The Tate Britain collection starts with a 1545 portrait by John Bettes, an English follower of Hans Holbein. The Protestant Reformation during Henry VIII’s reign resulted in the replacement of rich medieval religious art with secular pictorial images. Flemish artists fleeing religious persecution became the most important painters in England during the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I. Anthony Van Dyck, the most sought-after portraitist of his time, settled in London as court painter to the great art collector Charles I. In the latter 17th century, variety in subject matter began to appear in painting, such as landscape, animal and still-life.

William Hogarth’s career marked the beginning of a great flowering of painting in Britain, both in the extension of the tradition of portraiture with originality and the introduction of art rooted in English culture and life. Thomas Gainsborough, a supremely naturally gifted artist, painted some of the most ravishing portraits in art history, yet privately attached more importance to landscape painting. Portraiture was still the livelihood of most painters and Gainsborough placed his sitters in idyllic landscape settings. The development of topographical and classical landscape was enhanced by the arrival in England of Canaletto.

The foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, with the outstanding portraitist of the Grand Style Joshua Reynolds as its first president, brought artists the advantages of royal patronage, proper professional training and annual public exhibitions of a high standard. The achievement of George Stubbs in painting animals with unprecedented naturalism, based on thorough anatomical knowledge, elevated sporting painting to the highest level in art. Landscape painting grew in popularity, reaching a pinnacle in the early 19th century in the remarkable work of two great and very different painters JMW Turner and John Constable.

Tate Britain is home to the Turner Bequest, a collection of about 300 oil paintings and 19,000 watercolours and drawings, bequeathed by the artist to the nation in his will. The Clore Gallery was built in 1987 for the purpose of housing the collection, according to Turner’s request for a special gallery to preserve and display his work. Turner, arguably the most significant British artist, created an entirely new way of rendering natural atmospheric effects, his pre-occupations being in particular with light effects and the dynamism of nature. He revolutionised the tradition of highly defined detail in art, bridging the gap to Modernism.

A shift in artistic attitudes from the late 18th century onwards led to increasingly imaginative, dramatic and emotive paintings, with artists questioning the established rules of art and taste. The Bible, classical literature and authors such as Shakespeare and Milton were used as a source for subjects, via which romantic artists expressed their personal feelings and visions. William Blake, the great eccentric genius of English art, created extraordinary images based on the irrational imagination. Other examples are Henry Fuseli’s dreamlike paintings, John Martin’s sublime fantastical landscapes and Richard Dadd’s fascinating fairy subjects.

Artists working in the mid-19th century often used their paintings to address social, political and topical issues, such as the role of women in society and class divisions, typically painted in a highly realistic style. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, met in 1848 at the Royal Academy Schools and took their name from a desire to emulate painters before Raphael. Their work is characterised by serious, often moral, subject matter, highly elaborate symbolism, sharply defined forms, meticulous detail and the outdoor study of nature.

The French Impressionist revolution in art was introduced into Britain by James McNeill Whistler, his daringly individual art focusing on expression through purely visual and aesthetic means. The next generation of British artists, such as John Singer Sargent, Walter Richard Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer, took up the practice of Impressionism, painting everyday subject matter, completing pictures out of doors and rendering natural light effects with luminous, bright colours. Independent and highly individual artists, for example Augustus and Gwen John, developed personal, sensitively observed realism in their portraits.

A vigorous avant-garde developed in the period immediately preceding and following the outbreak of the First World War. Artists absorbed the transformation of art resulting from the dynamic movements of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism. The Bloomsbury painters embraced these influences in their rich and varied designs, intense colours and emphasis on bold form. Sculptors pioneered direct carving and truth to materials, inspired by non-Eurorpean sculpture, whilst painters experimented with abstracted geometric forms. Stanley Spencer’s visionary art remained untouched by developments in modern art.

Between the wars, London became an international art centre, as host to many influential artists from the Continent. Henry Moore inherited the new tradition of modern sculpture founded by Epstein and Gaudier-Breska and developed it with such a power of imagination and fertility of invention that he emerged as one of the greatest of all modern sculptors. Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson, who moved to St Ives in Cornwall at the outbreak of the Second World War, developed towards pure abstraction, creating poetic, sensuous, lyrical works in which the quality of the materials is central to the finished piece.

The War Artists Committee commissioned artists to record aspects of the war, for example Paul Nash, whose imaginative powers produced extraordinary, memorable, visionary landscapes. Francis Bacon became one of the major figures of post-war art, his anguished vision of man taking the the form of disturbing bestial images, powerful equivalents for feelings. Lucian Freud’s distinguished reputation is as a most significant figurative painter and one of Britain’s finest portraitists, whilst L.S. Lowry achieved fame with his entirely personal visions of the people and surroundings of the industrial cities of northern England.

By 1960, Pop Art had become a major movement in British art, with counterparts in Europe and America. Artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney were inspired by the worlds of industry, technology and commerce and of mass entertainment and popular culture, their source material being images from pop music, advertising and packaging. Abstraction dominated Western painting in the 1960’s, including Bridget Riley and Howard Hodgkin as two of the leading British abstract painters. An explosion in sculptural activity pioneered by Anthony Caro and Phillip King witnessed a revolution in form and colour.

Developments in art in recent decades have been in the field of Conceptual Art, characterised above all by an increasing emphasis on the idea content of a work of art and on the process involved in its creation. Increased freedom in the use of media has extended to non-traditional media for fine art such as photography, film, video, words and the artists’s own body. Gilbert and George’s own lives constitute their art, whilst Anthony Gormley makes moulds of himself which become life-size figure sculptures, Anish Kapoor’s art employs archetypal images and Damien Hirst’s is an examination of the processes of life and death.