ABSTRACT
Whether there really is such a thing as the Englishness of English art is not an issue addressed in this chapter, which is concerned with the terms on which the claim that there is such a thing could be made. I treat the problem of discovering the characteristics of a national culture in a painting as a part of the process of describing its meaning — whether by recognizing a meaning as immanent within it, or by attributing meaning to it, is for the purposes of this chapter immaterial. And I take it as axiomatic that in order for us to describe the meaning of a picture, of the kind which relates different aspects of it into a statement about its significance, there has to be available a discourse in terms of which that meaning can be described. This essay asks when, and in terms of what discourse, it first became possible to suggest that English paintings might have distinctive qualities of their own, which might contribute to, rather than detract from, their value; and it considers why it came to seem important to make that suggestion. After some fairly lengthy preliminaries, it will get down to arguing that the suggestion was first made by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in writings which, however, and for reasons I will discuss, were remarkably unsuccessful in persuading other writers on painting. 1
