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confess‖, he pronounced, ―that if ever this nation should produce a genius

sufficient to acquire the honourable distinction of an English school, the name of

Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity.‖

John Constable (1776-1837)

John Constable was born at East Berhold, Suffolk, which is situated near the river Stour in Deham Vale. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, its luxuriant meadows, its woods and rivers had a great effect on Constable’s art.

In 1799, with the encouragement of his mother, he went to London to begin his formal artistic training in the schools of the Royal Academy. At this time the classical ideal landscape of the 17th century was the model for the landscape painting in England. Constable was expected to comform to the principles of formal composition, lighting and detailed finished pictures, but he realized that with such limitations he could not paint the English countryside as he saw it, so he used new methods and created his own art.

Constable began the practice of the sketching in oils in the open air. He saw the lovely greens in nature and painted them using broken brushsrokes and putting the paint on the canvas with a pallete knife to render the living moving nature, sparkling light and colour. Constable broke with the tradition, but his originality was soon recognized.

Alongside with landscapes, Constable painted portraits as it was the chief means of earning a living, then available to an English artist. However, he didn’t succeed in portrait painting, and the only good portraits were the portraits of people he liked: his family members, close friends, his fiancée Maria Bicknell.

In 1816 Constable married Ms. Bicknell after a long courtship. The twelve happy years of their marriage were productive years for Constable as an artist. He began to gain recognition and sell his paintings. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. Constable painted a series of large canvases, the subjects of which were taken from the banks of the River Stour and which he exhibited in successive years at the Royal academy. They were ―Flatford Mill on the Stour‖ (1817, Tate Gallery), ―The Hay Wain‖ (1821, National Gallery, London), ―View

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on the Stour near Deadham‖ (1822, California) and ―The Leaping Horse‖ (1825,

London Royal Academy.

Now Constable was an established painter, and he received a lot of commissions to repeat his most popular compositions.

Constable and his family spent the summer months in Hampstead, a village on the northern outskirts of London, situated on a hill surrounded by open countryside. There he made studies of the sky, as he was convinced that that the sky gave different kinds of illumination to the objects on the ground. Many of his sketches show the foliage in motion and lit by gleams from a cloudy sky. On the backs of the studies he usually recorded the date , the time of the day and the weather conditions at the time they were painted.

In 1829 Constable’s wife died, leaving him with their seven young children. Another sorrow was the death of his best friend, John Fisher. From this time on Constable had fits of depression. His paintings reflect his stormy, agitated mood of that time. The only elaborate composition he made from his numerous sketches was ―Arudel Mill and Castle‖, on which he was working on the day he died. The painting was considered sufficiently finished and was exhibited post-humously.

William Turner

1775-1851

Turner was a short, stocky man with rather striking features, who became through genious, determination and boundless energy one of the greatest artists of England. The son of a London barber, he must have spent a lot of time among the warehouses and docks of the busy London harbour. The sights of England’s naval power, the glimpses of the ships that dominated the sea made a great impression on Turner. His talent became evident in his boyhood.

At 14 his work was good enough for his father to hang up his son’s drawings in his shop for sale. At that time he began to attend the Royal Academy Schools, where he drew the antique and also from life. But copying the works of others and sketching from nature were the main methods by which Turner taught himself. He travelled much in England and Wales, sketching mountains, ruins, castles and

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famous buildings. This kind of work – topographical painting – provided a major source of income thoughout his life.

The water-colours exhibited at the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1790 and 1791 showed that he had attained an absolute mastery of light and shade. In 1791 he also showed his first oil-painting ―Fishermen at Sea‖.

Turner’s home life was far from happy – his mother had emotional and mental problems and was soon sent to an asylum, but his artistic career flourished. He was generally known as the most promising of the young artists and was elected first Associate, then in 1802 a full member of the Royal Academy. Turner never married, but he had children with a widowed singer and actress Sarah Danby.

Turner tried painting various subjects - classical, historical, but the sea appealed to him most of all, especially the sea with ships. Turner painted in oils, but he always preferred working in water-colours. The artist was a reckless technician, using any materials to gain an immediate effect, and he loved to astonish people by entirely repainting his pictures the day before the exhibition opened. This has done much harm to his pictures, as they have now darkened, and connot be cleaned without damage because of the technique he used. More over, many of them hung for years in Turner’s private gallery, established in 1804 where the roof leaked and the canvases rotted. His sketches, however, are well preserved. They show the way he rendered light and colour of the sea and from them we may follow the development of the painter’s style.

In 1802 Turner departed for the continent to study the Old Masters in the Louvre. In 1807 he was elected professor of Perspective at the Academy, by a vote of 27 to 1, an indication of the esteem he was held in. Turner retained the title, which he greatly valued, until 1837, when he retired at the age of 62.

In 1819 Turner visited Italy for the first time The trip was a turning point in his life. At the age of 44 he found the light he had always sought – the dazzling orange sunlight of the Mediterranean, the blue of the sky and the azure of the tranquil sea. This brilliance was a contrast to the greyish light of England. Turner made some 1500 drawings and water colours, later serving as the basis for his canvases.

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The fantastic interplay of the sky and water can be seen in many of Turner’s paintings – an early one ―The Shipwreck‖ (1805), ―Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus‖ (1829), ―Child Harold’s Pilgrimage‖ (1832), ―Grand Canal, Venice‖ (1835). In 1834 Turner showed one of his several recordings of ―The Burning of the Houses of Parliament‖. The scene is an almost superhuman vision: the world is no more than a reflection of fire, the twin towers of Westminster Abbey seem to float in the flames and the far end of the bridge to disintegrate into them. A critic wrote about it, ―The execution of the picture is curious; to look at it close, it appears a confused mass of daubs and streaks of colour. Turner seems to paint slovenly, yet what other painter preserves equal clearness of colour?

But ―The Snow Storm‖ (1842), which now seems one of his most original paintings, was not warmly greeted. He had gone too far ahead of his time, he anticipated ad the purely abstract painters of the twentieth century. In this, as in his other works ―Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) and ―The Fighting Témeràire‖ (1838), we can see Turner’s realisation of an interplay between dark and light, warm and cold masses. ―The Fighting Témeràire‖ Tugged to the Last Berth to the Broken Up‖ (1838) was Turner’s marine masterpiece, he most continuously admired late work. Turner himself considered it his special favourite, even referring to it as ―my darling‖, and refusing repeated generous offers of purchase.

Towards the end of his life the artist became secretive and withdrawn. He took a house in Chelsea and concealed his address. In Chelsea he pretended to be a retired naval officer.

Turner painted to the very end. Just before his death the sky cleared, and a ray of sunshine fell upon him. It was as though some lifelong heliotropist made him seek the radiance of the sun to his last breath.

Modern Painting

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter, the initiator of Cubism and probably the paramount influence on the art of the 20 th century, was born on October 25, 1881. His father was an artist and professor at the academy of Fine Arts at Barcelona, so Picasso received his first lessons in art from him.

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During ―the blue period‖ of his work (1901-1904) Pablo Picasso concentrated almost exclusively on the human figure which he placed against a simple background. The paintings of this period, with their predominant cool tones of blue and blue-green, usually depict sad or desolate people beggars, blind men, the poor, the unhappy: ―The Tragedy‖, ―The Old Guitarist‖, etc.

Around 1905 Picasso brightened his palette with pink and rose, yellow-ochre and grey. He painted circus performers, harlequins and acrobats in a graceful manner, with extraordinary subtlety and sensibility.

In 1906 Picasso returned from Paris to Spain. Under the influence of Iberian sculpture, which had simple, unrefined, unconventional proportions and yet great strength, Picasso abandoned his ―rose period‖ and experimented in a simplified new style. The pictures were arrangements of figures. Realistic details, atmospheric effects and naturalistic colours were abandoned. Attention was focused on movement in space, on seeing things from diverse angles, on artistic means rather than on subject matter. The design was mainly abstract, though here and there realistic fragments of recognisable objects were introduced. The gradation of light and dark suggested shading and space.

In 1937, when the Basque town of Guernica was destroyed by German bombing planes, Picasso went into action, using his art to condemn brutality of modern times. ―Guernica‖, a huge canvas, is one of Picasso’s greatest creations.

The artist used the ancient symbols of Spain to spell out the terrible catastrophe. A woman with arms raised, falling from a burning house, a mother with a dead child, on the ground the hollow fragments of a warrior’s figure, one hand clutching a broken sword near which a flower is growing, a disemboweled horse with a spearpointed tongue, a woman who is crazed and cross-eyed with pain and grief – all these images and the expressive distortions suggest cruel affliction.

The war-time agony of death and senseless destruction is emphasised by the black, white and grey composition; there is no colour. Picasso explained the symbolism of the work, declaring that the bull is ―brutality and darkness‖, ―the horse represents the people‖. The painting has an impact of a nightmare and extreme psychological subtlety.

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Pablo Picasso created over 6,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures. A dove painted by Picasso, was adopted as the symbol of peace movement by the Paris World Peace Conference in 1949.

Proper Names:

Pablo Picasso ['pablou pik'æsou]

Guernica [ 'g∂:nik∂ ] м. Герніка

Basque [ bæsk ] баскський

Iberian [ ai'bi∂ri∂n] іберійський

Artists in America

Art developed in America in conditions such as existed in no European nation, there being no civilized society, inhabiting the same region for centuries. For the first century and a half, conditions were unfavourable to the growth of any art. Historical art required official patronage and a long background of history. Classical themes might have seemed even more foreign and should have involved the forbidden motive of the nude. Pictures of daily life being of no interest to the mercantile aristocracy, it was useless to paint them. Though there was some landscape painting of a naive kind, people, engaged in fighting the wilderness, had little use for the romantic sentiment for nature. Up to the eighteenth century, the only kind of art which people of wealth and position considered necessary was portraiture. And it was in portraiture that American artists made their first achievements.

Many native-born artists began as craftsmen, carriage painters, carpenters and cabinet makers.

With the United States emerge from colonialism into nationhood, the more intelligent artists were drawn increasingly to Europe. It was in London in Benjamin West's studio, that the first Americans attempted at the grand style , originated in West's own innovation. From his studio Charles Wilson Peale came home to paint his invaluable record of the revolution and its leaders. Being under West's influence, John Trumbull painted his revolutionary battle scenes, still the finest American historical paintings in the grand style. On his return Trumbull might have made a career or history painting, but America was not ready for this.

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The federal government had advanced little beyond the colonies in recognition of art and by the time Trumbull finally secured a commission for his Capitol murals, his youthful fire was gone. The same fate overtook others who attempted like subjects, John Vanderlyn, Allston and others.

The first definite school of painting must have appeared. And it was landscape painting which appeared in the eighteen twenties. The Hudson River School founded around 1825 by Thomas Cole expressed the immensity, solitude and open skies of the New World in enormous romantic canvases.

The late nineteenth century was a brilliant period for American-born painters. Cassatt and Whistler cast their lot with the Old World. Although not the most profound member of the French Impressionist movement, Mary Cassatt applied the Parisian technique to personal themes and made a lasting mark. Whistler developed in England a style, allied to Impressionism yet very much his own, that was one of the most individual aesthetic achievements of the time. The artists who worked in the United States were less graceful and more powerful. The self-taught Homer painted the aspects of American life that appealed to them with the realism that had been made into a national characteristic by the need to create prosperity in a wilderness.

Winslow Homer was a magazine illustrator depicting rural gaieties and then, during the Civil War, an artist-correspondent interested not only in battles but in the loneliness of boys far from home. When he was twenty-seven, he began painting in oil but almost without instruction.

No man ever worked harder to perfect technique, but he was determined to accept no outside influence. Since personal invention is a more laborious method than study, he matured slowly. Although he did not begin to use water-colour until he was thirty-eight, he became one of the most brilliant water-colourist the world has known. He was sixty before his oils reached their full grandeur.

Ukrainian Painting

Ukrainian pictorial art is an integral part of world culture. It goes back to the art of Kyiv Rus’. Even now you can admire the mosaic & fresco images on the walls of St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv – ― The mother of God‖, ― Jesus Christ with the Apostles ‖, ―Jesus Christ the King of Heaven‖. Icon painting

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predominated in Ukrainian pictorial art till the 17th century. Among the best known icons of the 14th – 16th centuries are ― St. George the Dragon Slayer‖ and ― Virgin Mary of Volyn’ ―. The European Renaissance influenced Ukrainian culture in the second half of the 16th century. A new genre – portrait painting – was developed as evidence of the maturity of humanistic ideas in the society. Realistic portraits were sometimes a part of an icon composition, for instance ― The Virgin Mary’s Protective Veil‖.

In the 17th – 18th centuries a new style, known as Ukrainian or Cossak Baroque, appeared in this country. Using various artistic techniques, the painters tried to convey their subject’s psychological state, their attitude towards reality.

During the 17-18th centuries, many artists painted their versions of ―Cossack Mamay‖, representing a fearless cossack playing the bandura and smoking a pipe. Real masterpieces were executed by Ivan Rutkovych (the ―Prayer‖) and Iov

Kondzelevych.

The art of the late 18th century definitely broke with the icon-painting traditions of the earlier times. The trends toward realism and romanticism took up a leading place in Ukrainian painting at the beginning of the 19th century. Vasyl

Tropinin’s portaits of peasants clearly demonstrate these trends. A new stage in the development of Ukrainian art began. Historical themes and scenes of common life became the subjects of paintings. Democratically minded artists truthfully depicted the life of common people. Ukrainian painters shared the opinion of the

―peredvyzhnyky‖ society, ― The beautiful is what is real‖. Kiriak Kostandi,

Mykola Kuznetsov, Petro Levchenko, Mykola Pymonenko introduced some democratic features into Ukrainian art. The artists began to touch upon the social problems of the time.

Taras Shevchenko, undoubtedly, stands out from the other Ukrainian painters of the 19th century. Trained by Brullov’s school of Romantic Classicism, he worked in the romantic trend and then moved towards realism in his work. Taras Shevchenko’s oil paintings and drawings, among which there are portraits, landscapes and genre paintings, are characterised by a deep love for his people and a romantic attitude to his native land.

The poetry of national costumes and old homesteads, the beauty of the Ukrainian landscapes, sentimental scenes of everyday life were reflected in the

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paintings of T. Shevchenko’s contemporaries and followers, such as Vasyl

Sternberg, Ivan Sokolov, Konstantyn Trutovsky. Ivan Trush is known and appreciated for his lyrical canvases, depicting both nature and Ukrainian peasants in their traditional costumes.

Several generations of contemporary painters continued the traditions of their predecessors. Nowadays, along with realistic art, Ukrainian painters work in other trends – abstractionism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, etc.

Taras Shevchenko

Among the outstanding figures of Ukrainian culture, a place of special importance belongs to Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861). He reflected the age-old freedom-loving aspirations of the Ukrainian working people through his inspiring works of poetry and visual art. Shevchenko lived a short, yet highly dramatic life. As a poet, artist and thinker of a revolutionary-democratic trend, Shevchenko ardently fought against the social and national oppression

of his people.

Taras Shevchenko was born into the family of a serf peasant in the village of Morintsi (today in Cherkassy Region). In his childhood he took a great interest in drawing pictures and writing poems. However, the development of Shevchenko's talents was hindered by the fact that he, a serf, was at the mercy of whims of his master Engelhardt. One such whim turned into a great opportunity for Shevchenko when Engelhardt took him as a lackey to accompany him on his journey to Petersburg in winter of 1831. In Petersburg young Shevchenko met a fellowcountryman of his, Ivan Soshenko, who introduced him to the democraticallyminded and prominent figures of Russian culture. They discerned that Shevchenko had a rare gift for literature and art and bought him out of serfdom in 1838.

From 1838 to 1845 Shevchenko was a student at St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts where he showed an unusual aptitude for oil and water-colour painting and pencil drawing. His instructor was Karl Bryullov, a prominent Russian artist. It was also at that time that Shevchenko became a poet of national recognition who raised the beauty and melodiousness of the Ukrainian language to unprecedented

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heights of poetic art. Shevchenko's poetry is full of truth and power for it comes from the very depths of experience. Filled with feelings of civic duty and directed against serfdom and autocracy, his poems attracted the attention of progressivelyminded people in Russia.

On graduating from the Academy in 1845, Shevchenko returned to Ukraine and began to work as an artist for the Archaeographic Commission of Kiev University. Two years later he was arrested as a member of the Society of Cyril and Methodius, a secret political organization. Shevchenko's writings, vividly exposing the unpopular state system of Russian empire, fell into the hands of the police, Shevchenko was exiled to Orenburg to serve thereas a private for many long years in a military corps. Approving the sentence, the Czar wrote with his own hand an order on the file: the exiled poet and artist to be kept under strict surveillance, forbidden both to write and to paint. However, due to the assistance of the local progressively minded intellectuals, he was able, on semi-legal grounds, to engage in creative work over the whole ten-year period he spent on the Kazakh steppes.

Progressive Russian and Ukrainian cultural figures fortunately interceded for him and Shevchenko was released in 1857. During the last years of his life he produced his most important works of poetry, painting and graphic art. His achievements in the field of engraving were particularly impressive and widely recognized. In September 1860 the council of the Academy of Arts bestowed upon him the title of academician.

In the winter of 1860-1861 Shevchenko's health, fragile since the exile, rapidly deteriorated. On March 10, 1861, he died and was buried at the Smolensky cemetery in Petersburg, but in the spring of the same year, according to his will, his remains were transferred to the Ukraine and interred on a high Dnieper bank in Kaniv, not far from the village where he was born and grew up.

In Ukrainian visual arts Shevchenko is a brilliant representative of romanticism. His works at the Academy, as well as those from the first two or three years after his graduation, demonstrate the author's poetic and profoundly humane perception of life and of man's inner state (this is particularly obvious in his Self-Portrait, 1840). A number of paintings and water-colours are distinguished for their typically romantic means of expression. A certain impact on the

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