ABSTRACT
Art is supposed to know no frontiers, but the pictorial arts were slow to cross the English ChanneL Until the mid-fourteenth century English monastic artists were up to continental standards in the minor art ofillumination, but then the links were broken by the Hundred Years' War. Until the eighteenth century there was no national art; not one great native artist before Hogarth. Pictures and painters had to be imported, mainly from the Low Countries, occasionalJy from Prance, seldom from Italy. Rome was thc artistic capital ofthe world, but such influences as percolated through were second-or third-hand. The history of early English art would make abrief chapter, but for architecture.
