Introduction One of the most important early venues for contemporary British art was established, appropriately enough, at London''s Foundling Hospital. The portraits, landscapes, and history paintings that were donated to the Foundling Hospital from 1746 were intended, at least in part, to encourage support for the nation''s neglected offspring, the pictorial arts. As the upper crust of London society visited the hospital and its neatly dressed orphans, so too could it view ambitious paintings that offered "the public an opportunity of judging whether the English are such indifferent artists, as foreigners, and even the English themselves, pretend," as William Hogarth''s friend Jean-André Rouquet frankly put it. Whether a foundling hospital could raise a healthy and productive school of British art remained an open question. Describing a turn of events as striking as Tom Jones''s novelistic transformation from foundling to legitimate heir, Joshua Reynolds reported twenty-five years later that the arts "flourish here with great vigour, we have as good Artists in every branch of the Art as any other nation can boast . and the King has very seriously taken them under his protection; he has established an Academy which opend [ sic ] the first of January." In a scant quarter century the status of British art had risen from that of a charity case to that of a cherished royal monopoly. How can this transformation be explained? How substantive were these perceived changes, and how much were they the result of clever marketing or hopeful projection? And most important, why did the visual arts become a pressing national concern at this moment in Britain''s history? Joshua Reynolds''s own speculation on the matter, presented in his first discourse to the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts in 1769, remains deeply ingrained in art-historical thinking.

Positing the academy as an "ornament" suitable to Britain''s "greatness," Reynolds emphasized the " slow progression of things, which naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence and power." While Reynolds acknowledged a fact that was obvious to his contemporaries--that culture is integrally related to wealth and power--he was anxious to downplay the significance of immediate social or political levers on the academy''s foundation. What Reynolds crafted in this and subsequent Discourses was a powerful and enduring myth about the progress of British art, in which it emerged in tandem with broad economic change--the nation''s inexorable rise to greatness--while remaining autonomous from immediate political and institutional pressures. Reynolds''s Whiggish art-historical account has undergone significant revision and critique over the years, but the basic parameters and pace of his narrative remain in place. The current art-historical consensus, magisterially established by John Barrell in The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (1986) and David Solkin in Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (1993), maintains that over the course of the long eighteenth century British art underwent a polite and commercial reformation in which an urban bourgeoisie gradually shaped aristocratic culture into its own image. Broadly framed by concepts drawn from social and economic history, the accounts of Barrell and Solkin have enabled the field of British art history to become a vibrant locus for research and publication over the last two decades. There was, however, another art-historical narrative already in circulation by the second half of the eighteenth century in which British art and architecture emerged dramatically onto the national stage, achieving "by one rapid stride" what it had taken Continental rivals centuries to achieve. In this counternarrative the Seven Years'' War (1756-63) occupies a transformative place in British culture.

To take just one example of this narrative''s wide public purchase, an anonymous London resident penned a running history of Britain''s military fortunes across the globe in a conflict yet to be named because it was not yet concluded:The trade of the nation had every year increased; the country abounded with provisions; and the people in general were so wealthy, that many great works, both of public, and private expence, were entered upon, and many of them already finished during the heat of the war. In London, the beautiful building of the Horse-Guards was completed; the admiralty was adorned; the streets were made more commodious by pulling down the old gates; London-bridge, at a vast expence, was new-modelled; and the foundations of another bridge laid at the Blackfriars.This author, like Reynolds, views the arts as an effect of opulence and power, but he is particularly struck by the immediacy of these changes, by the fact that they take place in the "heat of the war." While this passage is focused on architecture, on the infrastructure of an imperial capital, London artists established compelling links between the improvement of London and a commensurate investment in the arts of painting and sculpture. With the inauguration of annual art exhibitions in 1760 and a series of large-scale public works related to the war, London artists capitalized on the public''s mercantile competitiveness and imperial fervor. Early histories of British art make these strategies clear, such as Edward Edwards''s Anecdotes of Painters (1808), which traced public artistic patronage back to the protectionist Anti-Gallican Society, whose "patriotic example greatly stimulated their countrymen to exert their talents in those productions," referring here to painting and sculpture, "which were before almost unknown in Great Britain." Within this paradigm, British artists converted a potent conjunction of mercantile competitiveness and global conquest into a genuinely public commitment to contemporary art. These two art-historical narratives need not be mutually exclusive, and this book entirely endorses the proposition that the development of British art paralleled that of a modernizing economic base over the course of the long eighteenth century.

It attempts to recover, however, the impact of political contingency on artistic production and reception and, more importantly, to reveal the catalyzing effect that the first global war for empire had on a national school of art. In short, it sets the pressing questions of politics, religious affiliation, and empire alongside the social and economic narratives that have dominated earlier accounts. If the current economic model of British art''s development establishes the basic parameters of cultural development over the long eighteenth century, then this account offers a more flexible and dynamic model of cultural change in a more specific chronological frame. It contends that new artistic styles, genres, and formats often emerged in response to immediate political pressures. While Solkin''s Painting for Money demonstrates the extent to which private interests and the division of labor worked against a viable public for British art, this book contends that the military victories of the Seven Years'' War bound the body politic together in a renewed sense of national purpose and identity. The sinews of this body politic were mercantile, military, Protestant, and imperial, for they were the shared aims that knit together a diverse public for art at a uniquely consensual moment in Britain''s history. That many of these sinews strained and snapped in the 1770s, including a mercantilism at odds with state policy and a Protestantism riven by sectarian strife, reinforces the need for a more precise model of cultural development. A recovery of the Seven Years'' War as a major cultural event necessarily entails a reconceptualization of the relation between British artists and the "fiscal-military state.

" According to John Brewer, the fiscal-military state was "dominated by the task of waging war," and the military emerges from his account as Britain''s largest borrower, spender, and employer in the eighteenth century. He also describes a political culture that was weak in despotic power--the formal and legal power to deprive its subjects of their property and liberty--but strong in infrastructural power--the administrative ability to implement the military and governmental powers that it had. Brewer''s recovery of the actual apparatus of British state administration comes at the expense of a Whiggish view of constitutional monarchy and mercantile independence that preferred to downplay the strength and influence of state bureaucracy. This emphasis also highlights a conventional distrust of direct governmental influence in the social and cultural sphere. The Foundling Hospital provides a telling example of the subtle intersection of private philanthropy and state power in the prewar period, and also how private initiatives could be co-opted by the state as the Foundling Hospital became subject to parliamentary decree during the war. The Seven Years'' War challenged London artists to find ways to ally themselves with the fiscal-military state without abrogating their professional independence. While the French Royal Academy of Arts loomed large in artistic debates as the preeminent model of artistic training, ripe for emulation, it also figured as a potentially "despotic" institutional form inimical to Britain''s pluralistic and mercantile culture. The issue was not simply institutional but also representational.

London artists struggled with varying degrees of success, in the works examined in this book, to craft an image of the state that respected Britain''s constitutional arrangements and mercantile ideals in the face of unprecedented military conquest and domestic political upheaval. These struggles thoroughly validate Edmund Burke''s claim that "th.