"The field covered by this volume includes the work and influence of foreign-born painters such as Holbein and Van Dyck as well as native masters from Gower and Hilliard to Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Sandby. We can follow step by step the development and flowering of British painting, and can compare, for example, the work of the English Sir Joshua Reynolds with the Scottish Allan Ramsay. Portrait and landscape, history piece, miniature, water colour, there is a record of them all. The text is both scholarly and eminently readable and the illustrations comprise well known examples of British painting and others seldom or never before reproduced between the covers of a book. This new edition includes an introductory essay by Michael Kitson bringing readers up-to-date with the latest approaches to the period, as well as colour plates and a revised bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.