immediate and practical purpose to knowledge; the merchants organize their own materialistic Republic; “the Round Heads impose on the Republic their own strict rules. In this world there is no place for painting; the imaginary world of Shakespeare is enough to satisfy and relax its entire soul. It is not until Charles II brings about from France a new less strict moral code of values, a new kind of literature, a new type of politics, that painting could assert itself as one of the mechanisms of the new system, but long before it could be acknowledged as a basic need of the English soul. The Hierarchy of Categories in Painting in 1714-1768 The changes underwent by this hierarchy in this period were undoubtedly the ones that allowed the creation of the “Royal Academy of London” in 1768. This secured the official theoretical background absolutely necessary for the future development of painting in Britain. “We are now arrived at the period in which the arts were sunk to the lowest ebb in Britain”, with this memorable statement Walpole opened his account of the painters in the reign of George I. The continued ascendancy of the portrait painters who were the favourites of Queen Anne and her Court, the withdrawal of the Venetian history painters, and the extravagant praise bestowed by national prejudice on Charles Jervas and William Kent in the uncritical search for an English Raphael seem to support the general charge against Georgian painting on the first half of the XVIIIth century. But Walpole’s verdict was coloured by his dislike of the latest phase of the English baroque. At least a few of the finest portraits were painted after the accession of George I, and the same may be said of Michael Dahl. For the first time in the history of English art a native-born painter, Sir James Thornhill, was almost wholly occupied with history painting comparable for splendour of a...
