Peter Fuller has been hailed as Britain's most dynamic and controversial art critic since Herbert Read. In his articles in the Sunday Telegraph, and particularly in Modern Painters, the journal he founded and edited, Fuller drew attention to the neglected but flourishing legacy of the British Romantics. To lose touch with our roots, he believed, was to lose touch with our basic humanity. This study begins with a series of lectures in which Fuller outlines his ideas and his debt to John Ruskin. Ensuing essays examine the nature of the British tradition, looking at work from Reynolds and Stubbs to Auerbach and Hockney. In particular, Fuller is concerned to reassess British modernists such as Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, John Piper and David Bomberg. The final section of the book focuses on contemporary British artists, some well-known, such as Lucien Freud or R.B. Kitaj; others, like David Blackburn or William Tyler, whom Fuller believed to have been unjustly neglected. Other books by Peter Fuller include Beyond the Crisis in Art, Art and Psychoanalysis and Theoria - Art and the Absence of Grace.