Excerpt from Illustrated Catalogue of a Loan Collection of Portraits of English Historical Personages Who Died Between 1714 and 1837: Exhibited in the Examination Schools, Oxford, April and May, 1906<br><br>HE two exhibitions of Historical Portraits already held by the University Of Oxford brought the history of painting in England down to an important point of departure in the history of British art. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century art in England had produced little, which could be called original or indigenous, except portraiture, and that was based on formulas set in the time of the Tudors by the painters of the Netherlands, in the time of the Stuarts by Van Dyck, and in later days by the painters of Holland, or those of the decadent Italian school and their imitators in the academic schools Of Paris.<br><br>But from these borrowed and scarcely flickering ashes of art a new era was to spring. The origin is best described in the rough and ready words of the engraver, George Vertue, to whose diligence, as a chronicler of art-matters, nearly all the knowledge of this period Of art in England is due.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.