The Romantic Continuity

Abstract

We know very little of English artists. Few have been studied. We have still only the beginnings of an art history. Books on English painting are mostly of individual taste, category books (animal painters, watercolour painters, portrait painters, genre painters), and books which, whether ‘histories’ or picture galleries, repeat an arbitrary reading of artists made first of all round about 1850.¹

Geoffrey Grigson’s assertion makes salutary reading in an age when it is easy to assume that the artists of the thirties and forties had the kind of ready acquaintance with the major figures of English art that an intelligent and well-travelled sixteen-year-old can have today. It reminds us that, at the period of the revival of interest in Romanticism, the awareness of the painting of the past was severely limited. This puts the rediscovery of the first Romantic painters into rather a different light and, as we shall see, has consequent effects on our ideas of how some artists of the thirties and forties saw themselves in relation to the tradition; how the notion of what we might loosely call a Romantic continuity came to develop; and how this actually worked in practice.