John Constable was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. He enjoyed royal patronage. His painting Whistlejacket hangs in the National Gallery, London.
The Norwich school of painters was the first provincial art movement established in Britain, active in the early 19th century. Artists of the school were inspired by the natural environment of the Norfolk landscape and owed some influence to the work of landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age such as Hobbema and Ruisdael.
John Linnell was an English engraver, and portrait and landscape painter. He was a naturalist and a rival to the artist John Constable. He had a taste for Northern European art of the Renaissance, particularly Albrecht Dürer. He also associated with the amateur artist Edward Thomas Daniell, and with William Blake, to whom he introduced the painter and writer Samuel Palmer and others of the Ancients.
Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and a breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He was co-heir to one of America's greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, and his father's brother Richard B. Mellon. In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and his cousins Sarah Mellon and Richard King Mellon, were all among the richest eight people in the United States, with fortunes between $400 million and $500 million each.
The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is a scholarly centre in London devoted to supporting original research into the history of British Art. It was founded in 1970 and endowed by a gift from Paul Mellon. Since 1996, it has been situated at 16 Bedford Square in a Grade I listed building. This building houses an outstanding library of 26,000 publications focused on British art and architecture, and over 25 collected archives which include papers of eminent art historians such as Ellis K. Waterhouse, Oliver Millar, Brian Sewell and Brinsley Ford. It also holds the records of its own institutional archives, including a growing oral history collection. The centre compiled its own photographic archive from 1970 to 1996 and now also holds the Tate photographic archive. All of these research collections are available to consult in the centre's Public Study Room.
George Arthur Fripp was a British watercolourist. He was a grandson of the artist Nicholas Pocock and brother of the painter Alfred Downing Fripp. His nephew was the artist Henry Charles Innes Fripp.
Francis Towne was a British watercolour painter of landscapes that range from the English Lake District to Naples and Rome. After a long period of obscurity, his work has been increasingly recognised from the early 20th century onwards.
Thomas Patch was an English painter, printmaker in etching, physiognomist and art historian. He made a living from painting views of Florence and Tivoli and appears to have sold a number of painted caricature groups to members of the Anglo-Florentine community and to young British men on the Grand Tour. The largest collection of his paintings and prints is in the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut.
John Gubbins Newton and His Sister, Mary Newton is an 1833 painting by Robert Burnard. It is now in the Yale Center for British Art, as part of the Paul Mellon collection, where it has the accession number B2001.2.66.
Vesuvius in Eruption is the subject of a series of thirty paintings and at least one preliminary sketch by Joseph Wright of Derby, who travelled in Italy in the years 1773-1775. It appears that whilst Wright was in Italy Vesuvius was not erupting.
The Dort, or Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed is an 1818 painting by J. M. W. Turner, based on drawings made by him in mid September 1817. It shows a view of the harbour of Dordrecht. It is the finest example of the influence of Dutch marine painting on Turner's work.
Arthur Graham Reynolds was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné. Reynolds's approach exemplified traditional scholarship and connoisseurship and he was fiercely opposed to the New Art History of the 1970s.
Michael J. Rosenthal is emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Warwick. He is a specialist both in British art and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the arts of early colonial Australia.
Stratford Mill is an 1820 oil on canvas painting by the British landscape artist John Constable. It is the second painting in the series of six-footers depicting working scenes on the River Stour, a series that includes The Hay Wain. The painting is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.
Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (1907–1978) was a Scottish-born American art historian specialising in British 18th-century sculpture, a professor, museum director and post-World War II 'Monuments Man'. He was the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and director of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Sir Richard Steele's Cottage, Hampstead is a landscape painting by the British artist John Constable begun in 1831 and completed the following year. It shows a view from Haverstock Hill in then rural Hampstead looking southwards towards London with its skyline dominated by St Paul's Cathedral. The painting takes its name from the cottage to the right of the road, formerly home to the Irish writer and politician Richard Steele, a member of the Kit Cat Club. On the left of the street is a public house the Load of Hay, popular with travellers on their way to Hampstead Heath. The stretch was part of Hampstead Road which connected the city to Hampstead and still retains its historic alignment. The cottage was demolished in 1867 during the development of Belsize Park as a residential area, but is still commemorated by the name of Steele Road.
Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath is a landscape painting by the British artist John Constable. Painted between 1824 and 1825 it depicts the view from Branch Hill in Hampstead. Constable had lived in Hampstead, then beyond the outskirts of London, since 1819 and painted many views of the area. It was sold in 1825 to the collector Francis Darby. The painting shows some carts in the foreground as well as Branch Hill Pond. In the background are the fields around Harrow and the villages of Kilburn and Hendon. In the extreme distance is Windsor Castle.
Road to the Spaniards, Hampstead is an 1822 landscape painting by the British artist John Constable. It shows a view across Hampstead Heath along Spaniards Road, a route to Highgate. The building on the left is the Spaniards Inn from which the road takes its name. It was painted in July 1822 during overcast day. Constable emphasies the skyline with looming storm clouds. Today it is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
