United Kingdom and Ireland

About

Around 800, monks in Ireland and Britain painted the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels with spiralling knots and interlaced beasts. Elizabethan courtiers wore portrait miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard, and 18th-century portraitists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds served a wealthy elite. John Constable's The Hay Wain (1821) and J. M. W. Turner's storms made landscape a serious art, and in the 1860s Julia Margaret Cameron took soft-focus photographic portraits. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement championed handmade design.

In the 20th century, Ireland's Jack B. Yeats painted in loose, thick colour, while Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth carved abstract forms. Dublin-born Francis Bacon painted screaming, twisted figures, Lucian Freud painted flesh with unsparing attention, and Richard Hamilton helped invent Pop. David Hockney from Bradford and Bridget Riley followed, before Damien Hirst's generation emerged in the late 1980s.