{"id":344933,"date":"2025-08-14T22:09:33","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T22:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/344933\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T22:09:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T22:09:33","slug":"which-artist-best-represents-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/344933\/","title":{"rendered":"which artist best represents Britain?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting is the country\u2019s most significant<\/a>. The critic Miguel \u00c1ngel Cajigal holds that Picasso\u2019s Guernica, a powerful (and internationally famous) antiwar canvas, is the obvious contender, and said as much on the radio.<\/p>\n

The novelist Arturo P\u00e9rez-Reverte, who professed himself \u201cin shock\u201d at this, countered with Francisco Goya\u2019s Fight with Cudgels, a picture of two men viciously slugging it out in the mud, painted in the 1820s. \u201cPicasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,\u201d he wrote, in what is at the very least a damning indictment of the bad-tempered state of Spanish politics.<\/p>\n

That you can perfectly well argue for either of these paintings is something that neither man seems willing to accept. But what does it mean, \u201csignificant\u201d? <\/p>\n

Should such a painting \u201cdefine\u201d a nation? Should it speak to its psyche, in the way that P\u00e9rez-Reverte apparently believes Goya\u2019s brutal scene does? Should it be globally famous, like Guernica \u2014 or should it simply stop us in our tracks?<\/p>\n

\u2022 The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for August 2025<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

And what, then, would ours be? France has Delacroix\u2019s Liberty Leading the People, of course. I\u2019m writing this in Scotland \u2014 would its be Henry Raeburn\u2019s Skating Minister, or does it have to have a stag in it?<\/p>\n

For Britain as a whole \u2014 whose national dish could reasonably be argued to be chicken tikka masala, a hybrid of cuisines born out of the colonial project \u2014 our \u201cmost significant\u201d artwork is a pretty complex question.<\/p>\n

Is it Constable\u2019s The Hay Wain (1821), evoking a preindustrial view of Britain where a pretty country pub is always just around the corner? Or is that nostalgia, making it unsuitable even if it is something we\u2019re sorely given to as a nation? <\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

If it\u2019s impact you\u2019re looking for, you could do worse than Mark Wallinger\u2019s Turner prizewinning work State Britain (2007), which recreated Brian Haw\u2019s 40-metre antiwar protest camp that sat on Parliament Square in Westminster for nearly 10 years. With exhortations for peace and offerings from the public, including children\u2019s toys, combined with images of extreme human suffering, it created an environment that allowed viewers to consider the horrors of war \u2014 to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Guernica, in a different way, does the same thing. <\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/p>\n

Mark Wallinger and his Turner prizewinning 2007 work State Britain<\/p>\n

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL<\/p>\n

And Wallinger\u2019s work speaks to so much of what we think and know about ourselves. It reminds us of the huge numbers of Britons who turned out to protest against the war in Iraq, and of our affection for the plucky underdog, what the artist called Haw\u2019s \u201csingle-minded tenacity\u201d. As an imperfect answer to an unanswerable question, State Britain gets my vote. <\/b>
Nancy Durrant <\/b><\/p>\n

T\u00eate \u00e0 T\u00eate by William Hogarth (c 1743) \"Painting<\/p>\n

Marriage A-la-\u00e0 la Mode by William Hogarth (c 1743)<\/p>\n

Compared with France, Italy and Spain, Britain has produced few great painters. We\u2019re generally better at writing. But there is something novelistic about the painter William Hogarth, whose pictures tell stories and have something very ungrand and deflationary and British about them. They\u2019re also genuinely comic. My favourite is T\u00eate \u00e0 T\u00eate from Hogarth\u2019s series Marriage \u00e0 la Mode. The marriage is already a disaster \u2014 the couple are bored, chaotic, unfaithful and overspending. The despairing butler leaves the room with a sheaf of bills. It\u2019s full of novel-worthy detail (the dog pulling the woman\u2019s cap out of the husband\u2019s pocket, the broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece signifying infidelity). Compare this to the pompous and simpering aristos having their portraits painted in autocratic France at the same time. No country but Britain could have produced a painter as funny, as democratic and as splendidly cynical as Hogarth. James Marriott<\/b><\/p>\n

Coming Home from the Mill by LS Lowry (1928)\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Coming Home from the Mill by LS Lowry (1928)<\/p>\n

SAMSUNG\/PINPEP<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s old industrial Britain: little undistinguished figures, a couple of children, a trader\u2019s cart, smoke rising into the grey sky after another working day. Lowry\u2019s Going to the Match is more famous and purposeful, but this evening workforce speaks of modest duty.<\/p>\n

So does Lowry himself: more dutiful than happy, but fond of his home region; anonymous in a raincoat, too diffident to accept a knighthood. Made a coronation artist in 1953, he, as usual, just lovingly depicted the crowds, Queen Elizabeth\u2019s golden coach half-hidden in the throng. Libby Purves<\/b><\/p>\n

The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner (1838)\"Painting<\/p>\n

The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner (1838)<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

No painting captures Britain\u2019s mixture of pride and melancholy quite like Turner\u2019s Fighting Temeraire. The Trafalgar warship is hauled away for scrap, sail giving way to steam. Politicians love it: it\u2019s been on the \u00a320 note, quoted in Brexit speeches and wheeled out in essays on decline. <\/p>\n

I live near Turner\u2019s recently restored house in Twickenham: it\u2019s open to the public and you can wander around, retracing his steps, trying to fathom his grumpy genius. He saw beauty that others missed, beauty that\u2019s all around. And it\u2019s British beauty \u2014 the picture of constant renewal. Fraser Nelson <\/b><\/p>\n

Gassed by John Singer Sargent (1919)\"Painting<\/p>\n

Gassed by John Singer Sargent (1919)<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

Though painted in a very different style, John Singer Sargent\u2019s vast 1919 canvas Gassed is comparable to Picasso\u2019s Guernica in its shock impact, tragic power and its depiction of 20th-century warfare\u2019s horrific consequences. It also stands alongside Wilfred Owen\u2019s bitterly ironic poem Dulce et decorum est as one of the first works of art or literature to capture the ghastly reality of chemical weapons \u2014 in this case, a mustard-gas attack that has blinded or poisoned the line of bandaged Tommies staggering along to, probably, a very short and bleak future. Once seen, it\u2019s a painting that haunts you all your life. Richard Morrison<\/b><\/p>\n

The Wilton Diptych by unknown (c 1395-99)\"The<\/p>\n

The Wilton Diptych by unknown (c 1395-1399)<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

The National Gallery\u2019s Wilton Diptych is not only this country\u2019s most important artwork but its most magical. That we have it at all, one of a handful of English panel paintings to have survived from the Middle Ages, seems akin to necromancy. <\/p>\n

Thanks to the Reformation in the 16th century, and the activities of Oliver Cromwell a century after that, the earliest chapters of our art history have largely been taken from us. <\/p>\n

Painted by an unknown artist for Richard II towards the end of the 1300s, this folding pair of panels depicts his coronation before a trio of saints and a host of angels, the latter looking like bewinged girl guides. The Wilton Diptych gives a ravishing \u2014 and, to be frank, heartbreaking \u2014 insight into our collective loss. Anna Murphy <\/b><\/p>\n

Whistlejacket by George Stubbs (1762)\"Painting<\/p>\n

Whistlejacket by George Stubbs (1762)<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

I have chosen Whistlejacket by George Stubbs because a) it is lovely and b) it speaks to my childhood obsession with horses and the fact that for hours I would try \u2014 and fail miserably \u2014 to draw them (I could just about do the head and neck but never the body and legs, which always resembled those of a panto horse). <\/p>\n

Horses were, to me (still are, along with dogs), nature\u2019s most beautiful animal creation, and Whistlejacket, rearing magnificently, hoofs pawing the air, and with real, conscious character in his face and eyes, is a pin-up. Stubbs, aka \u201cLiverpool\u2019s Leonardo\u201d because of his anatomical attention to detail, dissecting equine corpses the better to understand their bodies, painted the stallion not in a field or even with another animal but alone, isolated, against a plain yellowish backdrop, almost as though he is in a studio, which is pleasing. It creates a sense that he is as aesthetically worthy of a portrait in his own right as any king, queen or castle. Quite right. Carol Midgley<\/b><\/p>\n

In the Black Country by Edwin Butler Bayliss (c 1900\u201336)\"Painting<\/p>\n

In the Black Country by Edwin Butler Bayliss (1936)<\/p>\n

WEST MIDLANDS, UK\/WOLVERHAMPTON ART GALLERY\/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES<\/p>\n

You would think from the paintings commonly labelled Britain\u2019s favourites, from the likes of JMW Turner and John Constable, that the most important things about us are our sea and countryside. But surely the defining thing about this country was the Industrial Revolution. It not only changed our economics, landscape and demographics, it changed the dynamics of the world. <\/p>\n

And this is why, for me, the Wolverhampton-born artist Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) is so important. Self-taught, he painted the blast furnaces, coalmines, factories and collieries of the Black Country with the eye of a French impressionist. A landscape that an American consul to Birmingham once described as \u201cblack by day and red by night\u201d, and that is said to have been the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings. Turner captured our light, Constable conveyed the beauty of our land, but a painting such as In the Black Country depicts nothing less than the fire in Britain\u2019s soul. Sathnam Sanghera<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-344933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115029407675462724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}