In Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), Peter Ackroyd traces the “London imagination” as far back as Chaucer’s contemporary William Langland (1332–86). In the 1370s, Langland wrote Piers Plowman, his portrait of a rural visionary, in “a hovel on Cornhill,” near the modern Bank of England. Langland saw Gluttony and Sloth toping in a London tavern, Blake the golden pillars of Jerusalem in the fields of Marylebone and St. John’s Wood. “To hear the music of the stones,” Ackroyd writes, “to glimpse the spiritual in the local and the actual, to render tangible things the material of intangible allegory, all these are at the centre of the London vision.”

In 1976, six hundred years after Langland’s visions, R. B. Kitaj curated an exhibition called “The Human Clay” at London’s Hayward Gallery. Kitaj detected the existence of a “substantial School of London.” He meant it in the geographical sense, rather than the stylistic one. Post-war London was home to a large and significant group of figurative painters, including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, David Bomberg, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff, and Kitaj himself. It also boasted Victor Pasmore, who in the late 1940s exchanged Whistlerian Romanticism for spare abstraction; Richard Hamilton, who made Pop Art before Andy Warhol did; and Bridget Riley, in whose Op Art a Classical austerity almost obscures a debt to the sensuality of Seurat’s chromatic palette. But it was the figurative painters that Kitaj had in mind for the School of