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Strolling through London, with its handsome bronzes and world-class museums and galleries, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when the city wasn’t an artistic hub. In fact, you don’t have to go back that far to find it. It was only in the past 300 years that London became what it is today: One of the few places that define what “art” even is.

The father of English art (18th century)

You can’t talk about London and painting without talking about William Hogarth (1697–1764), the father of his city’s art scene. Writing for The Guardian, the critic Jonathan Jones went so far as to say that before Hogarth’s rise to fame in the 18th century, “there was not really any such thing as British art.” There were talented painters living in England, of course, but there wasn’t so much a distinctive national style. Hogarth changed that forever. His loud, boisterous engravings and paintings are still laugh-out-loud funny—such as the virtuosic, surprisingly raunchy Marriage A-La-Mode series he completed in 1745.

What was so unique—and uniquely English—about Hogarth’s style? He was as talented a draughtsman as any Italian or French artist, but he had gifts for bawdy physical comedy, and for drawing memorable faces, that no artist of the era could match. He often depicted the crowded, chaotic streets of London, and—just like the streets themselves—his works are packed with bodies, weird faces, and flashes of queasy humor.

The year Hogarth was born, London had a population of half a million people. Within a few decades of his death, that number had doubled. Soon London would become the largest, densest city the world had ever seen. In his work, Hogarth invented a style that mirrored the growth of that city. In the process, he changed the way people thought not just about London, but the concept of a city in general.

Landscapes and smog (19th century)

Not all London artists took after Hogarth. If anything, you could argue that Hogarth inspired his successors to branch out—he’d already depicted the hustle and bustle of modern urban life so brilliantly that there was no point in trying to outdo him.

The 19th century is often described as a Golden Age for English painters, many if not most of whom lived and worked in London. The Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire brought enormous wealth to the city, creating new patrons with money to spend on paintings. One beneficiary of these changes was J.M.W. Turner, the painter who loomed above his English contemporaries much as Hogarth had a century earlier. In The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons 16th October 1834, Turner brought to life one of the most eventful days in London’s history. But instead of concentrating on the city’s clamorous crowds (as Hogarth probably would have), he gives the fire a strange serenity, emphasizing the vast, meteorological scale of the disaster.

It’s a masterful image, one of the finest ever painted by a London artist. But it illustrates something peculiar about English art at the time. A surprisingly small number of English artists directly acknowledged the Industrial Revolution in their work. While Turner, John Constable, John Everett Millais, and their peers painted hundreds of landscapes and portraits, there simply isn’t much comparably great art about the factories, squalid streets, and other harsh realities of life in London. (This is the era of London history that inspired the word “smog,” keep in mind).

In a sense, the peaceful landscapes of 19th-century London art were “about” the nightmare of industrialization. It’s just that the city’s painters, by and large, chose to ignore it.

Intercontinental rivalries (20th century)

Some rivalries never die. London has always had a touchy relationship with Paris, its only real rival in modern European history in terms of size, wealth, and cultural influence. In the 20th century, it must be said, London couldn’t always keep up on the cultural front. At the height of the Modernist era, Paris was home to Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, Dalí, Chagall, Miró, and Calder—practically a who’s who of avant-garde artists. London, at this time, had its share of notable painters, but if you were looking at the vanguard—or retrospectively, at what art textbooks cover—English artists would be conspicuously absent. To quote Jonathan Jones once again: “In the early 20th century, British artists put on modernist clothes but felt terribly uncomfortable in them.”

But it’s not true that 20th-century London stopped producing great artists with a distinctly “London” style. Following the end of World War II, a group of London-born or London-educated painters came to dominate the international stage to a degree not seen since the glory days of the British Empire. The so-called “School of London” included masters like Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Lucian Freud. These painters weren’t really a close-knit group, nor did they all reside in London. As stylistically different as they were, however, they shared a knack for painting faces and bodies in ways that hovered between portraiture and caricature. Consider how much passion Freud gets out of a pair of lips in Head of a Young Irishman (1999) or how grotesque (but believably grotesque!) Bacon makes the human mouth look in his famed “Screaming Pope” series. Hogarth would be proud.