English art England's earliest artistic traditions were shaped by invading forces. The Anglo-Saxons had an enduring influence. Their most notable achievement came with the Bayeux tapestry. The Church remained the dominant patron of the arts until the arrival of Hans Holbein at the court of Henry VIII. In the 17th century, Rubens and Van Dyck worked in the courts of James I and Charles I. A native tradition emerged in the 18th century, with William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough. The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) was founded in 1768, and Joshua Reynolds was the first president. In the 19th century, England's two most influential artists were J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. The work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood bridged Romanticism and symbolism, while William Morris was a seminal influence on the Arts and Crafts Movement. Major 20th-century figures were Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon. Modern English sculptors, including Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, exerted a widespread influence.

English architecture Between the 6th and the 17th centuries, there were at least five distinctive styles of English architecture: Saxon, Norman, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque. England was influenced by European trends in architecture towards the end of their development. For example, Inigo Jones brought his revolutionary Renaissance ideas relatively late to the 17th-century Stuart court, and Christopher Wren introduced Baroque forms to England at the end of his career. The Georgian period (1702–1830) subdivides into English Baroque, Palladianism, and neo-classicism. In the 19th century, the Victorian age marked an earnestness and solidity of architecture, while the Great Exhibition (1851) paved the way for modernism. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement encouraged purity of design in the late 19th century, a concept which was maintained in the early 20th-century work of Lutyens and Charles Voysey. In the late 20th century, the movements of modernism and post-modernism, in particular the work of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, has been challenged by proponents of more classical styles.