Overview

The genre of British landscape painting, which flourished in the first half of the 19th century, has grown to become a prized international export. In 2015, the Getty Center in Los Angeles hosted an exhibition of Joseph Mallord William (J.M.W.) Turner (1775-1851), the first major display of his paintings on the West Coast of the United States. Producing some of the most innovative, albeit challenging visions of the British landscape, Turner's paintings continually command extraordinarily high prices at auction, due to their rarity. THE idea of development has played, for considerably more than half a century, and still plays, a large part in all discussions about art. And it is a very useful and at the same time a very dangerous idea; useful because with its aid you can prove anything you have a mind to, and dangerous, because it conceals all sorts of latent suggestions, vague presuppositions, and lurking misconceptions, and thus misleads and beguiles the unwary. The most insidious and dangerous of these suggestions is its connexion with the ideas of progress or advance. The dictionaries, indeed, give progress as one of the synonyms of development, and amongst the synonyms of progress I find advance, attainment, growth, improvement, and proficiency. So that as soon as we begin to connect the idea of development with the history of art we find ourselves committed, before we quite realize what we are doing, to the view that the latest productions of art are necessarily the best. If art develops, it necessarily grows, improves, and advances and the history of art becomes a record of the steps by which primitive work has passed into the fully developed art of the present; the latest productions being the most valuable because they sum up in their triumphant complexity all the tentative variations and advances of which time and experience have approved.

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