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Lecture: 'Pevsner and Englishness'
the challenge he set himself as an in-comer was to identify the essence of England and the English. This lecture explores his Reith Lectures on the ‘Englishness of English Art’, and the characteristics he attributed to his adopted countrymen and to their art: humour, informality, naturalism, matter-of-factness, rationalism and reticence in the expression of fantasy or religious feeling, from the Luttrell Psalter and the Perpendicular parish church to Hogarth, Blake and the English landscape garden.
Pevsner was reared as an art historian on the idea of national character in art. Part of
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