Apart from English Landscape Artists of the 18th/19th century, there isn't much British art. Why is this?
There's no good way to answer this question, because the premise it's based on is extremely false. Why do you think there are "so few British paintings in history"? Here is the page on ArtUK, a website for art held in public collections in the UK, for British artists - there are 6,831 of them listed. Some particularly famous ones include:
Possibly you're counting Turner as a landscape artist, but these others are all portraitists and painters of scenes. They are also "high art" in the sense that their paintings were and are accepted as excellent, desirable work by members of the elite. Artwork from before the eighteenth century also existed in certain quantities, though the artists were often brought in from the Low Countries (e.g. Peter Lely, Anthony Van Dyck) and they were typically portraits of elites as well - pre-photograph, a painting was of course the only way to memorialize yourself or a loved one, or show a person's image to another person, which is why they were also extremely popular in France, Spain, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia, and Italy.
I think that you're partly just unaware of the huge amount of art that was made in Britain in the early modern period, but underneath that you may be asking about the development of the Italian Renaissance/Rinascimento. It began in the cities of Northern Italy, politically separate entities with their own dialects, customs, and systems of governance, which did not get along with each other. In the mid-late middle ages (the twelfth through thirteenth centuries) these cities came to be dominated by an elite class of merchants and bankers - families "in trade", who earned lots and lots of money through their professions. These elites desired to take on luxurious, aristocratic lifestyles, and reinvested their wealth into architecture (palazzi), as well as the patronage of artists, writers, and poets in order to give themselves the standing of the landed aristocracy, and then to compete with each other. The writers and poets (such as, famously, Dante and Petrarch) first began to emphasize a shared Italian culture and identity through using the vernacular dialect of Tuscany rather than the international Latin and using their own poetic forms rather than the French/Provençal ones; they also promoted interest in "pure" historical documents from the Roman Empire, which then led to a more general interest in Roman culture and art, and the use of Classical subjects in art and literature when they would have previously been seen as pagan and inappropriate. The upper classes of other regions did not have the same wealth at that time, or the same need to compete and prove their status, so for some time Italy was at the vanguard of "high art culture". By the early fifteenth century, though, elites and artists in other cultures were starting to get in on the game, and 1500 is generally regarded as the beginning of the "Northern" Renaissance. However, the English section of this Northern Renaissance, going through the philosophical and religious conflicts of the Reformation instead of building up and spending great fortunes on new palaces that needed outfitting, was more focused on literature and poetry than the paintings of allegorical or Classical subjects associated with Renaissance high art, and it's not until the early seventeenth century that English visual art began to flourish in the same way as the rest of Europe.
Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.
Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" The latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
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