Lecture 9 cultural life in great britain

Plan

1. Various Interests in Great Britain

2. Painting

3. Sculpture and Architecture

4. Art Galleries and Museums

5. Cinema

6. The British Theatre Today

7. Music Life

8. Folk Music

1. Various interests in great britain

In Great Britain there is probably a greater interest in painting and sculpture today than ever before. Artists are experimenting with colours, shapes and materials of all kinds. They hold exhibitions on street pavements, in parks, in empty buildings, as well as in schools, universities and art clubs. If they are lucky, their works are chosen for exhibition by the Institute of Contemporary Art, which was founded to help young artists. Much of their work is connected with the objects and experiences of everyday life. A few young painters and artists are successful and have their works accepted by well-known London art galleries. The older generation of modern painters and sculptors, such as the artists John Piper and Graham Sutherl or the sculptor Henry Moore, now has an international reputation.

An interest in crafts has grown again. More and more young people are learning them in schools, colleges and evening classes. Pottery, woodcarving, furniture making, hand-woven and hand printed clothes, handmade jewelry and metal work are the most popular.

Portrait painting and landscape painting are the glories of English Art. In both directions it rose to supreme height.

2. Painting Painting in England in the 15th -17th centuries

Mostly foreign artists represented painting in England in the period of the 15-17th centuries.

In the 16th century Hans Holbein the Younger, a well-known painter was invited to London by the King Henry VIII. Though he did not create any painting school in England he nevertheless played an important part in the development of English portrait art. Later Charles I made the Flemish painter Van Dyck (a pupil of Rubens) his Court painter. Van Dyck founded a school of aristocratic portrait painting. Another painter Peter Lely came from Holland in 1641. He became celebrated for his portraits of the idle and frivolous higher classes.

The 18th century was the century during which a truly national painting school was created in England. Portrait art at that time was the main kind of painting. It depended upon the conditions under which the English painting school developed.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was the first man to raise British pictorial art to a level of importance. He was born in London. His father was a schoolmaster. His early taste for drawing was remarkable and after schooling normal for his day he was apprenticed to a silver plate engraver.

His success he attributed to hard labour, “I know of no such thing as genius”, he wrote – “genius is nothing but labour and diligence”.

Hogarth painted many pictures. “The Marriage Contract” is the first of the series of his pictures forming the famous “marriage a la mode”.

The subject of the picture is a protest against marriage for money and vanity. Hogarth was the first great English artist.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the first President of the Royal Academy, was not only a painter but also the founder of the academic principles of a “British School”.

The Venetian, Titian and Veronese Paolo influenced his own work. His passion for rich depth of shadows was unfortunate; to obtain it he used bitumen. This radioactive substance has blackened, and generally worked havoc on many of his pictures.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) is the third great figure of the 18th century painting. He was born in 1727 in the small market town of Sudbury in Suffolk.

Gainsborough had little academic training; he learned to paint not by plodding in the studio, but by observing the actual world. Van Dyck’s graceful poses and silvery tones fascinated him and played a large part in determining the development of his skill. Perhaps the best known today of all Gainsborough’s portraits is the famous “Blue Boy”.

But curiously enough it was little known in Gainsborough’s day and there is no definite information, about the date of the painting. It is a portrait in a Van Dyck habit. There is an opinion that Gainsborough painted “The Blue Boy” in order to establish the point which he had made in a dispute with Reynolds and other painters, when he maintained that predominant colour in a picture should be blue. His picture “The Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher” attracted general attention. The picture representing a small country girl was first exhibited in 1814.

Gainsborough always thought of himself as a landscape painter, but torn away from his real love by the necessity to paint portraits in order to earn his living.

He was the first to introduce lyrical freedom into British painting. His achievement lay in the discovery of the beauty of his native landscape.