This review of The Foreign Invention of British Art: From Renaissance to Enlightenment by Leslie Primo is from the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
What if British art is not entirely British? That is the provocative question driving Leslie Primo’s The Foreign Invention of British Art. The author compellingly argues that immigrant artists created the British school of painting across four centuries, fundamentally challenging our understanding of national artistic traditions. Through 11 chronological chapters spanning Tudor to Georgian England, Primo’s central insight is both simple and radical: what matters is where art was produced, not the birthplace of its maker. This reframing serves as both historical corrective and contemporary warning about the selective amnesia that shapes cultural identity.
Primo distinguishes between ‘British school’ and ‘British style’ through the lives and works of great foreign artists. Hans Holbein transformed Tudor court portraiture, shaping our visual understanding of the period. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi introduced baroque theatricality. Rubens elevated both the social status of artists and created the Banqueting House ceiling as an artistic-political statement. Van Dyck’s aristocratic portraits thoroughly integrated European values into English visual culture. Together, these foreign talents created what we now mistake for quintessentially British traditions.
As the Irish playwright and plantation owner Richard Steele observed in 1712, portraiture ‘is nowhere so well performed as in England’. Yet Steele himself sat for German-born Godfrey Kneller. This reveals how foreign and local traditions had become so seamlessly woven together that supposed British excellence was imbued with Continental expertise.
Primo’s treatment of Marcus Gheeraerts demonstrates his skill at bringing lesser-known artists to general audiences while exploring cultural negotiation. Gheeraerts, arriving as a Protestant refugee child from Bruges, actively sought integration, becoming a denizen and proving himself an acute observer of Elizabethan society. His portraits of women evolved from Holbein’s psychological penetration to something more concerned with representing the status of the sitters rather than their individual characters. Works such as Barbara Gamage, Lady Sidney with her Six Children and the Ditchley portrait show how portraiture became the representation – literally the re-enactment – of social and individual identities. Many such treasures survive in local collections, including the portrait of Ann Fanshawe at Valence House Museum.
The career of Daniel Mytens demonstrates how foreign artists could become integrated while remaining vulnerable to professional displacement. Like Gheeraerts, he became a denizen and was awarded a generous annuity under James I. His two portraits of James Hamilton – one from 1623 when the sitter was 17, another six years later – perfectly illustrate his artistic flexibility. The earlier work masters Antonis Mor’s exquisite handling of black-on-black but suffers from stiffness, with the costume seeming to wear the sitter. The later portrait reveals Mytens painting à la Van Dyck, having absorbed newer techniques and trends after a sojourn on the Continent. Yet when Van Dyck arrived as an unbeatable rival, Mytens was forced to return to the Netherlands – a stark reminder that even royal protection and citizenship could not guarantee security against superior foreign skill.
William Hogarth’s career contains the cultural contradictions that Primo identifies as central to British artistic psychology. His Marriage A-la-Mode series, with its mock-French title, includes references to Italian art – copies of Correggio’s Jupiter and Io and Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede. It satirises the Continental excess also enjoyed by the English upper classes the artist so desperately wanted to join. Here was an artist consciously defining British identity against foreign influence while remaining thoroughly shaped by European models.
The 18th century presents more nuanced challenges as Great Britain emerged as both political entity and colonial power after the 1707 Act of Union. The book’s institutional culmination comes through Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffman, two founders of the Royal Academy. Primo’s treatment of Reynolds focuses on a single painting – the Portrait of Mai – exploring how European-trained British artists reimagined colonial subjects according to classical Western ideals. Even this supposed pinnacle of Britishness depended entirely on Continental Grand Tour training and European artistic conventions.
Kauffman’s involvement with the Royal Academy represents the capstone to Primo’s argument. This Swiss artist helped establish Britain’s premier art institution, having been invited to join the founding group alongside Mary Moser. Primo demonstrates how Kauffman’s neoclassical style and international education brought European sophistication to British art, raising the nation’s standing on the Continent.
Following the example of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Primo organises his book through biographical narratives. Individual artists’ stories remain digestible for general audiences while maintaining authority, though the biographical framework occasionally constrains deeper thematic development. Primo avoids overwhelming readers with over-specialised sources, instead favouring readily available publications. The result keeps the writer accountable while ensuring academic tools enable rather than intimidate.
The book’s greatest strength lies in its contemporary relevance. Primo demonstrates that the finest achievements in British painting resulted from cultural assimilation rather than native genius, challenging comfortable assumptions about the purity of the national character. Writing for an informed general readership – students, collectors, museum professionals and art enthusiasts – Primo illuminates both art history and cultural politics, reminding us that Britain’s artistic legacy, like its society, has always been enriched by those who crossed its borders in search of opportunity and recognition.
The Foreign Invention of British Art: From Renaissance to Enlightenment by Leslie Primo is published by Thames & Hudson.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
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