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| George Romney Lady Hamilton as Cassandra ca. 1785-86 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Romney is best known for his serene portraiture, but had ambitions to be a history painter. Throughout his career he designed innumerable grand, turbulent compositions which usually remained as sketches. He frequently used the lovely Emma Hart, later wife of Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy at Naples, as a model for 'fancy' pictures in which she assumed a variety of characters. In this sketch she appears as the prophetess Cassandra, a daughter of Priam, King of Troy. Romney evokes her ravings as she pronounces the doom of the city after its ten-year siege by the Greeks. The finished full-length was engraved in 1795, but is now lost."
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| Benjamin West Lady Beauchamp Proctor 1778 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Like many grand portraits of women in the eighteenth century, this picture was commissioned to mark the sitter's marriage. She is Mary Palmer, who married Sir Thomas Beauchamp-Proctor in March 1778. She is shown decorating a statue of Hymen, the Roman god of marriage, with flowers. These classical references and her richly painted costume are meant to evoke the noble art of the past. Her hair, however, is piled high in the fashion of the day."
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| Joshua Reynolds Mr Huddesford and Mr Bampfylde ca. 1778 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"This double portrait is a poignant record of the friendship between two young men, George Huddesford, left, and John Bampfylde. Huddesford, who is dressed in a black silk van Dyck costume, looks toward the viewer while proffering his companion an engraving, presumably selected from the bundle beneath his hand. Bampfylde examines the print, which he takes in his left hand, while holding the neck of his violin in his right. The print in question, which is also based upon a portrait by Reynolds, depicts Joseph Warton, a close friend of the artist, and Master of Winchester College, where both Huddesford and Bampfylde had been pupils. The inclusion of Warton's image lends a suitably scholastic air to a portrait that seeks to emphasise the friends' common interest in the pursuit of learning and the fine arts. Reynolds's composition is a deliberate evocation of the Renaissance friendship portrait, celebrating the fraternal bond between two young men. However, shortly after the portrait was completed their relationship was disrupted by Bampfylde's encroaching insanity."
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| Thomas Gainsborough Charles Crokatt, William Keable and Peter Darnell Muilman in a Landscape ca. 1750 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"This is one of only a few group portraits by Gainsborough, who generally preferred to paint individuals. The sitters are probably Charles Crokatt and Peter Darnell Muilman, the sons of rich merchants who had recently acquired fine estates in Essex. The man playing the flute in the centre is William Keable, a minor portrait painter who taught the young gentlemen music and drawing. In this early painting Gainsborough fuses his three great interests in life: portraiture, landscape painting, and music. "
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| attributed to Joseph Highmore Couple Dressed in the Height of Fashion 1744 gouache Tate Gallery |
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| George Stubbs Otho with John Larkin up 1768 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Otho had proved only moderately successful on the race-track until 1767, the last year of his racing career, when he had several victories at Newmarket. This portrait with a mounted jockey, beside one of the rubbing-down houses at Newmarket, was presumably commissioned to celebrate these achievements. Stubbs was often limited to painting standard horse portraits for proud owners. However, even in conventional subjects such as this, he raised the genre to a poetic level. His subtle atmospheric effects evoke the tension of racing, as the storm-clouds hint that the sunlight in which the horse and rider stand may be fitful."
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| George Morland The Gravel Diggers ca. 1790 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| George Garrard A Thatched Barn ca. 1795 oil on paper Tate Gallery |
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| George Garrard A House by a Lane ca. 1795 oil on paper Tate Gallery |
"The landscape oil sketches which Garrard painted in the 1790s were probably executed in the open air, and seem chiefly to have been made for his own enjoyment. As well as specialising in pictures of rustic genres, he also produced a wide range of animal subjects in plaster and bronze."
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| William Blake The Night of Enitharmon's Joy ca. 1795 colour print with ink, watercolour and tempera Tate Gallery |
"The dense, dark colour-printing in the sky and the rocks suggests that this was the first of the three known impressions to be printed. Blake used pen and ink to give strong outlines to the figures, and to draw locks of hair, the bat, and the donkey's mane and rough coat. The figures have been given form and roundness by washes of intense but transparent colour. The owl's eyes are highlighted with a bright, opaque red wash. Enitharmon is a character in Blake's mythology. In her 'night of joy' she sets out her false religion."
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| Nathaniel Dance-Holland The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas ca. 1766 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Aeneas was shipwrecked near Carthage after the sack of Troy. The goddess Venus induced Queen Dido to fall in love with him. Dance-Holland made this picture while he was in Rome, sending it to London to be exhibited as a way to advertise his imminent return."
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| William Hogarth Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo 1759 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Illustration of a dramatic scene from Giovanni Boccaccio's celebrated Decameron. The heroine Sigismunda holds a golden goblet sent to her by her father, Prince Tancred. Inside is the heart of her dead husband, Guiscardo, one of Tancred's servants. Tancred has murdered Guiscardo, enraged by the unsuitable secret marriage. This was Hogarth's most deliberate attempt to prove that modern English painters could handle heroic themes as convincingly as the revered Italian Old Masters. But the picture received such harsh criticism that he almost completely abandoned painting for the last years of his life."
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| George Lambert Moorland Landscape with Rainstorm 1751 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Lambert, a landscape and scenery painter, was a friend of Hogarth and Samuel Scott, and a respected member of London's artistic community. He was the first native-born painter to devote himself entirely to landscape, both classical and topographical. This seems to be an exercise in pure landscape painting for its own sake, concentrating on the weather effects across a bleak Northern moorland. Although it attempts to capture the atmosphere of the open surroundings, it is unlikely to have been painted on the spot. Lambert's method was to make pencil drawings of a location, which he worked up in oils later in his studio."
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| Samuel Scott A View of London Bridge before the Late Alterations ca. 1758 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Scott's view of Old London Bridge was taken shortly before the demolition of its buildings in 1760. The bridge itself (London's only bridge until the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750) was constructed about 1209; its twenty piers supported nineteen irregularly spaced arches. Building upon the bridge itself progressed erratically over the next 600 years, without any coherent planning and subject to recurring disasters, particularly fire. Reading from left to right, the buildings depicted on the bridge are a group of houses last rebuilt after the fire of 1725; the Great Stone Gateway (originally built in the thirteenth century, incorporating a drawbridge and portcullis and impregnable to human attack), also rebuilt after the fire of 1725; a group of houses with railed roof gardens, rebuilt in the seventeenth century; the drawbridge, once regularly raised to let tall-masted ships pass, already 'ruynous' by 1500, when Henry VII insisted on its being raised (apparently for the last time) for his royal barges, and permanently 'fixed' in 1722; Nonesuch House, an elaborately decorated building pre-fabricated in Holland, slotted into the site of the Old Drawbridge Gate in 1577 and by now in the last stages of decay; a group of seventeenth-century houses known as 'The Middle', also with railed roof gardens; the remains of the Chapel of St. Thomas, partially demolished in the 1550s, converted into tenements and latterly the premises of the stationers Wright & Gill; the Waterworks (with the Water Tower) which supplied the City of London; and, most recent of all, the block of elegant shops designed by George Dance the Elder, built about 1745 and known as 'The Piazza' from its inner, colonnaded street frontage."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London