The book has an epic sweep – it begins with a Bronze Age drawing of a horse’s head carved into animal bone that was found in a cave at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire and continues up to the emergence of the genius of JMW Turner in the 19th century. Along the way it takes in everything from the 3,000 year old Uffington Horse on the Berkshire Downs (“if Matisse had made something similar in France, it would be one of the artistic wonders of the world”) to pressed metal pilgrim badges. Every time Grosvenor settled on a starting point, he says, “something else drew me further back.”

His end point, he decided, had to be “that moment when you could say a school of distinctive British art exists”. (He hopes there will be a second volume.) Why that took so long is one of the themes of the book. Landscape painting, he suggests, is the major British achievement in the visual arts. “I mention people like Delacroix hailing Constable as the father of French landscape painting. It’s probably a moment where British artists change the normal flow of art across Europe, where for hundreds, thousands, of years we’re importing ideas.”