Ruskin uses the term 'English School' to describe paintings separately displayed in several rooms of the National Gallery under that title. Foreign pictures, were displayed in rooms for: 'The Florentine School', 'The Venetian and Allied Schools', 'The Later Italian Schools', 'The Dutch and Flemish Schools', 'The French School', etc. In part, the term was used because there were also national galleries for Scotland and for Ireland. The notion of an 'English School' was much discussed, bearing in mind the range of styles and approaches adopted by English artists and the historical influence from the Continent. Commentators discussed the absence of any kind of uniform style, though clearly various small groups were easily identified, e.g. 'Norwich School' and 'Pre-Raphaelite School'. However certain underlying purposes were identified within the 'English School' such as a 'seriousness of purpose' and an emphasis upon a 'moral element'. Ruskin noted in 1883 in The Art of England, Lecture 111:
in England you may take Sir Joshua and Gainsborough for not only the topmost, but the hitherto total, representatives; total, that is to say, out of the range of landscape, and above satire and caricature.. .They do it not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school. ( Works, 33.311)
Ernest Cesneau, traces the development of the 'English School' and suggests that :'The origin of the English School cannot by any means be alleged to be lost in the mists of antiquity, since it dates only from the second quarter of the eighteenth century' ( Cesneau, The English School of Painting p. xxxix). He argues: 'It is from Hogarth... that English painting may truly said to date' ( Cesneau, The English School of Painting p. xiii). Ruskin comments in the Preface to this volume that: 'It is good for us to hear this acute and kindly Frenchman assuring us that we have some metal of our own, and interpreting to his own countrymen some of the insular merits of a school which hitherto has neither recommended itself by politeness, confirmed itself by correctness nor distinguished itself by imagination' ( Cesneau, The English School of Painting p. ix). See also Ruskin and British Art.