THE BRITISH HERITAGE ARCHIVEBritish English All entries

BRITISH LEGACY / THE COLLECTION

Visual Arts

British visual arts, from the pre-Raphaelites to contemporary artists, have set trends that resonate globally. The UK's galleries and artists continue to be pivotal in the global art scene, influencing aesthetics and art criticism. Iconic works by British artists continue to draw admiration and scholarly interest worldwide.

75 entries

David Nash: sculpture shaped by wood and landscape

From the moving Wooden Boulder to the living Ash Dome, David Nash has made wood, trees and the changing landscape central to a British sculptural practice.

Dame Elisabeth Frink: sculpture shaped by strength and vulnerability

The English sculptor made distinctive bronzes of men, animals and religious subjects, drawing on figurative traditions to explore struggle, vulnerability and the human condition.

Howard Hodgkin: painting memory through colour

The British painter and printmaker made vivid, frame-spanning works that turned personal experience into a distinctive language of abstraction.

Mark Wallinger: Art in public, politics and place

From the Fourth Plinth to the London Underground, the English artist has made public spaces part of his work.

Sam Taylor-Johnson: from video art to the cinema

The British artist moved from multi-screen installations and portraiture to feature films, including Nowhere Boy and Back to Black.

Tacita Dean: film, time and the traces of history

From the sea-haunted films of the 1990s to her vast Turbine Hall commission, Tacita Dean has made the qualities of analogue film central to a wider practice of looking, listening and remembering.

Grayson Perry: ceramics, class and the stories Britain tells

From a Turner Prize-winning ceramic practice to tapestries and television, Perry has used accessible forms to examine taste, identity and social division.

Sarah Lucas: everyday objects, sex and the Young British Artists

From early London exhibitions to representing Britain in Venice, Sarah Lucas has made blunt humour and familiar materials tools for examining gender, bodies and everyday life.

Jake and Dinos Chapman: art, provocation and the grotesque

The British brothers built a collaborative practice around unsettling imagery, dark humour and questions about how art confronts violence.

Maggi Hambling: painting, sculpture and the art of public debate

From portraits and North Sea paintings to the contested public sculptures Scallop and A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, Maggi Hambling has made art that invites a response.

Rose Wylie: the painter who makes unlikely images belong together

From Kent art student to Royal Academician, Rose Wylie built a distinctive practice from everyday life, popular culture and an openness to imperfection.

Paul Nash: war, landscape and the modern British imagination

From the Western Front to Avebury and the skies of the Second World War, Nash made landscapes carry the weight of history and memory.

Stanley Spencer: Cookham, war and the work of resurrection

The English painter made his Thames-side home the setting for biblical visions, while his wartime pictures found meaning in ordinary acts of care and labour.

John Constable: painting the places he knew

From the River Stour to the Royal Academy, Constable made the weather, light and working landscapes of Suffolk central to a new kind of British art.

William Blake: poet, printmaker and visionary artist

From illuminated books to the unfinished illustrations for Dante, Blake made poetry and image inseparable in a body of work that outlasted the neglect he faced in his lifetime.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: painting, poetry and the Pre-Raphaelites

A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti made a career of bringing literature and painting into conversation, from medieval verse to portraits that helped shape the Aesthetic movement.

David Hockney: painting, perspective and the freedom to experiment

From Bradford and the Royal College of Art to California, Yorkshire landscapes and digital drawing, Hockney made curiosity across media central to a long artistic career.

Henry Moore: sculpture, public space and a lasting legacy

From Castleford to international commissions, Moore reshaped modern sculpture through monumental figures, drawings and a foundation devoted to the visual arts.

Barbara Hepworth: sculpture shaped by form and space

From Wakefield to St Ives, Barbara Hepworth transformed modern sculpture through abstraction, pierced forms and works made for public places.

Sir Joshua Reynolds: portraiture, ambition and the Royal Academy

From Devonshire apprentice to the first president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds reshaped British portrait painting and argued for the status of art.

Thomas Gainsborough: portraitist and painter of landscapes

From Suffolk scenes to fashionable portraits in Bath and London, Gainsborough joined close observation with a fluid, distinctive technique.

Francis Bacon: the painter who made the human figure unsettling

Born in Dublin and established in London, Francis Bacon built a distinctive post-war career around distorted figures, recurring motifs and the psychological force of paint.

John Everett Millais: from Pre-Raphaelite rebel to Royal Academy president

A child prodigy and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais made some of Victorian Britain’s most closely observed paintings before turning to portraits, landscapes and illustration.

William Holman Hunt: detail, faith and the Pre-Raphaelites

A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt made paintings in which close observation of the world carried intricate moral and religious meaning.

Edward Burne-Jones: painting, design and the medieval imagination

The Birmingham-born artist joined Pre-Raphaelite imagery to a wide-ranging practice in painting, stained glass, books and decorative arts.

L. S. Lowry: the industrial landscapes of northern England

From Pendlebury mills to Salford’s galleries, Laurence Stephen Lowry made the changing streets and working lives of North West England the subject of a distinctive body of art.

J. M. W. Turner: light, landscape and a changing Britain

From architectural draughtsman to Royal Academician, Turner transformed landscape painting by bringing light, weather and modern industry into view.

Rachel Whiteread: giving form to absence

From the demolished House in east London to public commissions in Britain and abroad, Whiteread’s casts make familiar spaces newly visible.

Chris Ofili: painting, materials and a changing British art scene

From Manchester and London art schools to the Turner Prize and the British Pavilion in Venice, Ofili has built a distinctive career across continents.

Damien Hirst: art, death and the making of a public spectacle

From the student exhibition Freeze to a record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, Hirst made contemporary art a subject of public argument.

Gilbert & George: Performance, Pictures and the City

The artists made their shared identity part of their work, from The Singing Sculpture to large-scale pictures engaging with urban life and taboo subjects.

Peter Blake: Pop art, popular culture and the power of collage

From Dartford to the Sgt. Pepper sleeve, Blake brought images from everyday life into British art and made album design part of his story.

Bridget Riley: painting the movement of sight

From precise black-and-white patterns to colour-rich canvases, the English painter made the act of looking part of the work.

Richard Hamilton: Pop Art and the images of modern life

From a post-war collage of consumer goods to political paintings and experimental printmaking, Hamilton made art from the visual language of his age.

Lucian Freud: the painter who made looking an act of attention

From early, finely drawn portraits to monumental studies of flesh, Freud spent six decades painting people, animals and rooms from life.