Elements of Style, Movement and Personality
When asking the question of what makes or does not make a British painter, a review of the literature seems to reveal the style, art movement, and the painter’s personality as key elements in understanding the answer. The nineteenth century in Britain was a remarkable time of change, including the rise of industrialism and the bourgeois class. Movements in art were influenced by and reflected these changes. For example, the landscapes and seaviews that dominated British painting for a great deal of the early nineteenth century were a reflection of many individual’s desire to return to a more idyllic lifestyle than urban industrial living offered. As the bourgeois class began to exert more influence on society, the realism movement began to emerge, including the use of lowlife figures such as prostitutes and others as subject matter. However, the impressionist movement also occurred as a reaction to the rapid changes in society that blurred class lines and dealt a death knoll to a former way of rural and agricultural living.
Therefore, what most makes a British painter is what movement and style influenced their works, as well as what aspects of society and culture. Adding personality to the mix created British painters who collectively embody a diversity of styles, movements and personal idiosyncrasies in their works. Perhaps some of the best illustrations of this theory are demonstrated in the works of the American-born expatriate James McNeil Whistler. As Mark Harden notes, “Egotistical, abrasive, and yet extremely talented, he stands as an isolated figure in art history, never directly associated with a specific style of school of painting” (1). If we look at FIGURE ONE, we can see how Whistler incorporated many elements into his work that reflected society and culture as well as his own individual personality. In At The Piano, Whistler used the aff
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