. Painting was confined to illuminated manuscripts—bright and exactingly detailed miniature paintings in prayer books that were produced by monks. This art continued through the Middle Ages because books were still illustrated by hand, even after printing was invented in the mid-15th century. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the chief patron of artists and sculptors, who were hired to decorate the massive cathedrals as well as local churches.
In early modern times portrait painting became important, particularly for monarchs interested in marriage opportunities abroad. Noted artists who produced paintings in early modern England were foreigners, such as German artist Hans Holbein the Younger in the 16th century and Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck in the 17th century. English artists came to excel at miniature painting in the 17th century.
By the 18th century a distinctive British style began to emerge that tended to be brighter and livelier than the darker European canvases. British artists also stayed within the confines of neoclassical rationalism; that is, their art exhibited the values of order, logic, and proportion. William Hogarth was known for his moralistic narrative paintings and engravings satirizing contemporary social follies, as in his famous series (first painted and then engraved) Marriage à la Mode (1745), which traces the ruinous course of marriage for money. The etchings and paintings of William Hogarth show satirical scenes from ordinary life and were enormously popular. Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, following the tradition established by van Dyck, concentrated on portraits of the English aristocracy. The verve and grace of these paintings and their astute psychological interpretations raise them from mere society portraiture to an incomparable record of period manners, costumes, and landscape moods. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney became famous for their polished and elegant portraits. Gainsborough and others painted natural landscapes and seascapes. The artworks of Gavin Hamilton and John Flaxman depict Greek and Roman themes.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries romantic painters appeared who emphasized the beauties and forces of nature. This is seen in the landscapes of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, whose paintings directly influenced French impressionism. Although distinctly different in their styles, both artists were ultimately concerned with depicting the effects of light and atmosphere. Despite Constable's factual and scientific approach—working outdoors, he painted numerous studies of cloud formations and made notes on light and weather conditions—his canvases are poetic, expressing the cultivated gentleness of the English countryside. Turner, on the other hand, sought the sublime in nature, painting cataclysmic snowstorms or depicting the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in a sweeping, nearly abstract manner. His way of dissolving forms in light and veils of color was to play an important role in the development of French impressionist painting. Noted poet William Blake was also a painter, and he illustrated his poems and stories with imaginative drawings.
Scores of artists in the Victorian era painted specifically for middle-class tastes. Sir Edwin Henry Landseer was noted for paintings that often feature animals, such as dogs or wildlife. Frederick Leighton painted mythological and historical subjects and illustrated popular magazines. William Powell Frith painted large, busy canvases in the popular style known as genre painting, which realistically depicted scenes from everyday life. Sophie Anderson painted sweet children.
In reaction to Victorian art styles and middle-class materialism, with its concern for worldly objects, several painters came together in 1848 and founded a movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their works exhibited the brightness, color, and purity of medieval and Renaissance painting done before the time of Italian artist Raphael. These painters included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and Sir John Everett Millais. This return to earlier traditions affected other aspects of the arts as well.
Toward the end of the Victorian era, art nouveau (literally, “new art”) developed. Art nouveau is a decorative style with strong elements of fantasy. It borrowed motifs from sources as varied as Japanese prints, Gothic architecture, and the symbolic paintings of William Blake. This style, which became popular in Europe, influenced many art forms as well as architecture and interior design. The art nouveau illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, in particular, are still popular.
Britain has produced many artists in the 20th century. They include sculptors Jacob Epstein and Dame Elisabeth Frink, who both produced monumental figures, as well as abstract sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Painters include Paul Nash, a war artist who painted scenes of landscapes and battles during both world wars; Sir Stanley Spencer, whose works often used biblical themes; and Graham Sutherland, who developed a unique style of landscape painting. After World War II such artists as Francis Bacon, whose paintings are steeped in the horrific, and David Hockney, who also designed opera sets, became noted for their unique achievements.

American Art.

Until the early 19th century, painting in America was confined largely to portraiture, sculpture to utilitarian objects. But in that century American artists took up the full range of subjects in painting—still lifes, landscapes, history paintings, and scenes of everyday life. Sculptors began to produce large-scale works in marble. In painting landscape emerged as the dominant subject. The earliest landscape painters in America, the Hudson River School, conceived of the land as wild and intractable, reinforcing America's view of itself as something new, a kind of Garden of Eden. Their enormous canvases reveal their reverence for the beauty of the American landscape. Thomas Cole, the most noteworthy of these painters, charged his scenes with moral implications, as is evident in his epic series of five allegorical paintings, The Course of Empire’. America's first truly romantic artist was Washington Allston, whose paintings are mysterious, brooding, or evocative of poetic reverie. Like other romantics, he was inspired by the Bible, poetry, and novels, as is evident in numerous works.
At first most artists in America lived along the Eastern seaboard, but starting in the 1830s and 1840s some artists from the East pushed westward, a move reflected in paintings of Native Americans by George Catlin and paintings of animals and Native Americans of the Rocky Mountain region by Albert Bierstadt. These painters helped Americans envision the vast land to the west.
A core of realism, a reluctance to depart from the facts of existence, continued in painting until the end of the 1800s, even when painters conveyed a somewhat romanticized view of nature. We can see this adherence to realism in unidealized portraits by colonial painters such as John Singleton Copley and in mid-19th-century landscapes by the so-called luminist painters, who explored the effects of light. And when Childe Hassam and other American painters turned to European impressionism in the late 1800s, they kept the figures and objects in their paintings fairly intact, in contrast to the Europeans who dissolved objects into patches of color. Opposing this realist mainstream were a few imaginative approaches, such as the mystical landscapes by Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock. In sculpture, neoclassicism—a revival of ancient Greek and Roman styles—became deeply ingrained, persisting into the late 1800s.
In mid-19th-century landscape painting there appeared a new trend, now defined as luminism, an interest in the atmospheric effects of diffused light. Among the luminist painters were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. A sense of “God in nature” is apparent in their pictures, as in the earliest works of the Hudson River School. In contrast to the smaller and more intimate luminist works—for example, Kensett's scenes along the Rhode Island shore—Frederick E. Church and Albert Bierstadt painted the spectacular scenery of South American jungles and the American West on enormous canvases.
Three great American geniuses—Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder—worked in the late 19th century independent of the major art movements on the continent. Homer explored humanity's struggle against the forces of nature in numerous oils and watercolors of the sea and shore. Like the luminists before him and the impressionists of his own day—with whom he was otherwise not aligned—Homer showed a keen interest in light and atmospheric effects. Eakins also used light with great effectiveness in his powerful realistic paintings of surgeons— The Gross Clinic—and a series of portrayals of rowers on the Schuylkill River, meticulously planned and executed in every detail. Ryder, on the other hand, turned from external reality to explorations of the interior self; his reduction of objects to patterns and silhouettes has affinities with the symbolists. Favorite motifs were boats, sea, and night sky, which Ryder infused with romantic and mystical feelings.
Until World War II (1939-1945), Americans saw their art as provincial compared to the best that Europe had to offer. In the 1950s the United States—New York City in particular—took the lead with its own movement, abstract expressionism, and American art remained dominant into the 21st century. In the last decades of the 20th century, art in America and elsewhere embraced new materials, including industrial metals; vinyl, cloth, and other soft materials; fluorescent lights; and even the earth itself. No one could have dreamed of these developments when American art was young.

Russian art.

In 988 Vladimir I , ruler of Rus married a Byzantine princess and converted from paganism to the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire. The introduction of Christianity into Rus spurred the development of the country’s fine arts. For 600 years, imported Christian forms dominated Russian painting, music, architecture, and literature. Russian artists, however, applied their unique vision and dramatically altered the imported forms. Especially in painting, the blending of foreign influences with native genius produced some of the world’s most beautiful icons. In the early 15th century Andrey Rublyov, the greatest of Moscow's artists, painted icons that surpassed those of his Byzantine collaborators in quality and brilliance.
Foreign invasions during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) and the Westernizing policies of Peter the Great around the turn of the 18th century exposed Russia’s artists to new secular influences. As a result, the focus of the Russian artistic experience shifted to Western Europe. As they had done with Byzantine influences in the Middle Ages, the Russians borrowed art forms from the West, assimilated them, and raised them to unique levels of brilliance and achievement. The new vision blended all the artistic influences of Russia's past and present with those of ancient Greece and Rome.
The 20th century ushered in the beginnings of an avant-garde movement. From 1900 to 1917 Russia’s arts included the symbolist poetry, the revolutionary musical scores, the neoprimitive paintings of Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mikhail Larionov.
The revolutionary creations of Russia's avant-garde, especially the constructivist designs of Vladimir Tatlin and Konstantin Melnikov (Constructivism), continued during the first years of the Soviet era. Abstract art, which involves not one but several distinct styles, began developing in Russia in the second decade of the 20th century. Cubism was crucial to its evolution, particularly in Russia, where artists began to create geometrically constructed paintings. Kasimir Malevich called his approach to abstraction suprematism, while other Russians—such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky—were known as constructivists. For many years the Soviet government used the stale precepts of socialist realism to censor the arts. From the 1930s to the 1970s various artists challenged the restraints of socialist realism,
In the 1980s émigré artists who had fled the Soviet Union and dissident artists who had remained in Russia began to influence what would become the cultural mainstream of post-Soviet Russia. The works of many artists became widely available in Russia only in the 1980s, including the émigré paintings of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandins and the modernist sculpture of Ernst Neizvestny.