ABSTRACT
The year 1870 may be used as a convenient punctuation mark in the history of British painting, as of so much else. It was in 1870 that Ruskin began his lectures at Oxford and that Poynter began to teach at the newly-founded Slade School in London, bringing with him a Frenchman, Alphonse Legros, to act as master of painting. In 1877 Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery, hanging Whistler’s Falling Rocket upon his walls and provoking Ruskin to his celebrated libel. Nine years later the New English Art Club held its first exhibition at Colnaghi’s. The 1870s sees the final and complete extinction of the Germanic influence in this country, and a growing interest in French painting which continues unabated for the next eighty years. It is necessary also to remember that French painting in the 1870s was not at all like the kind of French painting that we see in a London exhibition of nineteenth-century art.
