Constable or Lowry: which artist best represents Britain?

Times

17 hours ago

Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting is the country's most significant. The critic Miguel Ángel Cajigal holds that Picasso's Guernica, a powerful (and internationally famous) antiwar canvas, is the obvious contender, and said as much on the radio.
The novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who professed himself 'in shock' at this, countered with Francisco Goya's Fight with Cudgels, a picture of two men viciously slugging it out in the mud, painted in the 1820s. 'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, in what is at the very least a damning indictment of the bad-tempered state of Spanish politics.
That you can perfectly well argue for either of these paintings is something that neither man seems willing to accept. But what does it mean, 'significant'?
Should such a painting 'define' a nation? Should it speak to its psyche, in the way that Pérez-Reverte apparently believes Goya's brutal scene does? Should it be globally famous, like Guernica — or should it simply stop us in our tracks?
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And what, then, would ours be? France has Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, of course. I'm writing this in Scotland — would its be Henry Raeburn's Skating Minister, or does it have to have a stag in it?
For Britain as a whole — whose national dish could reasonably be argued to be chicken tikka masala, a hybrid of cuisines born out of the colonial project — our 'most significant' artwork is a pretty complex question.
Is it Constable's The Hay Wain (1821), evoking a preindustrial view of Britain where a pretty country pub is always just around the corner? Or is that nostalgia, making it unsuitable even if it is something we're sorely given to as a nation?
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If it's impact you're looking for, you could do worse than Mark Wallinger's Turner prizewinning work State Britain (2007), which recreated Brian Haw's 40-metre antiwar protest camp that sat on Parliament Square in Westminster for nearly 10 years. With exhortations for peace and offerings from the public, including children's toys, combined with images of extreme human suffering, it created an environment that allowed viewers to consider the horrors of war — to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Guernica, in a different way, does the same thing.
And Wallinger's work speaks to so much of what we think and know about ourselves. It reminds us of the huge numbers of Britons who turned out to protest against the war in Iraq, and of our affection for the plucky underdog, what the artist called Haw's 'single-minded tenacity'. As an imperfect answer to an unanswerable question, State Britain gets my vote. Nancy Durrant
Compared with France, Italy and Spain, Britain has produced few great painters. We're generally better at writing. But there is something novelistic about the painter William Hogarth, whose pictures tell stories and have something very ungrand and deflationary and British about them. They're also genuinely comic. My favourite is Tête à Tête from Hogarth's series Marriage à la Mode. The marriage is already a disaster — the couple are bored, chaotic, unfaithful and overspending. The despairing butler leaves the room with a sheaf of bills. It's full of novel-worthy detail (the dog pulling the woman's cap out of the husband's pocket, the broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece signifying infidelity). Compare this to the pompous and simpering aristos having their portraits painted in autocratic France at the same time. No country but Britain could have produced a painter as funny, as democratic and as splendidly cynical as Hogarth. James Marriott
Here's old industrial Britain: little undistinguished figures, a couple of children, a trader's cart, smoke rising into the grey sky after another working day. Lowry's Going to the Match is more famous and purposeful, but this evening workforce speaks of modest duty.
So does Lowry himself: more dutiful than happy, but fond of his home region; anonymous in a raincoat, too diffident to accept a knighthood. Made a coronation artist in 1953, he, as usual, just lovingly depicted the crowds, Queen Elizabeth's golden coach half-hidden in the throng. Libby Purves
No painting captures Britain's mixture of pride and melancholy quite like Turner's Fighting Temeraire. The Trafalgar warship is hauled away for scrap, sail giving way to steam. Politicians love it: it's been on the £20 note, quoted in Brexit speeches and wheeled out in essays on decline.
I live near Turner's recently restored house in Twickenham: it's open to the public and you can wander around, retracing his steps, trying to fathom his grumpy genius. He saw beauty that others missed, beauty that's all around. And it's British beauty — the picture of constant renewal. Fraser Nelson
Though painted in a very different style, John Singer Sargent's vast 1919 canvas Gassed is comparable to Picasso's Guernica in its shock impact, tragic power and its depiction of 20th-century warfare's horrific consequences. It also stands alongside Wilfred Owen's bitterly ironic poem Dulce et decorum est as one of the first works of art or literature to capture the ghastly reality of chemical weapons — in this case, a mustard-gas attack that has blinded or poisoned the line of bandaged Tommies staggering along to, probably, a very short and bleak future. Once seen, it's a painting that haunts you all your life. Richard Morrison
The National Gallery's Wilton Diptych is not only this country's most important artwork but its most magical. That we have it at all, one of a handful of English panel paintings to have survived from the Middle Ages, seems akin to necromancy.
Thanks to the Reformation in the 16th century, and the activities of Oliver Cromwell a century after that, the earliest chapters of our art history have largely been taken from us.
Painted by an unknown artist for Richard II towards the end of the 1300s, this folding pair of panels depicts his coronation before a trio of saints and a host of angels, the latter looking like bewinged girl guides. The Wilton Diptych gives a ravishing — and, to be frank, heartbreaking — insight into our collective loss. Anna Murphy
I have chosen Whistlejacket by George Stubbs because a) it is lovely and b) it speaks to my childhood obsession with horses and the fact that for hours I would try — and fail miserably — to draw them (I could just about do the head and neck but never the body and legs, which always resembled those of a panto horse).
Horses were, to me (still are, along with dogs), nature's most beautiful animal creation, and Whistlejacket, rearing magnificently, hoofs pawing the air, and with real, conscious character in his face and eyes, is a pin-up. Stubbs, aka 'Liverpool's Leonardo' because of his anatomical attention to detail, dissecting equine corpses the better to understand their bodies, painted the stallion not in a field or even with another animal but alone, isolated, against a plain yellowish backdrop, almost as though he is in a studio, which is pleasing. It creates a sense that he is as aesthetically worthy of a portrait in his own right as any king, queen or castle. Quite right. Carol Midgley
You would think from the paintings commonly labelled Britain's favourites, from the likes of JMW Turner and John Constable, that the most important things about us are our sea and countryside. But surely the defining thing about this country was the Industrial Revolution. It not only changed our economics, landscape and demographics, it changed the dynamics of the world.
And this is why, for me, the Wolverhampton-born artist Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) is so important. Self-taught, he painted the blast furnaces, coalmines, factories and collieries of the Black Country with the eye of a French impressionist. A landscape that an American consul to Birmingham once described as 'black by day and red by night', and that is said to have been the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Turner captured our light, Constable conveyed the beauty of our land, but a painting such as In the Black Country depicts nothing less than the fire in Britain's soul. Sathnam Sanghera