Text h. Pre-Raphaelitism and Victorian Painting

Inspired like the Chartists by the spirit of revolt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a militant group, the first organized revolt against the Royal Academy, the objects of its attack, being on the one hand the dark and pretentious history picture and on the other trivial anecdotes, and in particular what the Brotherhood termed the 'monkeyana' of Landseer. The remedy and the ideal was seen in a double aspect; as the 'truth to nature', expounded in Modern Painters by Ruskin and as a return to the purity of art before the High Renaissance period, along the lines suggested by the earlier 'Pre-Raphaelite' movement of the German 'Nazarenes'. There were many possibilities of complication in this duality which were to appear the more complex because of the very different temperaments of the leaders of the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-96). 'Truth to nature', a conception which Constable (much more specifically than Turner) had applied to landscape painting, suggested such realism as might be gained in painting from nature, that is, in the open air, and indeed for a while this was a Pre-Raphaelite practice, showing in theory a certain correspondence with the aims of Realism and later of Impressionism in France. Yet whereas French painters were mainly concerned with the general truth of light and atmospheric effect, the Pre-Raphaelites looked for it in minuteness and precision of detail. They differed also in devoting themselves to figure subjects in the main, with an ethical and narrative content. A further difference was the tendency encouraged by Rossetti in particular to look back sentimentally and nostalgically to the past, which took on a dream-like attraction. Thus, instead of that beautifully logical development which produced the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French art, England produced a strange, though potent mixture of enthusiasms in which painting took on several aspects and eventually became subordinated to aims of wider social import.

The great period of Pre-Raphaelite painting can be placed within the decade 1850 to 1860. It is marked by intensity of feeling, a brilliance of colour which banished brown and earth colours from the palette (as the Impressionists were to do), and tours de force of detailed execution. Millais as a young man produced a number of works of great beauty with religious and Shakespearean themes. In colour and feeling The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 1851, excels even the celebrated Christ in the House of His Parents. His Ophelia, 1852, with its almost photographically minute background painted on the Ewell River near Kingston-on-Thames and its figure portraying the beauty of Miss Siddal, remains a remarkable picture.

Holman Hunt painted a masterpiece of its kind in The Hireling Shepherd of 1851 with a sunlit background of willows and cornfield which for a moment makes one think of Claude Monet. The fanatic search for 'truth' which sent him to the shores of the Red Sea to paint a religiously symbolic subject invests The Scapegoat of 1854 with a Surrealist strangeness. Rossetti, apart in his poetic medievalism, reached the highest point of his art in watercolors of an imaginary past and great emotional intensity such as The Tune of the Seven Towers of 1857.

With all its curiosities of effort, this Pre-Raphaelite period has never lost its enchantment. How young artists in the industrial and mercantile England of the mid nineteenth century responded and rallied to an ideal exacting devoted toil is evident in the immediate spread of its enthusiasm and methods, though they had their effect also on artists somewhat older than the young champions of the Brotherhood. William Dyce (1806-64) seems to reflect the quasi-photographic aspect of its realism in the enduring charm of Pegwell Bay, Kent painted probably in 1859, a picture in which he strikingly departs from a rigid style due to German Nazarene influence. Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), at first outside the movement, so far entered into its spirit as to produce some of its most characteristic paintings, among them Work, with its glorification of manual labour and its brilliant glimpse of Heath Street, Hampstead. Inclined to overlabour his subject, Madox Brown displays Pre-Raphaelite colour at its best in landscapes of more simple intention.

It is a sad aspect of the Pre-Raphaelite story that none of these painters lived up to their first promise and in various ways lost direction. The remark applies almost equally to Millais, Rossetti, and Hunt though the decline or deflection in each case was individual. The nostalgic element overcame the challenging realism, in painting at all events.

A second phase inspired by Rossetti and represented by William Morris (1834-96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) is mainly of note for a change of direction towards the crafts and the problem of providing a counter to the ugliness and soullessness of industrial production. The delicate mannered painting of Burne-Jones is of less value than his collaboration with Morris in the arts of design. In this and other ways Pre-Raphaelitism may be looked on as anti-Victorian, a protest against the materialism of the age, either as an attempt at reform or as escape into the past, its weakness appearing in the latter respect.

PRACTICE

Comprehension Check

Activity 1. Scan the texts about the greatest artists of Great Britain and complete the profile of each painter:

The most important dates in the artist's life and career

The most important events in the artist's life and career

The most famous and spectacular works of art

Epithets and terms to characterize the peculiarities of the artist's style and manner of painting, his artistic achievements

Phonetic transcription of the most important proper nouns

Activity 2. How carefully have you read the texts? Answer the questions and provide your commentaries if necessary:

1. What are the major peculiarities of British art in general?

2. What can you say about the historical background against which British art developed?

3. Why do we usually regard English painting as beginning with the Tudor period?

4. What did English royalty do to paint the people of the court and to record the historical events? Why?

5. Why did portraiture flourish in England in the 18^th century?

6. What did Hogarth do as a painter of social life? Don't forget to give examples from Text B.

7. What are the rules and standards of painting professed by the representatives (Reynolds, for example) of the Grand Style? Don't forget to give examples from Texts A, C.

8. What genre of painting did Gainsborough introduce into British art? What are the influences on Gainsborough’s art?

9. Why did Constable concentrate on rendering the atmosphere and light of nature? Don't forget to give examples from Text E.

10. What is the dominant difference in the subject and in the manner of painting between two great Romantic artists – Constable and Blake? Don’t forget to give examples from Texts A, F.

11. How did poetry and light influence Turner’s mature outlook? What are the most characteristic features of his style? Don't forget to give examples from Text G.

12. What are the key themes the Pre-Raphaelites preferred to develop and explore in their works? Comment on the peculiarities of their artistic manner.

Activity 3. Here are the descriptions of some famous works of art created by the artists of Great Britain. Match them to the titles given below:

1. The lines in this painting are generally blurred and indistinct. There is no definite outline of many recognizable objects, except for the rails of the bridge and a faint outline of a train moving toward the viewer. The artist used blurred splotches of paint including yellows, browns, orangish-reds, light blue, and white. The colours are mostly light, except for the dark red and rust colours that suggest the railroad. There is an overall hazy and misty feeling, as a result of the blue and gold veils of paint that he applied to the sky and surrounding scenery. The painter makes the main subjects of his work become part of his colouring and lighting effects, and they add to the general feeling of uncertainty. But what makes the whole picture look really great is the fact that the reflection of light alone gives shape to reality.

2. In a series of six pictures the painter tells the moralizing tale of the marriage of convenience between the son of a count and the daughter of a rich merchant, which leads to irretrievable breakdown and violent death. One of them shows a room rendered in the wide-angle perspective typical of the period. Seated on the left are the two marriage candidates who display not the slightest interest in each other. To the right, the fathers are negotiating the deal. The count needs his daughter-in-law’s dowry in order to finance his palace which, as can be seen through the window, is under construction. All details in the scene, even the small paintings – copies of well-known Italians – are relevant to the action.

3. The subject of the painting is the death of a famous literary heroine. She is driven mad by the behaviour of her betrothed. Picking flowers one day she slips, falls into a stream and drowns. It is unclear from the writer’s description whether she could have saved herself. In the painter’s interpretation she is still alive, buoyed up by her outspread clothes and singing “snatches of old tunes”. The artist spent the summer painting the background on the bank of the river Ewell, near London. He then painted the figure from a model lying in a bath in his London studio. Such procedures are typical of his approach to realism.

4. This is a typical family group portrait in the Grand Style of English portrait painting. The lady was the wife of a Member of Parliament and belonged to the privileged class of the landed nobility. Here, with an air of apparently casual informality, she is shown on the terrace before her country house, while behind stretch the broad acres of her family estate. The painter has taken care that the gestures, facial expressions, and poses of his subjects are appropriate to their age, character, and social status. In this portrait, the sitter is dignified and gracious, secure in the knowledge of her beauty and wealth. Her son John, aged five, as if sensing the responsibilities of manhood, gazes sternly toward the distant horizon. Her other son, Emelias Henry, in unmasculine skirts as befits his three years, is coy and winsome. The fourth member of the group, the unkempt Skye terrier, is the embodiment of loyal affection. Note the simplicity of the pyramidal design and the low-keyed color scheme. These features were for the painter symbols of dignity and good taste.

5. The trees, river and meadows have been dissolved into one moving, shimmering surface, making it appear as if the cart crossing the river has lost contact with the firm ground under its wheels. Bulging cloud formations have given way to some flashes of blue sky. This painter loved the changes that wind and weather effected on the landscape. Before finishing his painting he spent over three months sketching a particular view at different times of day, for in nature “not even two hours are the same”.

6. A painter of landscapes by passion and of portraits by financial necessity, this great artist took over elements of Dutch genre and landscape painting. These he combined with an air of cool casualness in the people represented, a trait which was regarded as typically English. In this famous portrait his client and the client’s wife are illuminated by cold, “sober” light. It makes them appear detached from the landscape, which is painted in lively, warm, earthy colours. A dynamic relationship between foreground and background is established by the perspective lines to the left and right of the figures, which lead the eye into the distance.

1. Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed

2. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Lady Elizabeth Delme and Her Children

3. Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews

4. William Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode: The Marriage Contract

5. John Constable’s The Haywain

6. Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia

 Language Focus: Vocabulary

Activity 1. Match the words underlined in the texts to their synonyms or synonymous expressions:

vein surge quintessence affinity adverse err subsist willowy irksome abhor hapless pugnacious congenial ambience vehemence visage ostensibly eschew facet bequest rally

apparently sympathy, attraction detest, despise mood, spirit unite, cooperate one aspect, side increase, rise friendly, agreeable legacy, gift exist abstain from model, embodiment aggressive, hostile passion, zeal harmful, unfavourable flexible, slender person’s face tiresome, annoying unlucky transgress, blunder surroundings, atmosphere

Activity 2. Match the words underlined in the texts to their dictionary definitions:

1. lucidity founder illuminators aloof deprecate chafe rope off discountenance ransack indigenous jaded felicities cavil sentient rustic translucence intransigence diatribe unravel pestilence mezzotint

those who decorated pages of books produced in the Middle Ages with gold paint and light colours a picture printed from a metal plate that is polished in places to produce areas of light and shade to stop someone from doing something by showing your disapproval unnecessary complaints about someone or something no longer interested in or excited by life, especially because he has experienced too many things deliberately staying away from other people thinking that you are better than they are to surround an area with ropes in order to separate it from another area a disease that spreads quickly and kills large numbers of people something that is clear and easy to understand absence of will to change your opinion or behaviour in a way that would be helpful to others to fall after a period of time because something has gone wrong or a new problem has caused difficulties to search thoroughly; to turn everything upside down to understand or explain something that is very complicated being not transparent, but clear enough to allow light to pass through a long speech or piece of writing that criticizes something or somebody very severely to express disapproval well-chosen and successful features belonging to a particular place rather than coming to it from somewhere else to show irritation someone from the country, especially a farm worker able to see or feel things through the senses

Activity 3. Rearrange the text given below. Make sure you read through the completed text to check that the order of the paragraphs makes sense. Add new words which may come in handy when speaking about painting as a supplement to your vocabulary list:

1. On the importance of naturalness, the two very different painters Reynolds and Gainsborough agreed. Although they were often seen as real artistic rivals, both were concerned with freeing painting from any kind of 'tasteful' stylization. While the academician Reynolds tried to achieve this through the classical aesthetic, the quasi-autodidact Gainsborough tended to rely on intuition.

2. In order to provide himself with raw material for his ideal compositions we know from a contemporary account that”. . . from the fields he brought into his painting-room stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds.” As an aid in composing, he made miniature landscape models on the top of a table. “He would place,” wrote a contemporary, “cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.” As we study his Landscape with a Bridge, for example, we realize that it is completely non-specific, and we cannot even be certain that the view is of the English countryside. Gainsborough, although he apparently loved his native land with its blue horizons, dreaming rivers, and noble trees, was more interested in portraying a mood than a specific view.

3. In many respects England served as a model for the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. This attitude of mind, shaped by the Enlightenment, also influenced artistic sense. Rejecting Baroque painting and the decorative contemporary tendencies, which were felt to be outmoded and hollow, one now sought an art which would reveal unaffected sensibilities.

4. “I’m sick of Portraits,” wrote Gainsborough at the height of his successful career as a portraitist, “and wish very much to take my viol da gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease.” In spite of this romantic attitude toward nature, Gainsborough rarely if ever painted actual views. Like most eighteenth-century theorists, he was convinced that nature in the raw was uncouth and unsuitable as a subject for painting. Only after the elements of a landscape had been distilled through the artist's imagination and gently turned into the ideal vision of a pastoral poet could the artist start to paint.

5. Two painters in particular pursued this goal, albeit in very different ways: Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds took his bearings from a search for the primal, the true beauty of classical ideals. The art of classical antiquity was his chosen model to bring his own works back to the sublimity and grandeur that he so missed in contemporary decorative art. He pursued this goal as a teacher and as president of the first English Academy, of which he was a co-founder.

6. Gainsborough's approach, which prefers to grasp reality with the senses, was widespread in England in the 18th century. While French rationalism declared purely abstract thought to be the basis of all knowledge, the English empiricists worked on the premise that all knowledge of reality came through the senses. Observation, trial and error and the conclusions drawn from them were, for them, the only valid foundations for knowledge.

7. Gainsborough was very impressed by the natural rhythm of Dutch landscape painting, which attracted little attention at this time. In contrast to the prevailing academic ideal of an Arcadian classical landscape in the style of Claude, or a conventional Rococo garden backdrop with ornate bushes, in his painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, he painted nature as it presented itself to the painter's eye. With this realistic vision, the painter succeeded in painting both a portrait of his client and a portrait of the landscape which – although shaped by human hand – appears untouched and natural.

8. Taking his lead not from classical ideas, but from an intuitive painting derived from his own vision and sensibility, Thomas Gainsborough tried to give expression to feeling. The portrait-painting which bound him to the wishes of his sitters, and which constituted his chief field of employment, as it did for Reynolds, was a source of constant torment to him. 'Nothing is worse than gentlemen', he complained. What he really loved was landscape painting: 'I do portraits to live and landscapes because I love them'.

9. In this, to an extraordinary extent, it corresponded to the Enlightenment ideal: (moulded) 'naturalness', which was also a feature of the English landscape parks and gardens that became fashionable around the middle of the century, in contrast to the artificial geometry of French gardens, was seen by the English thinkers of the Enlightenment as a symbol of natural beauty and individual freedom.

Activity 4. Read the texts below and complete them using the words from the boxes:

unsuitable demand cheaper creatures recognition borders immorality mentality showing educational wider grasping

The Enlightenment spirit

The growing confidence of the bourgeoisie in England encouraged a(n) …¹… which produced a greater interest in tangible and useful things, as in the research of Isaac Newton, than in fabulous …²… and mythology. Christian themes had never been very much in …³… in the Protestant island kingdom. The English preferred moralistic and …⁴… works of art.

Also in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the English painter William Hogarth, with his sociocritical, ballad-like broadsheets, known as ‘moral pictures’, scourged the …⁵… of society. The idea was still current at the time that paintings …⁶… lowlifes were low themselves, and such subject matter was …⁷… for noble art. Thus, as oil paintings, satirical pictures like the satire of Marriage a la Mode: The Marriage Contract received little …⁸… . More popular, however, were the many engravings that Hogarth himself – cleverly …⁹… the situation – made from his paintings. With the …¹⁰… prints he reached not only a …¹¹… public, but one that was very different from the traditional art audience, which took great pleasure in these popular broadsheets. The print brought Hogarth fame far beyond the …¹²… of his homeland.

hand patches compositions devoted colour studies balance harmonized nature idealization

“Painting is Feeling”

In his landscapes John Constable turned away from earlier landscape …¹… in the sense of the heightened …²… of nature. There is a …³… between complete abandonment to the emotions and deep sensitivity to nature on the one …⁴… , and scientific advances on the other. In the 1820s these are apparent in the systematic sky and cloud …⁵… characteristic of the work of Constable. The precise observation of …⁶… led the painter increasingly to disregard line, and the painting was gradually constructed from free …⁷… of colour, which were …⁸… to model the object. Constable strove for a “pure, genuine reproduction of the landscape, paying particular attention to the …⁹… ”.

John Constable’s works were very successful when they were shown in Paris in 1824. Influenced by Constable were the painters of the ‘Barbizon school’, who …¹⁰… themselves to plein-air painting in the 1830s.

Activity 5. Read the text below and complete it using the words from the box on the right in the correct form. Always check that the word you have formed is not only lexically and/or grammatically appropriate but also makes sense in the context:

This painting, one of two views of Mortlake Terrace painted by Turner, is a view from the house, looking directly west into the luminous glow of the setting sun. Turner established the quiet mood of the late-afternoon scene with two ivy-covered elm trees, whose soft, …1… leaves and curving limbs frame the painting. Long shadows create elegant patterns on the lawn that almost obscure the human element in the scene. Scattered about are a gardener's ladder, a hoop, a doll on a red chair, and an open portfolio of pictures that have been just left behind by figures watching the Lord Mayor's …2… barge. The painting was done about eight years after Turner's first stay in Venice, where his …3… of nature and the physical world was profoundly changed by the city's unique light and atmosphere. Light immobilizes the river and gives its surface a dreamlike shimmer. The stable mass of the classical gazebo, the delicate …4… clarity of its architectural details, and the carefully depicted windows in the buildings on the left bank of the river coexist in Turner's vision with the heavy impasto of the sun's …5… rays that spill over the top of the …6… wall and dissolve the stone's very substance. Here Turner brings the great force of his romantic genius to a common scene of working-class men at hard labor. Although the subject of the painting is rooted in the grim realities of the industrial revolution, in Turner's hands it transcends the specifics of time and place and becomes an image of …7… visual poetry. An almost palpable flood of moonlight breaks through the clouds in a great vault that spans the banks of the channel and illuminates the sky and the water. The heavy impasto of the moon's reflection on the …8… expanse of water rivals the radiance of the sky, where gradations of light create a powerful, …9… vortex. To the right, the keelmen and the dark, flat-bottomed keels that carried the coal from Northumberland and Durham down the River Tyne are silhouetted against the orange and white flames from the torches, as the coal is transferred to the sailing ships. To the left, square-riggers wait to sail out on the morning tide. Behind these ships Turner suggested the distant cluster of factories and ships with touches of gray paint and a few thin lines. Through the …10… atmosphere ships' riggings, keels and keelmen, fiery torches, and reflections on the water merge into a richly textured surface pattern.

Feather Ceremony Perceive Line Force Bank Startle Break Swirl Shadow

Activity 6. Use these word combinations speaking about your favourite British painters and their famous works of art:

In a fitful fashion; devotional wall painting; secular portraiture; flat patterns of colour; precise outlines; stiff heraldic poses; flourish and poise; to be the fetter of genius; fledgling painter; to be poured into a mold; billowing draperies; direct observation of nature; to record the visions of one’s inner eye; to observe life with a keen and critical eye; ability to compose a vivid group; delightful delicacy of colour; to find fruition; brilliant way of animating a surface; to dab in broad touches; unique capacity for rendering the freshness of atmosphere and the incidence of light; to scorn imitation; emphatic distortions; to live up to one’s promise.

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.

*

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)