Developing Conversation Skills

Activity 1. Let's visit an art gallery! Read the descriptions of the paintings given below and say more about the artists' life, style and manner of painting.

George STUBBS (1724-1806)

Colonel Pocklington with His Sisters

"After portraits of himself, his wife, and his children," a critic of English art has observed, the "English patron of the eighteenth century liked best to have a picture of his horse." In fact, copies or engravings after pictures of famous race horses were more popular than portraits of national heroes like Lord Nelson. George Stubbs was the first of a long line of English painters to specialize in painting animals. The son of a tanner, after he had received only a few weeks of formal training as an artist, he decided he would copy from nature only. Besides gaining distinction as a painter, he was an outstanding anatomist, and his drawings for ‘The Anatomy of the Horse’ published in 1766 constituted the most definitive work on the subject up to that date. His last study in this field, the comparative anatomy of a man, a chicken, and a tiger, unfortunately was never finished.

Not only the horse is important in this picture; the portraits also of the Colonel and his sisters are so beautifully painted as to discredit the acid observation of a contemporary critic of Stubbs' paintings: "The people are no more than attendants for the noble beast, and it is obvious which species Stubbs preferred to paint." Note the curious segmentation of the design. Stubbs – and this is perhaps reasonable and right for an anatomist – studied and painted each part of the canvas separately, and rarely succeeded so well as here in combining the separate sections into a harmonious whole.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The subject of this portrait was one of the most fascinating women in eighteenth-century England. Born in a provincial town, Miss Elizabeth Linley at the age of nineteen captivated the musical world of London with her singing. "The whole town," wrote a contemporary, "seems distracted about her. Every other diversion is forsaken. Miss Linley alone engrosses all eyes, ears, hearts ... and to [her voice] was added the most beautiful person, expressive of the soul within." The same year fashionable London was rocked with the news that Miss Linley had eloped to France with Richard Sheridan, a very famous statesman and dramatist.

In the portrait note the apparently careless, free-flowing brush strokes, particularly in the dress and background. Gainsborough is known to have painted on occasion with brushes mounted on handles almost six feet long, in order to be the same distance from his model and his canvas, and this may account for the rough, sketchy technique. The fact that Gainsborough also often painted by candlelight may be a further explanation of the shimmering, wispy effect. Reynolds, commenting on this feature of Gainsborough's art, wrote: "This chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect of diligence, under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence."

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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William Blake (1757-1827)

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

The art of William Blake represents a complete contrast to the pictures typical of his time. A strange, impassioned poet and artist, he was considered of unsound mind by many of his contemporaries. In seclusion and poverty he became absorbed in the visions of his imagination, and from this world of cosmic tempests and beauty, he drew the inspiration for his illustrations of religious mysticism. This painting illustrates a theme from the Book of Revelation which describes how the Great Red Dragon, the incarnation of Satanic evil, appeared from the night skies with seven horned heads and the stars tied to its tail, and sought to devour the still unborn child of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, symbol of valiant innocence. In his artistic education Blake also represents a sharp break with English tradition. Apprenticed to an engraver, he trained himself partly by copying medieval illustrated manuscripts in the British Museum. This background combined with the Neo-Classic doctrine, that the most essential element in painting was the outline, contributed to make his art essentially linear and flat. "Leave out this line," wrote Blake in a descriptive catalogue of his own work, "and you leave out life itself." Note also that the colors are subdued and yet give an impression of brilliance. "Colouring does not depend," he commented, "on where the Colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put."

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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John Constable (1776-1837)

Wivenhoe Park, Essex

This landscape, which represents a private estate about fifty miles northeast of London, was painted shortly before Constable's marriage, at a time when he was writing frequently to his fiancée about his difficulties, hopes, and fears. A letter of 1816 describes how his patron and host, General Rebow, was supervising the work on this picture. "My dearest Love," it reads, "I have been here since Monday, and am as happy as I can be away from you. ... I am going on well with my pictures. . . . The great difficulty has been to get so much in as they wanted.... On my left is a grotto ...; in the center is the house over a beautiful wood and very far to the right is a deer house, which it was necessary to add, so that my view comprehended too many degrees. But today I got over the difficulty." The way in which Constable "got over the difficulty" of including so wide a view was by adding a strip, a little more than three inches wide, to each side of his original canvas.

An aspect of Constable's art which can be clearly sensed in this painting was expressed by an eccentric contemporary, who put up an umbrella while he was looking at a landscape such as this. Constable does, in fact, catch the essential qualities of the English landscape so convincingly that we can almost see and hear the first drops of rain as they bend the leaves of grass on the green pasture lands.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

Mortlake Terrace

Turner was especially interested in the optical effects produced by light under varying conditions. In his view across the Thames he has represented a scene looking directly into the rays of the afternoon sun, a condition which the human eye normally cannot tolerate. With scientific precision he has portrayed the golden path of the reflection on the water, the sparkle of light on the wet lawn, and the refraction of the sun's rays as they seem to eat into the stone parapet. It is curious that although the principal lines of the composition seem to lead the eye into the burning orb of the sun, there is a second point of interest, a black dog on the parapet. The explanation for this is even more curious. When this picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy there was no dog. On the varnishing day, a rival painter, feeling that the composition needed a focal point, cut out the dog from paper and stuck it on the canvas while Turner was out to lunch. When the painter saw this insulting addition to his work, he merely moved the dog a fraction of an inch, touched it with dark paint and left. So the paper dog remains to this day.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Activity 2. Give a talk on a reproduction of any famous work of art created by the British artist. Describe its technical aspect and comment on its subject.

Activity 3. Give a talk on

• the history of British art, its major peculiarities and distinctive features;

• the development of new techniques in the 18^th and in the 19^th centuries;

• the most representative artists of British art.

Art must be parochial in the beginning

to become cosmopolitan in the end.

George Moore. Hail and Farewell: Ave (1911)

Art is a revolt against fate.

Andre Malraux. Les Voix du Silence (1951)