their ideal was to keep close to the exact photographic truth but to render it with a vigorous , personal handling of the paint , which gave it a character not possessed by a photograph . at the end of the nineteenth century the leading portrait painters in Britain included Sargent , John Lavery and the veteran Watts , while in landscape Alfred East and D Y Cameron were among the leaders . but a kind of work that was particularly typical of this period was inspired , not by the French impressionists , but by a group who preceded them in France , called the plein air ( open air ) School . these plein airists chose to paint their pictures on the spot - not in the studio . they believed in working direct from nature , out of doors . those British painters who tried to follow these ideals found themselves in difficulties with the British climate , for the climate of France is much more suitable to long hours of painting out of doors . however , they found a solution by moving to the mildness of Cornwall , in the south-west , to live . there , in such places as Penzance and Newlyn , colonies of painters settled . Stanhope Forbes and Frank Bramley represented faithfully scenes from the lives of the Cornish fishermen . Henry La Thangue and George Clausen also found , in the everyday life of humble folk , their favourite subjects . we can see many pictures by British artists , as well as those of the more recent foreign painters , at the Tate Gallery in London , which was opened in 1897 - an important event for art in Britain . this gallery was the generous gift of Henry Tate , the sugar merchant , who was made a baron by Queen Victoria just before he died , as a mark of the gratitude of the nation . Queen Victoria herself died in 1901 , and by that time the influence of the impressionists was being felt strongly in Britain . painters like Lucien Pissarro , Wilson Steer , Spencer Gore and Sickert were working in a fully impressionist way , and this kind of painting was at last becoming accepted by the British public in spite of the constant prejudice against new things in art . so the pioneer work of Constable and Turner , having been nurtured on foreign soil , echoed back to their native land after more than half a century had passed . however , by that time a new war had been raging in Paris for some time , where the post-impressionists were attacking the ideas of the impressionists , though once again it was some time before this new conflict spread to Britain . the impressionists , in their devotion to light , had tended to become quite indifferent to the objects in their pictures . the post-impressionists felt that this impartiality was itself a limiting thing . they held that it was the painter &apos;s feelings about a scene that should be expressed , not just the light that reflected from the scene . with this in view they permitted themselves to exaggerate any quality which they found exciting - they claimed the right to distort the facts according to their own feelings . in doing so these painters finally abandoned all attempt to compete with the camera . they turned their back on realism and threw overboard all their time-honoured traditions . many painters still continued to represent nature in the traditional way , of course . such painters are called academic , because in general they keep to the ideals of the old academies , which have tended to oppose any new movements in painting . we still have many such academic painters today , and they will continue ; but gradually the British public is accepting the other kind - those who feel that a painter &apos;s job is to abandon the task of representing nature in a literal , realistic way and to explore beyond the region of actual appearances . this breaking away from accepted standards in painting has usually been brought about by small groups of young painters who have shared the same ideals and given each other encouragement and help . these groups , as they have arisen one after another , have been regarded by most older painters as dangerous rebels and have been outcasts , excluded from all established groups such as the royal academy . however as time goes on they have managed to convert many of their fellow-artists and finally the general public to their new ideas , which have then lost their novelty and no longer appear so shocking and outrageous , but are finally regarded as quite traditional and old fashioned . these rebel painters by then will have grown old and their style may have come to be regarded as sufficiently respectable for them to be themselves elected to the royal academy and other societies which once rejected them . they then tend , in their turn , to oppose the newer groups whose ideas and methods are more modern still . thus the old-established art societies , and particularly the royal academy , have been constantly rejecting and thwarting new groups of young rebels as they have come into being one after another . this has tended to lessen the prestige of the royal academy in the eyes , first of many painters , and eventually of the general public . it is still important and has great influence , but that influence is less than it once was . on the other hand various groups in turn , such as the new English art club , the Camden Town group and the London group , have organised exhibitions which have been more vigorous and exciting than the academy itself and have often attracted more attention . recently there have been a number of painters who could have become associates of the royal academy and finally academicians , but have preferred to remain outside , for they wanted to be regarded as advanced and unorthodox in their work and not to become associated with any society which might be considered old fashioned and hidebound . it is really rather surprising how well the royal academy has managed to adjust itself to changing styles and ideals in art , considering how it is organised . painters , before they are elected as associates or academicians have nearly always been exhibiting for some years and are therefore no longer young men , so the A.R.A.&apos;s and R.A.&apos;s are , on the whole , middle-aged or elderly . at that age people tend to become somewhat set in their ways . what is remarkable is not so much that the royal academy should have remained distinctly academic , but that it should have shown so much tolerance as it has to the younger men . since the days of the impressionists the world of art has grown much smaller . rapid communications have broken down the national barriers that previously gave painters in Britain a certain amount of isolation . art has thus become much more international . Paris has continued as the focus-point of change in art . here the new ideas have mostly originated , but they have spread much more quickly than in previous periods . in the past fifty years or so we have seen a number of isms , following each other in quick succession - cubism , futurism , fauvism , surrealism and others . these movements have mostly consisted in the exaggeration of some single factor in painting - some factor that has been part of the stock-in-trade of painters from the first - and enlarging this to become the whole . by discarding all the other factors , or most of them , this then becomes the sole interest of the painter . to take a single instance , cubism consisted in the exaggeration of the geometric characteristics of natural forms . there have always been painters who enjoyed the squareness or roundness of things , and have tended in consequence to exaggerate the squareness of an elbow or a cliff edge and the roundness of a forehead or a hilltop at the expense of other aspects of objects . the Cubists took this to the limit , reducing every form to its simplest , geometric counterpart - making human figures , trees , hills and everything else into arrangements of cubes , spheres and cylinders . of course , in order to do this they had to deny themselves nearly every quality other than geometric forms ; but that is the nature of an ism in art . many British painters have been influenced by cubism , among them Wyndham Lewis , Paul Nash , Edward Wadsworth and William Roberts . another characteristic of painting in recent times is the repeated turning back for inspiration to early or primitive artistic traditions . this is not just the kind of home sickness for simpler ways which we have seen already , among the pre-Raphaelites for instance . no doubt this feeling enters into it , but there is more to it than that . it is part of a questing for new purpose and aim in art . of course there are still many painters who are content to continue working in the academic way , developing new variations within the tradition of more or less descriptive painting . but there is a growing number who have become dissatisfied with this . they have come to feel that realistic painting has run its course and that the whole of that road has been thoroughly explored and no further progress is possible . there is no feeling of adventure for them in this field , no anticipation of new discovery , and without this a painter &apos;s work becomes unbearable drudgery . unless he feels that he can improve , he must either give up or go back and start again on a new route . that is just what many painters have been doing in recent years . they can not beat the camera at its own work and they can not improve on the work of the great realistic painters before them , so they go back along the route of painting of the past in the hope of finding some side-track branching off , which will open up into a royal road to new achievements and exciting discoveries . so the modern painters have often taken the ancient Greeks or Mexicans , or perhaps the more recent carvers of west Africa , or the Fiji Islands as their inspiration , just as explorers in a strange land will employ local guides . after all , there have been artists in the world for nearly fifty thousand years , but painters have been working in the academic style for only about the last six hundred years , and most of that time in only one part of the world - western Europe . this academic painting is a recent , very wonderful episode if we consider it against the whole of art history . it is like one short act in a long performance ; and while painters in Europe have been perfecting their own tradition , there were many other artistic traditions , both past and present , about which they were very ignorant . all these alien styles were available to help them when they felt the need to make a new beginning . some artists have found a new path in their work by abandoning subject-matter entirely . they have taken this much further than Whistler and the impressionists did , and represent nothing in their pictures , employing only purely abstract shapes . Ben Nicholson is the best known of the British abstract painters . many painters , in quite recent times , feel more and more out of tune with modern society . they feel that the world today belongs to science and machines and has no place for art - that everywhere a falsely high value is placed on material things , and the mind and spirit of man is being neglected . some of them , especially certain groups abroad , have expressed in their pictures the frustration and dissatisfaction which they feel . at times such painters have gone far beyond the satire of Hogarth and Rowlandson , and have held mankind up to derision in their canvases , depicting humanity as distorted by corruption and lunacy . as usual , these new movements have mostly been in existence for some time on the continent before they reached Britain ; and when they have been seen here it has often been only in a modified form . but a great deal of the art of today in this country has been affected by them . the recent tendency to turn away from realism in painting has been made easier because photography has now relieved painters of much of their previous task of recording facts and portraying people and places . 