2. Sculpture.

Apart from traces of decoration on standing stones and the art of Roman occupation, the history of sculpture in England is rooted in the Christian church. Monumental crosses of carved stone, similar to the Celtic crosses of Ireland, represent the earliest sculpture of the Anglo-Saxon Christians. The tradition of relief carving attained its highest expression in the stonework of the Gothic cathedrals. The influence of Renaissance and Baroque sculpture were slow to reach Britain. The most prominent English sculptors are Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who both came from Yorkshire. Nearly a century after Moore’s birth in 1898, his abstract reclining figures remained the dominant images of modern English sculpture.

3. Music.

Britain has several great names in the world of music and composition. But they are not so popular as Bach or Bethhoeven or Chaikovsky. Among them are Arthur Bliss (his major work is “The Colour Symphony”), Benjamin Britten (an English composer, pianist, conductor, public man and outstanding representative of modern English music). Britten played the piano at seven, composed an oratorio at nine and had written a symphony, quarters, and other works by the time he was sixteen. His opera “Peter Grimes” placed Britten among the major composers of England. Ralf Vaughan Wiiliams is another prominent English composer whose compositions include 9 symphonies, concerts for piano, violin and tuba, opera “sir John in Love”, ballets and other works.

4. Pop music.

The British experience of pop music was quite different from the American. There were more holdovers from the music- hall era of pre-War entertainment (rather like vaudeville). Pop crooners and bands tried for all the world to imitate American songsmiths. Sometimes you got a flash of inspiration, and then it was exclusive to British teens alone (like skiffle music---America had none of this!) Then there was the wireless (American English: radio). There were no top-40 AM stations in England, all pounding a pop message to youngsters throughout the States, but rather the benevolent BBC ("The Beeb"), which only gradually allowed rock and roll to transgress its airwaves. Most of the really good stuff came creeping across the channel via clandestine "pirate" stations aboard stationary ships like Radio Caroline, or continental stalwarts like Radio Luxembourg---now *they* had the music-lover in mind!

What the teenage Beatles grew up with, in their own pop music culture, was substantially different from the American experience...so much so that this note was created for your enjoyment and edification. In it you'll find a list of groups and singers who entered and exited the pop charts of the UK from the fifties through the end of the sixties--- the singers who influenced several generations of music listeners. It's not an all-inclusive list; it stops roughly when the British Invasion ceased to have an effect on the US, about 1968. There were groups aplenty after this, but the wave had slowed, and it's the wave, and its imperceptible precursors, that interest us.

Lecture 6: British Painting.

The plan.

1. British grand manner portraits of the 1700s.

2. British history paintings of the 1700s.

3. Britain's Royal Academy of Art in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

4. British conversation pieces and portraits of the 1700s.

5. Constable and Turner - British landscapes of the early 1800s.

The history of British painting is intimately linked with the broader traditions of European painting. Kings and queens commissioned portraits from German, Dutch, and Flemish artists. Holbein, Van Dyck, and other eminent foreign portraitists imparted an aura of perfection even to the most insipid of their sitters. British painters found inspiration and guidance from their journeys abroad, in Italy especially.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, English artists began to develop their own styles in marine and allegorical painting. In William Hogarth's satirical and moralizing scenes of contemporary life one senses the evolution of a new and inherently British idiom. Emphatically propounding the Englishness of his art, Hogarth promoted an academy for the arts, the predecessor of the Royal Academy of Arts. The latter was founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose influential Discourses stressed the preeminence of history painting. Ironically, perhaps the key figure in the development of English history painting was the American-born Benjamin West, who became the second president of the Royal Academy after Reynolds' death. Other American painters, such as John Singleton Copley, followed West's example and relocated to London. Copley became one of the most celebrated artists of the day and painter to the king.

The late eighteenth century saw a growing interest in landscape painting. Some artists, such as Richard Wilson, painted idealized scenes imbued with the spirit of the classical past, while others, such as Joseph Wright of Derby, pursued more individual and personal visions of the natural world. Thomas Gainsborough, although known best for his fashionable portraits, painted highly imaginative landscapes and seascapes that relate to no specific time or place.

The great flowering of English landscape painting came during the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily in the works of two masters, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Constable's true-to-life views of the English countryside expressed romantic ideals about the essential harmony and purity of nature. Turner, on the other hand, was a romantic who sought to project the way in which sun, fire, smoke, wind, and water affected and transformed the physical world. With their fresh vision and powerfully original styles, Constable and Turner profoundly influenced the work not only of many subsequent British painters, but of countless American and European artists as well.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, young members of the British upper classes extended their education with the Grand Tour of continental Europe. There they were introduced to a sophisticated level of artistic achievement that influenced their tastes as adult art patrons. To ensure such high standards in the visual arts, the Royal Academy opened in London in 1769; until the 1800s virtually every major artist in Britain was elected a member or, at least, submitted work for its annual exhibitions.