French delicacies: AD 1713-1789
There is a sudden lightening of the tone in French society in the second decade of the 18th century. The treaty of Utrecht, concluding the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, seems to promise the end of the almost continuous warfare which has characterized the long reign of Louis XIV. And the death of the king himself, in 1715, offers possible liberation from the stifling formality which has been the mark of his court. In these same years a young artist, Antoine Watteau, is producing paintings which suggest a new social mood.		kex
The people whom Watteau depicts are rich and glamorous in their silks and satins, but they seem extremely relaxed as they busy themselves with social pleasures in romantic woodland settings. They chat with the clowns and guitarists who entertain them in these fêtes galantes (amorous festivities) as freely as one would in an open-air party today. The painterly skill with which Watteau captures such fragile moments is seen at its best in his last work, the large Enseigne de Gersaint. Painted as a shop sign for his friend Gersaint (in just eight mornings in 1721, when Watteau is mortally ill), it shows elegant Parisians inspecting the dealer's paintings and mirrors.		key
These people are all set to enjoy themselves and for the rest of the century, in Europe's most sophisticated kingdom, they do just that - until the shock of 1789. Two younger artists reflect and satisfy this mood. François Boucher is born in 1703, Jean-Honoré Fragonard is a generation younger. Both produce the romantic landscapes and the titillating boudoir scenes which suit the market of the day. Boucher is at the erotic end of the spectrum in his portrayal of the young Louise O'Murphy sprawling naked on a sofa. Fragonard provides the sentimental touch in an image such as Le Souvenir, showing a slender girl in exquisite silks who carves an initial on the trunk of a tree, closely observed by her spaniel.		kez
Fragonard lives on into the stern days of the French Revolution, when his frivolously elegant art becomes politically incorrect. He dies in poverty in 1806. But there is one French artist, of equal delicacy in his use of paint, who would have been warmly welcomed by the revolutionaries if he had not died (at the age of eighty) in 1779. He is Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Chardin's subjects are unfashionable - most often just domestic servants going quietly about their business, among gleaming copper utensils. But his treatment of them has a profound honesty. And the paint sings. Chardin is one of those rare geniuses where the art is itself both the mystery and the joy.		kfa
Venetian sunset: 18th century AD
In the last century of Venice's independence the city's painters recover the esteem enjoyed by their predecessors in the 16th century. This is true in particular of the last great artist to work in fresco. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is born in Venice in 1696. The major influence on his life is Veronese, whose example he follows in tackling detailed and complex historical scenes. In keeping with the rococo spirit of the age, and with fresco as his preferred medium, Tiepolo brings to these pictorial pageants a light palette and a visible deftness of touch - and in doing so provides some of the most exhilarating images in the whole of 18th-century art.		kfb
Tiepolo first finds his characteristic style in the frescoes which he paints in 1726-8 for the archbishop's palace in Udine. In Venice his greatest surviving series is that of Antony and Cleopatra in the Palazzo Labia. But Tiepolo's outstanding achievement is his decoration of the prince-bishop's palace (the Residenz) at Würzburg. The building, designed by Balthasar Neumann and completed in 1744, is on the cusp between baroque and rococo. The great staircase and the central hall present Tiepolo with difficult and challenging surfaces which he fills, between 1751 and 1753, with superb scenes. They celebrate, with a very Venetian flourish, the glories of Germany's imperial past.		kfc
Tiepolo spends his last years on a similarly patriotic task in another country - providing a ceiling on the theme of The Triumph of Spain for the throne room of the royal palace in Madrid. Meanwhile, in the prosperous 18th century and the heyday of the Grand Tour, rich tourists are flocking to Venice. It is they who promote the final chapter of Venetian painting. Canaletto is born in Venice in 1697. In 1720 he begins to specialize in views of the city, and two years later wins his first commission from an English visitor. Thereafter the English become his chief patrons, partly thanks to the encouragement of Joseph Smith (the British consul in Venice and a keen collector of Canaletto).		kfd
Canaletto lives in England from 1746 to 1755, painting views of the Thames in London and of his aristocratic patrons' country seats. His practice of painting large topographical views is continued by his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, who leaves Venice in 1747 and thereafter works mainly in Dresden and Vienna. In Venice, from about 1760, the demand of the tourists for views is met at a simpler and cheaper level by Francesco Guardi. His small canvases, more vague and informal than Canaletto's topographical studies, are notable for the ease and delicacy with which Venice's watery landscape is suggested.		kfe
Hogarth and the English scene: AD 1728-1764
The first English painter on a grand scale is also the most English of painters. Hogarth observes London life with the keenest of eyes, and makes his main contribution by presenting the bustling scene in vivid narrative paintings. His first great success is a picture in 1728 of the stage of the Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre during a performance of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, the smash hit of the day (over the next three years he paints several versions of the same picture). In 1731 Hogarth completes the six paintings which make up A Harlot's Progress, the first of his very successful narrative sequences in which a contemporary moral tale is told as if in a series of satirical scenes on a stage.		kfj
Hogarth engraves a version of the Harlot's Progress himself (his original trade is engraving) and publishes the six plates with great success in 1732. In this combination of narrative satirical paintings, followed by the publication of a set of engravings, Hogarth finds his natural medium. Subsequent series are A Rake's Progress (1735), Marriage à la Mode (1742-4) and The Election (1754). From the 1730s Hogarth also paints portraits. They tend to have a delightfully rough informality (such as the infants of the Grey family in 1740, cheerfully tormenting a puppy) or a sturdy masculinity (Captain Coram of the same year). But by this time a painter of more elegant portraits, Allan Ramsay, has set up shop in London.		kfk
British portraits: AD 1739-1830
Allan Ramsay, born in Edinburgh in 1713, studies in Rome and Naples during the 1730s before opening a studio in London in 1739 (together with another in Edinburgh). He brings to British portraiture a delicacy previously lacking, as seen to brilliant effect in his 1759 portrait of his wife (now in the National Gallery of Scotland). By the 1750s Ramsay has a younger rival, of considerable skill and soaring ambition, with whom he finds it hard to compete. Joshua Reynolds, who establishes himself in London in 1753 after two years in Italy, has a high notion of the dignity of art and the artist. He is the natural first president of the Royal Academy, when it is founded in 1768, and he endows his sitters with an equivalent sense of importance.		kfl
Reynolds often paints his subjects full length, in splendid poses and in close proximity to a classical column or urn. These are the sort of people who go on the Grand Tour. Their easy self-confidence in Reynolds's canvases revives the great tradition of the English portraits of van Dyck. If anything is missing in these powerful images by Reynolds, it is perhaps the fleeting quality of fashion - a quality abundantly supplied by his slightly younger rival Thomas Gainsborough. When Gainsborough catches William and Elizabeth Hallett on their Morning Walk (in London's National Gallery), the couple may not have the air of lasting importance which Reynolds would give them; but on this particular morning there is no one to match them.		kfm
Gainsborough maintains a studio in fashionable Bath from 1759 to 1774, and then moves to London. The rich English gentry who pose in town for him and for Reynolds have country seats where they are intensely interested in horses. These splendid animals also deserve a good portrait. England has just the man in George Stubbs. Stubbs's wonderfully calm and elegant images of sleek horses with their grooms, huntsmen or jockeys in neatly tailored landscapes, or of conversation pieces with the family sitting proud and upright in their carriages, are in their own way as significant a part of the portraiture of prosperous 18th-century England as the work of Reynolds and Gainsborough.		kfn
The generation after Reynolds, Gainsborough and Stubbs produces two artists who round off in dramatic style the great period of British portrait painting. Henry Raeburn stays almost exclusively north of the border in Scotland, usually depicting his sitters in dramatic lighting against dark sketchy backgrounds. His striking image of The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (early 1790s) is Scotland's most famous painting but is untypical. Thomas Lawrence, the youngest of this group, is also the most flamboyant and free in the brilliant facility of his brush strokes. As Holbein immortalizes Henry VIII, so Lawrence does the same for the prince regent, or George IV. He and his most famous subject die in the same year, 1830.		kfo
Neoclassicism: 18th - 19th century AD
Ever since the Renaissance, successive generations of artists and architects have turned to classical models for inspiration. Even at the height of baroque (the least classical of styles in mood or line) contemporary grandees are often depicted in togas. Military heroes, however foolish they may look, strutt in the stiff ribbed kilt of the Roman legionary. During the 18th century a quest for classical authenticity is undertaken with new academic vigour. There are several reasons. Archaeological sites such as Pompeii are being excavated. And interest is shifting from the Roman part of the classical heritage to the Greek.		kgj
Ancient Greek sites in southern Italy (in particular Paestum) and in Sicily begin to be studied in the 1740s. In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German archaeologist and a key figure in the Greek Revival, publishes a work on Greek painting and sculpture in which he argues that the art of Greece provides the best example of ideal beauty. The avant-garde greets this notion with enthusiasm. Over the next century Greek themes increasingly pervade the decorative arts. Greek porticos and colonnades grace public buildings. Greek refinement becomes the ideal for neoclassical sculptors and painters.		kgk
The effect of the Greek Revival on painters includes a new emphasis on the importance of line, deriving from the figures on Greek vases and in low-relief friezes. It also results in a great increase in the number of subjects selected from Greek mythology and literature. Many of these neoclassical artists treat their ancient themes with a wispy sentimentality, more in keeping with their own time than with Greece or Rome. This is true of the French artist who pioneers the style in the 1750s, Joseph-Marie Vien. The charge can also be laid against the most energetic neoclassical painter working in Britain, Benjamin West. But an entirely new rigour is introduced by Vien's best pupil, Jacques-Louis David.		kgq
British watercolours: 18th - 19th century AD
In 1771 the topographical artist Paul Sandby sets off with a wealthy patron for a tour of Wales. Sandby's job is to sketch the magnificent scenery, now coming into fashion with the beginning of the Romantic movement. This new interest will be popularized a decade later by the Rev. William Gilpin, an indefatigable pilgrim in pursuit of the picturesque who publishes accounts of his own sketching tours, beginning with Observations on the River Wye, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782). Watercolour is the natural medium for sketches of this kind. The passion for the picturesque therefore lies behind the development of the most distinctively British strand in art history - that of the landscape watercolour.		kfp
The use of watercolour as the occasional medium for a rapid sketch goes back as far as Dürer, and many artists in the 17th century use monochrome wash drawings as studies for paintings. The difference in Britain in the 18th century is that specialists emerge who paint watercolours for their patrons (and later for a wider market) and in many cases restrict their work to this one medium. This development coincides with a fortunate new discovery in printmaking, that of the aquatint - which for the first time can provide in printed form something very close to the tones of a wash drawing. Again Paul Sandby is a pioneer. His Welsh trips result in the publication, in 1776-7, of thirty-six Views in Aquatinta taken on the Spot in Wales.		kfq
Soon British watercolour artists are travelling abroad to bring back views from regions such as the Alps which have scenery even more picturesque than Wales can provide. In a nice paradox, classical ruins in Italy are also now found to be romantic. From the start very individual styles emerge among these artists. Many attempt a neat topographical precision, particularly in subjects such as ruins. Others go for much bolder effects. John Robert Cozens, touring in Switzerland and Italy in 1776, brings back wonderfully misty and evocative images. Francis Towne, in the same regions in 1781, turns landscape into simple blocks of wash so bold that the effect is almost abstract.		kfr
Other leading watercolourists who develop their own personal vision of the British landscape include Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, David Cox and Peter de Wint. Vision tips over into visionary in the richly intimate views painted by Samuel Palmer at Shoreham in Kent (under the influence of William Blake, a master of watercolour in his own visionary scenes). One figure above all personifies the development of the watercolour in England. Turner in his twenties paints brilliantly in the detailed topographical style. Later in his life he produces bright shimmering washes as bold as his large canvases of the same period. Constable says that they seem to be painted 'with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy'.		kfs
This History is as yet incomplete.		pvg

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Caravaggio: AD 1593-1610
One of the most startling and salutary shocks ever administered to fashionable art is the work of Caravaggio in the last few years of the 16th century. In about 1593 he arrives, at the age of twenty, in a Rome which is still attracted to the esoteric niceties of mannerism. The young man soon introduces two invigorating new elements in his paintings: a use of composition and light which gives the viewer an immediate sense of drama; and an intense realism, endowing the characters in a scene with the believable attributes of ordinary people.		kdf
These qualities are evident in the Supper at Emmaus in London's National Gallery. A single raking light, characteristic of Caravaggio, causes a strong contrast between bright details and dark shadows - as in any interior lit by a lantern. The two disciples are very ordinary travellers sitting down to a meal. As one of them recognizes Jesus, he flings his arms wide in a gesture which almost bursts out of the canvas towards us. This degree of ordinary reality is not to everyone's taste in a religious subject. When Caravaggio delivers a commissioned painting in 1602, showing St Matthew writing his gospel, it is rejected by the outraged priests in charge of the church of San Luigi in Rome.		kdg
The painting is a masterpiece (destroyed alas in Berlin in 1945), but it is easy to understand why the priests dislike it. St Matthew has bare feet (with a big toe jutting disturbingly towards us) and he is clearly a simple man, struggling with the difficult gospel words as a youthful angel stands beside him to guide his hand across the page. It is a profoundly touching image, and one which brings a religious moment very close to us. But priests prefer something more respectful. Caravaggio duly obliges with the painting now to be seen in the church. The composition remains intensely dramatic, but the angel is now flying in the air as angels do (even if he does cheekily count off the generations of Christ's ancestors on his fingers).		kdh
In a turbulent life (he has to flee from Rome in 1606 after killing a man in a brawl after a tennis match), Caravaggio continues to bring religion close to home in this direct way. In more than one great painting the pilgrims kneeling to the Virgin thrust the dirty soles of their bare feet right in the viewer's face. In the long run the church prefers the drama of Caravaggio's compositions, and his powerful use of light and dark, to the peasant realism of his detail. The preferred style of the 17th century becomes the baroque. This more full-blown exaltation of religious sentiment borrows much from Caravaggio - but not the gritty detail.		kdi
Rome and Bologna: AD 1595-1639
While Rome remains the centre of Italian art during the 17th century, there is a strong influence from the school of Bologna headed by the Carracci family of painters. In 1595 Annibale Carracci is invited to Rome by a cardinal in the powerful Farnese family. He is given the task of painting the ceiling of the banqueting hall in the Farnese palace. The magnificent result is completed by 1604. Carracci's theme is classical (the loves of the gods, from Ovid's Metamorphoses), and so is his style - with echoes of both Raphael and Michelangelo. This link between Bologna and Rome introduces a creative balance between classical and baroque tendencies in 17th century Italian art.		kff
The Bolognese artists (in particular Guido Reni, who inherits the mantle of Annibale Carracci as the leading painter of the school) tend to retain a classical purity of line and composition. The artists of Rome incline more towards the theatricality of a fully baroque style. The most spectacular expression of Roman baroque is the great ceiling painted for the Barberini palace in 1633-9 by Pietro da Cortona. In earlier Roman ceilings, such as Michelangelo's for the Sistine chapel or Carracci's for the Farnese palace, the figures remain obediently within their allotted architectural compartments. In the Barberini ceiling they are less restrained.		kfg
Cortona's figures seem to soar upwards, from the trompe-l'oeil continuation of the walls, like a flock of startled birds. The sense of profusion and energy in this triumphal celebration is overwhelming. Officially the triumph is that of Divine Providence, but by a fortunate coincidence both divine providence and the Barberini family (one of whom is now pope as Urban VIII) have bees as their emblem. The design makes it evident that the real triumph is that of the Barberini. But this is a private palace. In public this ecstatic Roman style is more appropriately put to the service of the Catholic Reformation - and nowhere more so than in the sculptures of Bernini.		kfh
Moghul miniatures: 16th - 17th century AD
When Humayun wins his way back into India, in 1555, he brings with him two Persian artists from the school of Bihzad. Humayun and the young Akbar take lessons in drawing. Professional Indian artists learn too from these Persian masters. From this blend of traditions there emerges the very distinctive Moghul school of painting. Full-bodied and realistic compared to the more fanciful and decorative Persian school, it develops in the workshops which Akbar establishes in the 1570s at Fatehpur Sikri.		hjz
Akbar puts his artists to work illustrating the manuscripts written out by scribes for his library. New work is brought to the emperor at the end of each week. He makes his criticisms, and distributes rewards to those who meet with his approval. Detailed scenes are what Akbar likes, showing court celebrations, gardens being laid out, cheetahs released for the hunt, forts being stormed and endless battles. The resulting images are a treasure trove of historical detail. But as paintings they are slightly busy.		hka
Akbar's son Jahangir takes a special interest in painting, and his requirements differ from his father's. He is more likely to want an accurate depiction of a bird which has caught his interest, or a political portrait showing himself with a rival potentate. In either case the image requires clarity and conviction as well as finely detailed realism. The artists rise superbly to this challenge. In Jahangir's reign, and that of his son Shah Jahan, the Moghul imperial studio produces work of exceptional beauty. In Shah Jahan's time even the crowded narrative scenes, so popular with Akbar, are peopled by finely observed and convincing characters.		hkb
Velazquez: AD 1623-1660
Spain, in the first half of the 17th century, has an artist of exceptional interest. Because of his long career as court painter to a single king, and his utter confidence in his own individual style, Velazquez produces a body of work of unusual consistency and distinction. In his early years, working from about 1617 in his home town of Seville, he is influenced by the dramatic chiarascuro and realism of Caravaggio. And he proves that he can match anyone for realistic detail in his paintings of street vendors, such as the woman with her dish of fried eggs (now in the National Gallery of Scotland) or the water seller in Apsley House in London.		kdj
The turning point in Velazquez's career is his appointment in 1623 as court painter to Philip IV in Madrid. Philip has become king just two years previously at the age of sixteen. He will outlive Velazquez by five years, dying in 1665. So for nearly four decades the painter works, with complete security, in a context where his talents are enormously appreciated. He has a studio within the palace. The king frequently drops in ('nearly every day', according to Velazquez's father-in-law) to sit for a while and watch the genius at work.		kdk
Velazquez's main subject matter is one which suits him well - the members of the royal family and their court servants. And on the walls of the royal palaces there hang the paintings which from now on profoundly influence his style, in the collection of Titians made by Charles V and Philip II. The result is a body of work which can be seen as a one-man climax to the Italian High Renaissance. With a fluency of brushwork to match Titian's, and a magic touch which can make a few flecks of paint look like detailed lace or the rich texture of fur, Velazquez records the king and his family posing in their best clothes in the studio, prancing on a favourite horse, or out in the landscape shooting - and inevitably, with the passage of time, growing older.		kdl
The Habsburgs are far from handsome. Philip IV has their notorious jutting jaw to an almost disfiguring extent. Velazquez does nothing to disguise this feature, except that he paints his employer with a warm and disarming honesty - a quality which he extends also to the court dwarfs and buffoons who sit for him. Some artists might feel stifled by this environment, but clearly Velazquez finds it stimulating. He records it with affection in his masterpiece Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), painted in 1656 and now in the Prado. It is an intimate glimpse of the private side of the Spanish court.		kdm
The viewer stands in the position of the unseen king and queen of Spain, who are being painted by Velazquez in his studio. On the left, behind a huge canvas, is the artist himself, about to dab on one of his subtle flicks of paint. In the foreground members of the court have gathered to watch. In the very centre, at the focal point of the picture, is a young princess. Fussing around her on either side are the ladies-in-waiting. On the right stand two dwarfs, one of them trying to stir a sleepy mastiff. In a mirror on the far wall we see a faint reflection of the sitters, Philip IV and his second wife, Maria Anna of Austria. Here, in an inspired ensemble, is the world of Velazquez.		kdn
Rubens: AD 1600-1640
Rome is the cradle of the baroque, seen already in certain aspects of Caravaggio. But it is a northern artist who provides in this city the first fully realized paintings in the new style. Leaving his home in Antwerp in 1600, at the age of twenty-three, Rubens finds employment at the court of Mantua and travels on to Rome towards the end of 1601. He begins an assiduous study of antique sculpture and of the masters of the Italian High Renaissance. His own talent is soon so evident that in 1606 he is given a most prestigious commission. In preference to all the artists of Rome, Rubens is invited to paint an altarpiece for Santa Maria in Vallicella, recently built for the Oratorians.		kdo
The painting, completed in 1608, can be seen as the first baroque masterpiece. St Gregory, wrapped in gorgeous swirling robes (and with a hand thrust out at the viewer as dramatically as in Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus), stares ecstatically up towards a holy image of the Virgin and Child around which plump cherubs disport themselves. Sumptously robed saints to either side of Gregory share his pleasure. The entire painting, in its warm hues and harmonious lines, invites us to do the same. This luxuriant ease of composition and of colour becomes Rubens' hallmark, whether he is dealing with biblical themes or classical mythology (Greek goddesses, in his hands, become the most comfortable of nudes).		kdp
Rubens returns to Antwerp in 1608 and rapidly establishes Europe's most successful studio. He works very fast, as is evident in the brilliantly free oil sketches which he produces in preparation for any major painting. With an army of assistants filling in the unimportant parts of a canvas, he is able to fulfil an unprecedented number of commissions. Prominent among his patrons are some of the leading rulers of Europe, often known personally to Rubens from the diplomatic missions entrusted to him by the regents of the Spanish Netherlands.		kdq
In 1622 Rubens receives a major commission from Marie de Médicis, until recently the queen regent of France. He is to transform her somewhat controversial life into a triumphal sequence of narrative paintings. He achieves this task with magnificent skill, completing by 1625 the great series of twenty-one canvases now in the Louvre. Three years later Rubens goes on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, where he becomes friends with Velazquez - and so impresses Philip IV that as many as 100 paintings from Rubens' studio subsequently enter the Spanish royal collection. In 1629, after helping to negotiate a peace between Spain and England, Rubens travels to London.		kdr
Charles I knights the painter for his diplomatic achievements and commissions him to paint the ceiling in the Banqueting House, recently built by Inigo Jones. The great canvas panels are designed to celebrate the achievements of the Stuart dynasty. They are shipped from Antwerp to London and are installed in 1636. (Just thirteen years later Charles I steps out, from beneath this triumphal ceiling, on to a scaffold in Whitehall for his execution). By that time another painter from the Spanish Netherlands has made a stir in London - providing the superb portraits by which Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, are familiar to the world. Also from Antwerp, and also knighted by Charles I, he is Anthony van Dyck.		kds
Van Dyck: AD 1618-1641
Van Dyck works in Rubens' studio in Antwerp between 1618 and 1620 and then spends most of the 1620s in Italy. In Genoa he makes an extremely successful career as a portrait painter, providing elegant and darkly dramatic full-length portraits of the city's aristocracy. It is this same elegance, in a slightly gentler vein and with a lighter palette, which later makes van Dyck the favourite portrait painter in English court circles. He moves to London in 1632 and is immediately encouraged by Charles I, a most enthusiastic and knowledgeable collector of paintings. Within weeks of Van Dyck's arrival the king and queen are sitting for him. That same summer he is knighted.		kdt
There are to be many more such portraits of the royal pair. The charming but weak face of Charles I, with the delicately trimmed beard, and the fragile beauty of Henrietta Maria are the most familiar images of British monarchs, in the entire long span between the queens Elizabeth and Victoria, entirely thanks to the skill of van Dyck. Other members of the aristocracy are as eager to use his services. They glow in his canvases, handsome and arrogant Cavaliers in fine fabrics (John and Bernard Stuart in London's National Gallery are a perfect example). Nemesis awaits them when civil war breaks out in 1642. But the painter who gives them immortality has died in the previous year.		kdu
French classicism: 17th century AD
Three painters, born in France within a span of seven years from 1593, are profoundly influenced by the traditions of ancient and modern Rome. They transform them into a classicism which is unmistakably French. The oldest of the three is Georges de la Tour, who uses as his main stylistic device the strong contrast between light and shade pioneered by Caravaggio. He takes this to far greater lengths than his predecessor, often limiting the source of light in his paintings to a single candle. The result is a startlingly beautiful severity, with simple outlines of light picking out the contours of flesh or fabric. Where the Italians transform the example of Caravaggio into baroque, a French artist takes it towards classicism.		kes
It is not known whether La Tour visits Italy, but the style of Caravaggio is anyway familiar through the master's northern followers in the Netherlands. The other two French classical painters spend nearly all their working lives in Rome. Nicolas Poussin moves to Italy in his twenties, in 1624. He makes an intense study of classical sculpture and finds himself increasingly out of sympathy with the baroque style prevailing in Rome. His response is to devise his own alternative. Where baroque painters engage in flamboyant visual gestures, carried along on a flood of emotion, Poussin develops a rational pictorial grammar to express the inner meaning of a scene and the attitudes of the participants.		ket
His belief that the intellect can be a prime force in shaping pictorial art acquires immense influence as his own fame grows among the connoisseurs of his day. His theories become the cornerstone of the academies of art founded in the 17th and 18th centuries. His own paintings divide viewers more decisively than those of any other great master. Enthusiasts rate them among the highest achievements of European painting. Others see only stilted exercises, revealing the effect of the wax figures which Poussin poses and groups on a miniature stage to help in perfecting his compositions.		keu
The third French classicist of the 17th century is altogether more gentle in his appeal. Like Poussin, Claude Lorrain moves to Rome in his twenties and hardly ever leaves the region. Like Poussin, he is much taken with the evocative traces of the classical world in the city and the surrounding countryside. But what entrances Claude most of all is the Roman landscape itself, and the light which suffuses it. Claude invents his own very original form of landscape painting. His countryside is beautifully calm and composed (no wind shakes a leaf in a Claude painting). Classical buildings frame striking vistas. Small figures, often mythological, move discreetly among them.		kev
But what makes Claude's landscapes unmistakable is the light spreading through them from the large expanse of sky. Often it comes from a sun shining from the centre of the canvas, straight towards the viewer. The rays bounce off the surface of stone facades or permeate the leaves of graceful trees, infiltrating every corner of the scene. Claude's seductive images appeal greatly to English aristocrats on the Grand Tour (there are more of his paintings in Britain than in any other country). English landscape gardening of the 18th century is much influenced by these idealized French views of a classical Italian scene.		kew
The great Dutch century: 17th century AD
While Rubens and van Dyck are international ambassadors for the painting skills of the southern Netherlands, the newly independent northern provinces are also entering an extraordinarily prolific period in the visual arts. Holland and its neighbouring provinces have a new prosperity in the 17th century, and the Dutch burghers are determined to enjoy in pictorial form the fascinating world in which they live. For the first time there is a thriving middle-class market for art. The painters respond eagerly to the available opportunities, producing a flood of work across a very wide range.		kdy
There is no subject with which the Dutch painters of the 17th century do not busy themelves. Portraits, landscapes and seascapes, biblical and historical scenes, subtly lit interiors containing just a few characters in enigmatic relationships, riotous taverns, winter festivities, still lifes, and sinister allegories pointing up the vanity of human existence (even though all the other paintings seem to state just the opposite) - all these are produced in abundance, to standards ranging from brilliant to less than middling, in the studios of Amsterdam, Leiden, Haarlem, the Hague, Delft and many other smaller towns. John Evelyn, visiting the Rotterdam fair in 1641, is astonished at the trade in paintings.		kdz
From the many practising in each field there emerge a handful of outstanding masters. In landscape Aelbert Cuyp achieves, from the 1640s, exceptionally beautiful effects of warm and gentle light in broad tranquil vistas. Jacob van Ruisdael, a few years younger, is the greatest of the Dutch landscape painters. He works a more dramatic vein than Cuyp, finding romance in wooded landscapes among which streams tumble or half-hidden roads wind their way. Ruisdael's theme is followed by his pupil Hobbema - though Hobbema's most famous image, The Avenue at Middelharnis, is untypical in its boldly formal design.		keb
There are two outstanding names among the Dutch portrait painters of the period. The elder by more than twenty years is Frans Hals, whose brush strokes seem to exult in their speed and facility - giving a breezy informality to his sitters. His most original achievement is his group portraits, beginning in the 1620s and 1630s with several magnificent paintings of the civic guards of Haarlem. Each is the equivalent of an officers' mess photograph, potentially lifeless and dull. But Hals presents these jovial amateur soldiers as completely convincing individuals, interacting naturally within the group. Rembrandt, a generation younger, is an artist of such broad and diverse talents that he needs a section to himself.		kec
Of all the many subjects being treated in Holland at this time, that of the Dutch interior is the most distinctive. Again there is one master so exceptional that he must be treated on his own - Vermeer. But others achieve almost as much within the limited setting of ordinary rooms. Pieter de Hooch opens the window most fully on to the austerely comfortable houses in which Dutch merchants and their families now live. With him one catches glimpses from one room to the next, down passages, through the hall, along the garden path. The viewer, in the world of de Hooch, seems to know his way around.		ked
Other painters tend to concentrate on a single corner of a room, framed by two walls. Here Gabriel Metsu is likely to show everyday events of household leisure, such as a man writing a letter or a woman drawing. Gerard Terborch more often presents two or three figures caught in a teasingly mysterious relationship. In either case the silks and furs will be painted with a rich brilliance, sufficient to make any envious viewer dream of a trip to market. Gerrit Dou, a pupil of Rembrandt, also paints people in tight corners. He does so with an exquisite precision of detail which has caused his followers to be known as the fijnschilders (fine painters). Even Vermeer paints in corners. But his brilliance is more than in the detail.		kee
Rembrandt: AD 1625-1669
The life and work of Rembrandt fulfil in many ways the modern romantic notion of an artist. He shows an easy brilliance in three fields of art (oil painting, drawing, etching), yet his prolific output seems to be as much for his own pleasure - in capturing life in all its fascination - as to meet specific commissions or the demands of the market. He makes a great deal of money but is hopeless at keeping it. He paints obsessively the people closest to him - his women, his son, himself - and thus allows us, through his art, into his private world. Others have done this, but few so extensively. We have almost 100 self-portraits of Rembrandt, at all stages of his life.		kef
Like Dürer, who begins the theme of the artist as his own central character, Rembrandt is incorrigibly histrionic. He depicts himself in exotic hats, costumes and poses. His early works, while he is still in his home town of Leiden, are of a kind unfashionable in the practical Dutch world. They are history paintings, for which a sense of drama is essential. This is a field in which Rembrandt in his maturity will produce powerfully dramatic masterpieces, such as the Blinding of Samson in Frankfurt or Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London. Both feature Rembandt's wife Saskia in the only female role (as also does The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum). Once again we are close to the artist's own world.		keg
Rembrandt moves from Leiden to Amsterdam in 1631 and in the following year paints The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp. Like the group portraits of Frans Hals of this same decade, the picture binds together several figures who are nevertheless treated as individual portraits. In this case they have an unusually strong focal point, in the corpse with his arm flayed for inspection. The painting makes Rembrandt's reputation in Amsterdam, and ensures his a steady stream of commissions for portraits during the 1630s. At the end of the decade the Amsterdam militia, headed by Captain Frans Banning Cocq, select him for the large group portrait which is by now an essential attribute of any such company of guards.		keh
Rembrandt goes one stage further than Hals in the originality of his response to this challenge. He presents the proud part-time soldiers at their best moment - not enjoying a social occasion, but marching off to the beat of a drum. Saskia, painted so often and so dramatically by her husband and now seen incongruously amid the military turmoil of The Night Watch, dies at the age of thirty in the very year of the painting's completion, 1642. Three years later another companion, Hendrijke Stoffels, enters Rembrandt's life and becomes in her turn his favourite model. She and his son Titus together manage his affairs for a while from 1656, to help him through the financial crisis of his later years.		kei
Rembrandt is a superb draughtsman in pen and ink (equally sure with landscape and the human figure) and he is one of the three greatest etchers in the history of the art - along with Goya and Picasso. His etchings survive in numerous states, revealing the process of their creation, and they are treasured in their own time as much as today. The title of Rembrandt's best-known print reflects the value put on them. His etching of Christ surrounded by the sick, done in about 1649, acquires its popular name half a century later because of the extraordinary price paid for one impression - the Hundred Guilder Print.		kej
Vermeer: AD 1653-1675
The artist now most highly prized, among all painters of Dutch interiors, rises from obscurity to the pinnacle of fame in a few decades at the start of 20th century. At his death in 1675 Jan Vermeer is an unknown artist outside his home town of Delft. He becomes a member of the painters' guild in Delft in 1653 but apparently sells very little of his own work during his lifetime, living instead as a dealer. At his death he is bankrupt; his wife gives two of his canvases to settle a bill with the baker. For the next two centuries Vermeer's paintings, if appreciated at all, are usually attributed to others. In the early 1880s his exquisite Girl with a pearl earring goes for the equivalent of five shillings in an auction in the Hague.		kek
By that time scholars are beginning to recognize his genius (there is the first glimmer of interest when his superb View of Delft is put on public show in the Mauritshuis when the gallery opens in 1822). Gradually his works become correctly attributed. There are few of them, not many more than thirty in all - a small output even for a life which ends relatively early, at the age of forty-three. A measure of the esteem which these works acquire during the early years of the 20th century is that Vermeer, of all other Dutch artists, is the one whom van Meegeren chooses to forge when he hopes to sell expensive fakes to the Germans during World War II. But the forger could hardly have chosen a master more impossible to imitate.		kel
The magic which Vermeer somehow works with space and light, within the simple confines of his scenes, is easy to appreciate when standing in front of a painting but is very hard to analyze or to describe in words. In Vermeer women read letters, play harpsichords, pluck lutes or sip wine in quiet corners of everyday rooms just as they do in so many other Dutch paintings of the period. But an extra dimension is miraculously added in the way he captures the effects of light, filtering through latticed windows, casting gentle shadows on walls or floor, bringing up warm bright patches in fabrics and gently rounding out the flesh of face or hands.		kem
This transformation of the everyday world into art is celebrated in one of Vermeer's most famous works, The Art of Painting. A tapestry curtain is pulled back to reveal, as ever, a quiet corner of a room. Light streams in from a hidden window to fall on a woman posing as Clio, the muse of History (she holds a book and a trumpet to reveal her identity). In the foreground a painter sits at his easel. He is just beginning to sketch her on the canvas. Art is being created before our eyes. Yet in a more real sense it already exists, also before our eyes, in the enticing tones of Vermeer's finished painting. We can dwell at our ease within one beautifully achieved trick of reality, while observing the creation of another.

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Cranach and Holbein: AD 1505-1553
An almost exact contemporary of Dürer is Lucas Cranach, but his career follows a very different path. Whereas Dürer keeps his own independent studio, Cranach serves for almost half a century, from 1505, as court painter to the electors of Saxony in Wittenberg. As a result he produces endless portraits of the worthies of Saxony, resulting in a marked deterioration from the early style of his youth. His good fortune, historically, is that from 1517 Wittenberg is at the heart of Germany's religious upheavals. Cranach finds himself, ex officio, the portrait painter of the Reformation. It is from his brush that we know the features of Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers.		kcm
Cranach and his studio also provide numerous other pictures which greatly appeal to the nobles of Saxony. These are paintings of impossibly elongated nudes, in provocative postures and often wearing just a large hat or necklace. They derive from the Venuses painted in Italy at this time, but transform them into something much closer to high-class pornography. A generation younger than Cranach, and altogether more solemn as a painter, is Hans Holbein. If Cranach is the portrait painter of the German Reformation, Holbein fulfils the same role for the leaders of the northern Renaissance.		kcn
In 1520 Holbein establishes a studio in Basel. In the following year Erasmus comes to live in the city. Holbein paints the great scholar twice in 1523 and is given letters of introduction to humanist colleagues in the Netherlands and in England. As a result, in the winter of 1526, Holbein finds himself lodging in the house of Thomas More in Chelsea. He paints here the earliest domestic family portrait in the history of art, showing More and nine of his relations grouped in a room at home (the image survives only in copies and in Holbein's original drawing).		kco
On this first occasion Holbein stays only two years in England, but he paints a great many portraits during his visit - including the large series of coloured drawings now in Windsor castle. In 1528 he returns to Basel, but he is back in England by 1532. On this second visit, lasting till his death in 1543, he is frequently employed by Henry VIII. The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as a child, from Holbein's brush. So are three of Henry's queens (Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard) as well as high officials such as Thomas More. Holbein in early Tudor England opens a window on a tense society.		kcp
Bosch and Brueghel: AD 1480-1569
Hieronymus Bosch acquires his name from the town of 's Hertogenbosch, where he is born in about 1450 and spends his entire working life. Relatively little is known about him, but the teeming fantasy of his imagination, vividly realized in paint, makes him one of the most distinctive of artists. In both subject matter (the torments and delights associated with hell and heaven) and style (the slender figures and clear colours characteristic of International Gothic), Bosch's art looks back towards late medieval models.		kcv
Bosch's most elaborate works abound in vivid and fantastic vignettes, little self-contained scenes of delight or horror which can keep a viewer browsing happily for hours as if wandering in some surreal adventure playground (much in his work directly prefigures surrealism). The two largest and most characteristic paintings are the triptychs of The Haywain and The Garden of Earthly Delights. Now in the Prado, these are among twelve paintings by Bosch acquired by Philip II for the Escorial. All come from the collections of Spaniards posted to the Netherlands. One group of six, including The Haywain, is bought by a diplomat during Bosch's life, presumably from the artist himself.		kcw
The natural successor to Bosch in Netherlands art is Pieter Brueghel, born in about 1525. His works too are mainly gathered in a Habsburg collection, this time in Vienna. There are as many as fourteen of his paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum - mainly collected by the Austrian archduke Ernst, regent in the Spanish Netherlands in the 1590s. Brueghel often depicts details as fantastic as those of Bosch (as for example in The Triumph of Death in the Prado), but he usually prefers to find a more realistic context. Thus the weird scenes in the battle between Carnival and Lent (now in Vienna) are presented as part of a village festival.		kcx
Brueghel's landscapes, filled with people going about their everyday business, are perhaps his most characteristic achievement. He adds a stimulating extra ingredient when he presents New Testament or mythological events in just such an everyday down-to-earth Netherlandish context. The Massacre of the Innocents take place with chilling conviction in a snowy northern village. Jesus makes his way, almost unnoticed, through a crowded summer scene to Calvary. In the Fall of Icarus only the leg of the fallen aviator shows above the waves, unnoticed by the ploughman in the foreground. The Tower of Babel is as busy, and as fascinating, as any other large building site. Brueghel is the first great poet of everyday life.		kcy
Mannerism: 16th century AD
While the Venetians in the 16th century are developing the sturdy themes of the High Renaissance, the painters of Florence and Rome are reacting against the achievement of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. The idealized perfection achieved by these artists can hardly be improved upon. The next generation devotes itself to a different kind of brilliance, aiming for a self-conscious stylishness which has become known as mannerism. The word, used in many different ways by art historians, derives from maniera, meaning stylishness. It is used by Vasari, the near-contemporary biographer of the great Renaissance artists, to describe the quality displayed by painters such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.		kcz
But mannerism is commonly used now to mean a style of great affectation (but corresponding brilliance) which bridges the gap between the Renaissance and the baroque in central Italy. The first glimpses of this style come in the work of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, both born in Tuscany in 1494. An early masterpiece in the new style is Pontormo's Deposition (late 1520s) in the Capponi chapel in Florence. The composition is an awkward jumble of figures which miraculously achieves harmony. The colours are a mix of improbable pale blues and purples, both startling and pleasing. The tone of Michelangelo, in the Sistine chapel ceiling, is made in every way more mannered.		kda
By this time a younger artist from Parma, known from his birthplace as Parmigianino, is developing a version of the style which makes much use of slender and elegant elongation. One of his best known works, the Madonna of the Long Neck in the Uffizi, admits as much in the title. Another mannerist master is Bronzino, the adopted son of Pontormo. His special form of mannered elegance is an icy coolness, even in the depiction of naked flesh - as in the famous Allegory with Venus and Cupid in London's National Gallery, where the provocative poses of the figures combine with bewildering ambiguity of meaning to achieve a quintessential icon of mannerism.		kdb
Later in the 16th century the style spreads through Europe - to France in the school of Fontainebleau, to the Netherlands, to the court of the emperor Rudolf II in Prague. And the most individual of all 16th-century artists, El Greco working in isolation in Spain, is essentially mannerist in the eccentricities of his style. But the exquisite and the unusual eventually pall. Religious painting is brought back to reality with a gloriously controversial jolt, in Rome in the early 17th century, by Caravaggio.		kdc
El Greco: AD 1570-1614
When Domenikos Theotokopoulos is born in Crete, in 1541, the island is a Venetian possession. It is therefore natural that the boy should be sent to Venice when he shows talent as a painter. There is evidence that he studies for a while under Titian before going to Rome, with letters of recommendation, in 1570. In Rome he becomes known as Il Greco (the Greek). When he moves in 1577 to Spain, his name becomes El Greco. Arriving in Spain with a Venetian instinct for colour, and with mannerist tendencies picked up during his stay in Rome, El Greco begins to develop his own extraordinarily personal style without further influence from other artists. For nearly forty years Toledo is his home.		kdd
Spain is the fervent centre of the Catholic Reformation, and El Greco responds to the prevailing mood with a mystical intensity. The violently unmodulated colours, sinuous curves and swooning compositions of his religious scenes almost demand that the viewer join in a mood of spiritual ecstasy. Toledo, it seems, accepts the challenge - for El Greco has plenty of customers for paintings which, in purely artistic terms, can be seen as difficult. Spain in the 17th century will have a powerful tradition of religious art, with painters such as Ribera, Zurbaran and Murillo. But none will match the vibrant eccentricity of El Greco http://www.historyworld.net