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―Anatomy Lessons‖, Rembrandt received many commissions for portraits and soon had many pupils of his own.

Three distinct phases can be distinguished in Rembrandt’s artistic career. His early works, portraits or biblical subjects, feature fine, smooth brush-work. The second phase, marked by the ― Night Watch‖, is more forceful and dynamic, while in the third phase Rembrandt sought textual effects. The culmination of his period is his ―Man in the Golden Helmet‖, in which the relief on the helmet is modelled by the paint. Rembrandt sets himself the aim of recreating in visual terms the intangible essence of man and his inner world.

When landscape became very popular, the Dutch painters began to depict Holland’s countryside. Rembrandt also participated actively in Dutch landscape art, and he did it in a very individual manner. He gained a conception of space and learned how to subordinate the individual form to a larger whole. Rembrandt achieved a suggestion of air and atmosphere using vibrant tones and lines.

The paintings of Rembrandt’s last years bear the sad imprint on his unhappy old age and disrepute. His superb collection of paintings was sold at auction in 1657/8 and even his house was put on the block. The dramatic expression in his last magnificent series of self-portraits reveal an overwhelming misery and inner tornment.

Proper Names:

Renbrandt van Rijn [ 'rembrænt væn 'rain]

Leyden [ 'l∂id∂n] a city in the Netherlands

British Painting

The art of painting started by Renaissance began to develop in Britain. However, for two centuries art in Britain was influenced by the styles of Flemish and French artists. In the early 18 th century British art began to develop independently. Thus, the 18 th century became the great age of British painting , when it acquired a distinct national character.

The first major artist who rejected foreign influence and established art with thoroughly British themes and subjects was William Hogarth (1697-1764). He started as an engraver, then learnt to work with oils. Hogarth observed the life of

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the high society and common people and depicted it in a moralistic and dramatic narrative way. His portraits are truthful and have a fresh vitality. Hogath’s witty and satirical portrayal of the contemporary society, his protest against social injustice, his attack on the vulgarity of fashionable society make him one of the most original and significant British artists.

The most accomplished series of moral paintings ―Marriage à la Mode‖ exposes the vulgarity of a rich aristocratic family hidden under outer glamour and refinement.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was a prominent figure in British painting . He went to Italy to study the Old Masters not to copy them, but to learn the principles of the Grand Style, to master the secrets of composition, and light and shade effects.

Painting mostly portraits, Reynolds insisted that not only physical features of the sitter should be depicted, but his inner world should be reflected too. Reynolds tried to fuse portraiture with historical painting.

Reynolds was the first president of the Royal Academy. His sitters were mostly socially prominent people of his time. One of the best-known paintings executed by Reynolds is ―Mrs Siddons the Tragic Muse.‖

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) painted portraits, popular at that time, but by inclination he was a landscapist. He successfully tried to combine portraiture and landscape painting. In his pictures the figures blend with the landscape background, so man and nature become the single whole. Taken as a whole,

Gainsborough’s portraits depict an entire society, though each of them is distinct and individual. He was a good psychologist, and he rendered the character of each sitter truthfully and subtly. Gainsborough didn’t paint rich, important people with pleasure, he preferred to portray those persons with whom he was at ease.

Gainsborough is known as an excellent colourist. Blue predominated in his colour-scheme.

Among Gainsborough’s masterpieces are the portraits of Mrs Sheridan, Mrs Graham, ―the most glamorous of his creations‖, ―The Watering Place‖, called ―the finest landscape ever painted in England and equal to the great Masters‖.

Joseph Turner (1775-1851), famous for his seascapes, made a great contribution to British art heritage. He painted about 300 oils and 19,000 water-colours, which

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now belong to the nation. Turner painted mainly marine subjects, using colour as the musician uses his tunes and chords. He explored the luminous effects of the sky reflected in water and of sunlight.

One of Turner’s best paintings is ―the fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken up‖, representing the majestic old ―Téméraire‖, dragged to her last home by a little spiteful steamer. The ship, the steamer, the river & the sunset are wonderfully united in this powerful riverpiece.

John Constable (1776-1837) has been regarded as the best British landscape artist. His desire was not merely to paint ―portraits‖ of places but to give a full impression of the beautiful scenery of the English countryside, to paint light, dew, breeze, bloom & freshness.

Constable’s ― The Hay Wain‖, exhibited at the Louvre in 1824, had a great effect on French art. His pure and brilliant colour was a revelation to French painters. He was able to choose a perfect composition for a painting to enhance the beauty of a rural view.

Proper Names:

William Hogarth [ ´wilj∂m ΄ houga:θ]

Joshua Reynolds [ ΄dзosw∂ ΄ ren∂ldz]

Thomas Gainsborough [ ΄tom∂s ΄geinzb∂r∂]

John Constable [ ΄dзon ΄kλnst∂bl]

Joseph Turner [ ΄dзouzif ΄t∂:n∂]

Téméraire [ ¸tem∂΄rε∂]

William Hogarth

1697-1762

William Hogarth was unquestionably one of the greatest of English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. He did a lot to found a distinctive English school of painting. Among other achievements, he established the new genre of ―Modern Subject‖, in a which a story from contemporary life was told in a series of paintings, which were later engraved.

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W. Hogarth was a man of many contradictions, he was a shrewed careerist, but at the same time deeply vulnerable to criticism; prone to high spirits, but also melancholic. These contradictions can be explained by his upbringing. W. Hogarth was a son of a bankrupt author and school master. The family was imprisoned for debt for 5 years, so William didn’t have a chance to get education. At the age of 17 he became an apprentice to a silver engraver. He set up as an independent engraver in 1720, enrolling also at the Vanderbank Academy, where he met well-known painters and picked up some instruction in drawing. In the following years, Hogarth rose steadily through his profession, making funeral tickets, book illustrations, social and political satire.

The painter’s made rapid progress on his own by learning new painting techniques. In 1729 W. Hogarth achieved a major success with his painting ―The Beggar’s Opera‖, which he was obliged to repeat at least five times.

The painter established himself as a fashionable portrait painter, but soon he realized that it was too much work for too little money. The series of 6 pictures under the title ―Harlot’s Progress‖, telling the tragic story of a young girl from the country who arrives in London, is lured by an old man with promises of affluence into keeping, and later descends into prostitution, prison, disease and death, brought the painter more fame and money. William Hogarth launched a subscription for engravings of the ―Harlot’s Progress‖, and that idea of his was a success – nearly 2,000 sets were subscribed for at a guinea each. The other ―comic story‖ paintings followed by engravings were ―The Rake’s Progress‖, ―A Midnight Modern Conversation‖, ―The Distressed Poet‖, ―The Four Times of the Day‖, and others.

Soon William Hogarth painted a new ―comic history‖ cycle ―Marriage a la Mode‖ consisting of eight paintings about a high society family. Negotiations of a marriage contract, weariness and disillusion of the married couple, the estrangement between the Earl and Countess, the Earl’s visit to a quack doctor about his venereal disease, the Countess’s diversions, her affair with the ―silvertongued‖ lawyer, murder, suicide – these things were depicted by the painter, revealing how rotten the high society was under the outer glamour. According to the art-critics, ―Marriage a la Mode‖ is the most accomplished of William Hogarth’s moral cycles.

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The other series exposed the corruption and foolishness of polite society and its hangers-on: aristocrats, merchants, doctors, lawyers, clergymen and foreigners. Besides his paintings on modern moral subjects, William Hogarth executed a lot of portraits, culminating in the spectacular ceremonial portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital.

Through his art W. Hogarth showed that a painter could be a man of intellect and wit. He discovered that by using engravings artists could survive economically by appealing to the public beyond the narrow circle of connoisseurs.

W. Hogarth had no pupils, but almost all subsequent art in England bears the mark of his personality.

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)

Joshua Reynolds is historically the most important figure in British painting. He was born in Devonshire, where his father was Headmaster of the Grammar School, so Reynolds was brought up in an educated family at a time when most English painters were hardly more than ill-educated tradesmen. Reynolds had a number of close friends among prominent poets, writers and statesmen, and probably did more to raise the status of the artist in England through his learning and personal example than by his quality as an artist.

He was an apprentice to a fashionable portrait painter in London. Later he established his own studio. In 1746 Reynolds painted the ―Eliot Family Group‖, which shows the fundamental basis of his art – the deliberate allusion to the Old Masters or Atique sculpture.

In 1749 Reynolds went to Italy, were he spent two years making a prolonged study of the Antique, Raphael and Michaelangelo. There he learnt the basis of Italian art.

In 1768, when the Royal Academy was founded, Reynolds was the only possible choice for the President. In 1769 he became Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, an honour that would have been unthinkable for a painter a generation earlier.

During the following years Reynolds exhibited regularly at the Academy exhibitions, and usually showed a skilful blend of large portraits painted in a

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historical manner. Unlike Th. Gainsborough, J. Reynolds employed many pupils and assistants.

At the Academy, Reynolds delivered lectures, which were published under the title ―Discourses on Art‖ and became international reading. Reynolds had a consistent theory: ―Study the great masters... who have stood the test of ages‖, ―study the works of the ancient sculptors‖. Don’t be ―a mere copier of nature‖, don’t ―amuse mankind with... your imagination or impress them by the grandeur of ideas‖. Don’t ―strive for dazzling elegancies‖ of brushwork, as form is superior to colour‖. The history painter is the painter of the highest order, while the portrait painter is inferior, and landscape and still life rank still lower.

This is clearly a consistent theory, but there is a contrast between what Reynolds preached and what he did. He told the students that they should aim at history painting and the Grand Manner, while he himself was almost exclusively a portrait painter.

Reynolds’ canvases are exhibited in numerous picture galleries and museums all over Europe, but many of them are badly preserved on account of his bad technical procedures: the faces of his sitters are often deathly pale because the carmine that he used has faded out.

Thomas Gainsborough 1727-1788

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the founding fathers of the British

landscape school, and also one of the greatest and most original portrait-painters of

his day. He was born in a small town of Sudbury in Suffolk in 1727. His father was

a prosperous merchant, of whose nine children Thomas was the youngest. At the

age of 13 he persuaded his parents to let him go to London to study painting. He

was an apprentice to Gravelot, a well-known painter, but at the age of 18 he

established his own studio and began to paint small landscapes. Gainsborough

studied hard in the best art school of the time, and he learned the elements of

pictorial composition from Dutch artists.

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In 1746 Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl, a natural daughter of a Duke, who had a substantial annual income, so they were never in danger of starving. They had two daughters, Mary and Margaret.

In 1748 they returned to Sadbury, where Gainsborough painted his masterpiece – the double portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews. In it he displayed his power as a landscape painter. For the first time in this type of picture, the sitters were moved to one side of the canvas, and the landscape was given equal prominence.

Soon the Gainsboroughs moved to Ipswich, a social and cultural center in East Anglia. There he was liked as a person – sociable, generous and warm hearted, but work was not always easy to come by. So, he decided to try his fortune in Bath, a small West Country spa. With his arrival at Bath in 1759 Gainsborough made for himself a reputation of a talented portrait-painter. Business came in so fast that he was soon able to raise his prices. The full-length portrait of Ann Ford, executed during that period, is distinguished by its grandeur, originality of pose and beauty of brushwork. Gainsborough continued painting as many landscapes as portraits, though he had \difficulty in selling them.

In summer Gainsborough spent a lot of time out of doors, sketching and working on his landscapes. He made frequent excursions to the country and brought home roots, stones and mosses, from which he formed and studied foregrounds in miniature. During these years the painter gained recognition among his contemporaries. Soon, he was asked to become a member of the newly formed Royal Academy.

For the first Academy exhibition, in 1769, he painted one of his masterpieces, the full-length portrait of the young and newly married Lady Molineux. With its aristocratic pose, exquisite softness and exceptional bravura brushwork, it created a sensation. However, soon Gainsborough stopped sending his paintings to the Academy, being displeased with the way they were exhibited there.

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In 1774 Gainsborough left Bath for London, where he received a lot of commissions, including some from the Royal family. He executed his portrait of Mrs Graham, the most glamorous of his creations, ―the Watering Place‖, called ―by far the finest landscape ever painted in England and equal to the great Masters‖.

From this time his position as one of the leading British painters of the day was assured. He was able to buy works of art, and purchased three portraits by Van Dyck, a Rubens and fifty-odd pictures, over half of which were landscapes.

During his life, Gainsborough portrayed a wide range of English society. His portraits are a gallery of an extraordinary group of people. He captured on his canvases not only the look, but the very spirit of the Britain’s aristocrats, soldiers, squires, statesmen, and assorted folk. Thus, he immortalized the fascinating face of the 18th century England.

However, he considered Reynolds to be more various than he, so in the last decade of his life he tried to extend the subject matter and deepen his expressive powers. Cottage scenes, with groups of children, became his most characteristic subjects. Soon he started painting rustic figures against backgrounds of natural scenery, reflecting a nostalgia for the old country life that was disappearing under the pressures of agricultural improvements and industrial development. Most pictures were painted from living models, like ―The Cottage Girl with Dog and

Pitcher‖, ―The Girl with Pigs‖.

At the close of his career, Gainsborough’s love of scenery sometimes prevailed over his interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in a portrait as in a picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and gracious women.

In the famous canvas ―Ladies Walking in the Mall‖, he ignores the identity of the fashionable ladies strolling in the park. The rustling of the foliage is echoed, as it were, in the shimmer of the ladies’ gowns.

Gainsborough died at the age of 61 of a fatal disease. Later this year Reynolds devoted his annual ―Discourse‖ to the analysis of Gainsborough’s paintings. It was the first time he had ever illustrated his ideas by reference to a particular artist. ―I

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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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