Britain has played a key role in the history of the last five centuries, and its art reflects this in absorbing but complex ways. At first, foreign artists and influences were dominant — for example, Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely and Kneller. In the century of Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough, British painting reflected an increasingly confident society, propelled by Imperialist expansion and industrial advance. Constable and Turner were among many pioneers in the artistic revolutions of the Romantic period, when British influence extended across Europe. The Victorian age saw the moral dilemmas, reflected in art, of Christian values challenged by science. A consistent undercurrent has been Britain's preference for the real world (landscape and portraiture) as against high art and abstraction. This is a survey of the personalities of British painting and an assessment of the latest flowering in which many threads of modern art come together.

The originality of Turner’s technique alone puts him high in the canon of great artists, but his subject-matter gains additional interest with an understanding of his enormous appetite for travel. In this book, over 150 of his works of every type are lavishly displayed and superbly reproduced. For over forty years, from the 1790s to his old age in the 1840s, he made regular tours in Britain and on the Continent, chiefly in France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, with repeated visits to Venice in his later years. Using Turner’s own writings, letters, notes and verse; recorded impressions by his contemporaries; and reviews of his exhibited works, Andrew Wilton builds up a picture of a man of many secrets. A comprehensive chronology, illustrated with portraits of Turner and his associates and views of places with which he was connected, sets out his travels, exhibitions and projects. Light is shed on the private man by a list of the books in his library and even an inventory of the contents of his London house. Here is a book of the widest appeal, on an artist who, two centuries after he came to prominence, is finding new converts wherever his work is shown. Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at the Tate, London, where he is continuing to catalogue the Turner Bequest. He is the author of many works on the artist, including the standard catalogue of the watercolours.