English Landscape Painters

With its verdant rolling hillsides, quirky seaside villages and red telephone boxes sporadically positioned down country lanes, England possesses truly unique and inimitable landscapes. By boasting such a distinct and beautiful landscape, England has naturally spawned many great landscape painters, whose creations expertly encapsulate the beauty of England on canvas.

The flowering of English landscape painters emerged in the first half of the 1800s, fundamentally generated by one master of English landscape artist, John Constable.

John Constable

Born in Suffolk in 1776, John Constable became one of the major European landscape artists of the nineteenth century. This English Romantic painter’s art was admired by the likes of Gericaultand Delacroix and is even believed to have made a mark on the Impressionists.

Although Constable was deeply influenced by watercolours of Thomas Girtin and the work of Claude Lorrain, in the second decade of the twentieth century the artist considerably altered his method from the realistic agrarian landscapes he was known for, such as the Ploughing Scene in Suffolk (A Summerland) (1814).

In fact, so inspired was John Constable by his surroundings of prolific natural beauty in Suffolk that the area he regularly painted, particularly his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, is now known as “Constable Country.”

John Piper

John Piper is widely cited as being one of the most prominent English landscape painters of the 20^th century. Spending much of his life living at Fawley Bottom in Buckinghamshire,John Piper produced paintings of architecture, landscape and abstract compositions, many of which was inspired by the beauty of Buckinghamshire.
This highly acclaimed British landscapist was particularly known for his romantic landscapes and views of old, ruined churches, castles and stately homes. A good example is Piper’s Covehithe Church (1983), with its playful brushstrokes and almost eerie use of blues, blacks, greens and whites, proficiently depicts how ruined English churches look in the moonlight. In fact so highly regarded have John Piper’s paintings become that Piper is broadly considered to be one of the most significant British artists of the 20^th century.

David Hockney

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century when landscapes became an English speciality, with a buoyant number of professional English landscape painters making an eternal impression on how art subsequently evolved, landscape painting in England still retains its unique allurement today as it did in the 1900s.
One contemporary English landscape artist that is managing to maintain England’s unique natural beauty within an artistic sphere is David Hockney, a contemporary English painter, photographer and stage designer, based in both Bridlington, Yorkshire and in Kensington, London.
Similarly, how John Constable painted the beauty and charm of the Suffolk countryside, Hockney recreates the scenic pleasure out of his window but with an ultra-modern twist – by using an iPad as his canvas.
Whilst many of this era are self-admitted techophobes, Hockney draws the flowers of his English garden on his iPad every morning and endeavours to look at the landscape through a variety of media: oil, charcoal, film and the iPad.