The second half of the 17th century and 18th century is the period to which the formation and outstanding success of the National English Art School belong. By the end of the 17th century, English architecture had already made significant strides; the 18th century was marked by the bright flourishing of English painting.
Intensive development of the English culture in general, with all its features, in these one and a half centuries, is due to the events of the English bourgeois revolution of 1640-1660 and its results.
The English revolution was driven by urban plebeian layers and peasant masses, who rebelled against the oppression and cruelty of “fencing” — the capture of peasant lands by Landlords. The popular movement was used by the bourgeoisie and the new nobility; their alliance is a distinctive feature of the English Revolution of the 17th century. These classes also took its fruits, which was clearly manifested when the republic, proclaimed after the execution of Charles I Stuart (1649), was replaced in 1653 by a protectorate, that is, the military dictatorship of Cromwell.
After a period of feudal reaction (restoration of the Stuarts, 1660-1688), the bloc of bourgeoisie and large landowners finally consolidated their domination by means of the coup d”eat of 1688, called the “Glorious Revolution” in English historiography. The coup d”eat consisted of the establishment of a bourgeois constitutional monarchy with limited king power and the supremacy of parliament.
The expropriation of peasantry, despite the landless revolution and the conquest of more and more colonies — Ireland, which had been conquered by Cromwell”s troops, a significant territory in North America, and in the 18th century India — entailed an influx of free hands and huge funds into British industry. All this provided a rapid growth of its productive forces.
To all the conquests related to the victory of the bourgeois revolution, England came a century earlier than France, and, while the French bourgeoisie was still preparing to storm absolutism, England faced such a consequence of the intensive development of bourgeois-capitalist relations as the industrial revolution.
The culture of England in the late 17th-18th centuries, which reflected the penetration of bourgeois-capitalist relations in all spheres of social life — English materialistic philosophy (Hobbes, Locke), the success of exact sciences (Newton), invention and political economy during the industrial revolution, and finally, English literature and art — all of this was as if a prologue to the subsequent development of culture in other countries, preparing to embark on the path of capitalism.
At the same time, the alliance of the British bourgeoisie with the nobility, which managed to preserve a number of former privileges, could not but have an impact on the English culture of the period under consideration: many phenomena were affected by this compromise. Thus, the political doctrine of Locke was a justification for the essentially bourgeois and monarchical form of the state.
In English literature of the 18th century, the figure of Samuel Richardson, a bourgeois ethic and morality activist, who was not at all militant towards the nobility (and who did not resemble the ideologists of the French bourgeoisie in this respect), is very characteristic in this sense. It was primarily to the nobility he addressed with a sermon of bourgeois virtues, with a call to follow these virtues in their once popular moral novels “Pamela”, “Clarissa Carlo”, “Grandson”.
In the field of painting, for example, we should note the development in England throughout the 18th century of paintings of a special kind, which are small group portraits, where the figures are depicted in the interior or on the background of the landscape and which introduced a certain plot motive — music, dancing, hunting, walking, and most often family conversations (why, probably, they are called “conversation pieces”, that is, “conversational scenes”). These peculiar compositions, reflecting the specific features of life of the upper strata of English society of the time, combine the features peculiar to the bourgeois everyday life of the Dutch and, on the other hand, the gallant scenes of French rococo.
In the second half of the 18th century, many examples of such a convergence of noble and bourgeois tastes are given by architecture and decorative-applied art.
However, the process of moderate democratization of social concepts and aesthetic tastes of the upper classes is not exhausted neither all the complex and acute contradictions of the era, nor all its achievements. Bold impulses of creative thought in England at that time are objectively connected with the people”s aspirations, with the attempts of the best minds understanding the specific historical results of the revolution of the 17th century for the people”s destinies, to understand what the masses of industrial revolution brings with it.
During the revolution, a high dream was born among the people themselves. It was Winstenley”s Utopian communism — the leader of the most radical movement in the English revolution — Diggers. The greatness of the people”s struggle was felt by the poet and publicist of the Milton revolution; in the period of triumph of reaction after the return of the Stuarts he had the courage to glorify this struggle in the biblical images of the grandiose poem “Paradise Lost”. Ugliness of morals and political contradictions in England after 1689 reflected the bitter satire of Jonathan Swift — his pamphlets and the immortal book “Travels of Gulliver".
Impressed by the pauperization of a peasant and a craftsman who accompanied the assertion in England of the principles of bourgeois property, some of the figures of English education, who firmly believed that these principles are reasonable, reflect on how they should be used to find the way to prosperity and culture for the man of work. We see such attempts in the hands of Daniel Defoe and the remarkable artist of the first half of the 18th century, William Hogarth. True depicting modern life, they involuntarily reveal not only the disgusting remnants of the feudal past, but also the dark sides of the bourgeois lifestyle. Henry Finding, the largest master of the realist novel, talented and convinced to connect the task of education, education of society with the protection of the rights and dignity of the commoner.
As soon as the industrial revolution began to reveal the reverse, anti-humanistic side of the bourgeois progress, many figures of English culture began a real war against such idols as “calculation” and “usefulness”.
The initiators of the ideological and literary movement, called sentimentalism, claimed the need to reconcile the mind with human feelings and even proclaimed the primacy of the latter, emphasizing the value of the individual. In denying the justice of the laws of sale and purchase lies the rightness of Stern, Goldsmith and Sheridan in their novels and comedies.
The notions of the great and beautiful, embodied by Reynolds in his best portraits, or Greensboro in his lyrical portraits and landscape paintings, in fact, also run counter to the limited bourgeois common sense, bourgeois morals and caste aristocratic prejudices.
Thus, in the 18th century, in the most vivid phenomena of English literature and art, two advanced artistic concepts emerged, which will develop in the 19th century in the art of many countries — critical realism and progressive romanticism.