Glimpses of british art

I. An outline of english painting

Some of the greatest foreign masters were attracted to England loaded with honours and even in some sort received into the nation by the titles of nobility conferred upon them. Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who married the daughter of a lord, and died in London is really the father of the English portrait school. He trained a few English pupils, nevertheless his principal imitators and successors were like himself foreigners settled in London. Not until William Hogarth (1697–1764) do we find a painter truly English, indeed violently so. Van Dyck was the father of the English portrait school and set before it an aristocratic ideal; Hogarth was a printer's son, uneducated but a curious observer of men and manners, who with his frank, robust personality brought strength to the stripling's grace. His first works date from 1730. For rather more than a century England was to see a brilliant succession of geniuses, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Constable and Turner, responding to her highest aspirations. No country has had so exclusive and strongly marked a love of the portrait. England and Holland alike were deprived of the religious painting by the Reformation, and mythology met with no better fate. Scarcely any decorative painting is found, and what little survived is mediocre. Holland compensated by inventing the small genre picture, street scene or interior which she brought to an unheard of pitch of refinement. But England practised genre painting only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in imitation, moreover, of the Dutch...

Now, if portrait painting is one of the glories of English art, landscape is another; in both directions it rose to supreme heights.

The third characteristic of the English school is the moral strain emanating from the old Puritan tradition. It sometimes favours a conception of art closely akin to that of the novel which from the eighteenth century onwards is so living and original a part of English literature. Sometimes it leans towards the pamphlet, which is, moreover, often one of the forms of the English novel, or else towards caricature. Sometimes it inspires visions by turns angelic and apocalyptic, but always with a profound moral aim; and, finally, sometimes results in movement which is to all appearances entirely poetic, like that of the Pre-Raphaelites, but with a poetry that is more literary than plastic and in which the idea of purification is applied almost as much to the intentions of art as to its specific processes and sensible effects...

(From the Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Exercises

1. Read the text given above.

2. Read the text about the golden age of British art in "Glimpses of British Art": "The eighteenth century was the great age of..." (p.p. 38 - 39).

3. Find the English equivalents for:

основатель английской школы портрета; человек, с любопытством изучающий человеческую натуру; последователь; ряд гениальных последователей; ряд знаменитых (прославленных) художников; любовь к портрету; бытовая картина; уличная сценка; лирический пейзаж; посредственный; памфлет; карикатура; довести до неслыханного совершенства; гордость (слава) английского искусства; подняться до величайших высот; концепция искусства, близкая к пониманию романа; приобрести национальный характер; отрицать иностранное влияние.

Translate the sentences with these words and word combinations. Give a back translation without consulting the texts.