The Rembrandt show made me think about this. I was trying to work out how many great painters we should expect to be alive at any time. Some very rough calculations led me to decide at least one per year was created before the 20th Century. Given the increased population and longevity, there should be quite a few alive at any moment. But I can't think of many. Perhaps that's my self-justifying thinking or just contemporary myopia.
Also I was thinking about how sports people and scientists and other professions are always advancing, getting better, and painters not so much. Artists seem to burst out of art school (especially MAs) and then not get much further (once again I'm open to the idea that this is my jaundiced nostalgia). Less successful (in career terms) artists don't seem to improve much even though they beaver away.
I've come up with two ideas for why this might be so:
1. Artists do not expose themselves to constructive or really any criticism once they've left art school. Even those artists in the public eye are just discussed in nonsensical art theory terms, or the PR/content based bullshit of newspapers (though they get more feedback) which is helpful). Because of the idea of the uniqueness and individuality of the lone artist, they cut themselves off from feedback/improvement/coaching, unlike most other successful people.
2. (this is more tenuous) Figurative painters usually work from photos. Before the 20th Century artists didn't. Something about the process of conversion of sight/imagination is lost when artists work from the flat (therefore already painting-like) photo. This is by no means an argument in favour of everyone painting Freudy life paintings, just a possible reason for the lack of good figurative painting. Looking or thinking about 3D things and then painting them is very different from rendering photos.