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both government corruption and the vogue for Italian opera. The arias were popular ballads with new lyrics by Gay, and the characters were pickpockets and prostitutes. William Hogarth, as Gay‟s friend, painted six canvases of the final scene, which is set in Newgate Prison.

On trial for robbery, Captain Macheath stands in shackles, while two of his lovers plead for his life. Lucy, his mistress, kneels before her father, Lockit the jailer, who wears keys on his belt. Macheath‟s wife, Polly, also implores her father, Peachum, a criminal mastermind and fence, to intervene on

Macheath‟s behalf. The other figures are not actors but theater patrons who, according to custom, were privileged to sit on stage. Adding to the fun, these spectators include caricatures of prominent aristocrats.

Before becoming a painter, William Hogarth earned fame with sets of humorous prints – his “modern moral subjects” – that satirized contemporary life. In 1753, Hogarth published the earliest major book of art theory in English. His Analysis of Beauty extolled lively, sinuous lines, such as the complex curves of the figures‟ poses and the stage curtain in this theatrical tableau.

Conservation Notes

The fine canvas is tightly plain woven; it has been lined, but the original tacking margins survive intact. The ground is warm gray and of moderate thickness. There is a thinly applied yellowish green imprimatura. The painting is executed in thin, rich, opaque layers that have an enamellike quality; the figures in the background are sketchily painted. There are pentimenti in the curtain: x- radiographs reveal that Hogarth originally painted upper center a satyr‟s head set between swags of drapery – which, as in the Yale version of this subject, would probably have borne the motto of Lincoln‟s Inn Fields Theater: VELUTI IN SPECULUM and UTILE DULCIsuspended on either side of what was presumably, although partially beneath the satyr‟s head, the royal coat of arms. The highlights of the curtain are executed with what appears to be gold foil toned with glazes. The edging of Macheath‟s pink coat was originally gilded. The paint surface is slightly abraded and has been slightly flattened during lining. The painting is otherwise in good condition. There are scattered retouches applied to abraded surfaces and some of the cracks. The thin natural resin varnish has not discolored.

(Abridged from: The Collection. National Gallery of Art http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/british.htm)

2.Fill in the gaps if necessary.

1.The history of British painting is intimately linked … the broader traditions of European painting.

2.English artists began to develop their own styles… marine and allegorical painting.

3.Some artists, such … Richard Wilson, painted idealized scenes imbued … the spirit of … the classical past, while others, such as… Joseph Wright of

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Derby, pursued … more individual and personal visions … the natural world.

4.Constable‟s true-to-life views … the English countryside expressed romantic ideals … the essential harmony and purity … nature.

5.… portraiture, conversation pieces referred … pictures commissioned … families or friends to portray … them sharing common activities such as hunts, meals, or musical parties.

6.Conversation pieces came … fashion during … the 1720s, largely due … the influence … William Hogarth.

7.Conversation pieces and novels, … fictionally portraying situations … real life, differ … the allegorical portraits and epic poetry preferred … the nobility.

8.The modish, diagonally swept-back hairstyle of the mother and daughter dates … this conversation piece … the late 1770s.

9.The “V”-shaped geometry that unifies … the group, silhouetted … the

dark foliage … a park, typifies … Wheatley‟s well-structured compositions.

10.Wheatley turned… painting sentimental scenes intended … engraving. 11.Romanticism, an artistic movement … the late 1700s to mid-1800s,

emphasized … an emotional response … nature.

12.Working … the studio … sketches and his imagination, Turner blended his oil paints … fluid layers… translucent color, called glazes.

13.Centered … the panoramic design, the red brick manor house stands … … reason of its warm color … an otherwise cool scheme of blues, greens, and grays.

14.To add this requested motif, he cleverly sewed … an inch … extra fabric … the canvas … the far right.

15.Based … notes in the artist‟s sketchbooks, the scene is the wide mouth … the Thames joining … the North Sea, where the smaller River Medway further churns … the waves.

16.The sails … the right, … instance, are brilliantly silhouetted … the dark clouds.

17.… extension, the Grand Manner came to include portraiture – especially … full length and … life size – accompanied … settings and accessories that conveyed … the dignified status … the sitters.

18.English society, … instance, relished … the rivalry … Sir Joshua Reynolds, knighted … the official court artist, and Thomas Gainsborough, whom all the royal family preferred … paint their portraits.

19.Sir Thomas Lawrence campaigned … the classical Greek sculpture … the Parthenon to be acquired … the British Museum.

20.… addition … imaginatively re-creating actual events … the past, history paintings also illustrated heroic or moralizing episodes … religion, mythology, and literature.

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21.… depicting significant events that appealed … the conscience, history painting deserved its reputation … the most demanding and rewarding form… art – both … the creator and the viewer.

22.The desire… profundity… narrative pictures often invested portraits and landscapes … allegorical meanings and poetic overtones.

23.… his own history paintings, Reynolds declared he would “sometimes deviate … vulgar and strict historical truth, … pursuing the grandeur … his design.”

24.Thus, regardless … when and where the events occurred, Reynolds clothed his figures … classical robes and placed them … idealized scenery.

25.Benjamin West produced a startling shift … convention depicting a recent incident, set … a recognizable location, … figures … contemporary dress.

3.Find synonyms or explain the meaning of the words and word groups in bold.

4.Comment on the parts of the text highlighted in yellow (explain in your own words what the author meant by them).

5.Speak on every genre of painting viewed in the text dwelling on the following:

genre and its typical subject matter;

stages of the genre development;

representatives;

intrinsic characteristics: general trends and variability.

5. Look at the pictures below and decide what genre they belong to. Give reasons for your choice.

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IV. On Your Own.

Read more about some of the brightest representatives of the Golden Age of British painting in ADDITIONAL MATERIAL of this textbook. Complete the tasks that follow the texts – they will help you to understand and process the information.

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MODULE 3.

BRITISH ART AND PAINTING FROM THE VICTORIAN PERIOD TO

THE 20TH CENTURY

UNIT 1.

VICTORIAN PERIOD

I. Lead-in

Discuss the following questions:

1)What do you know of the Victorian period in the history of England? What was that period characterized by?

2)What outstanding English writers, playwrights, musicians, architects and artists of the Victorian period do you remember?

3)Look at the names of some British artists of the Victorian period and say which of them are familiar to you? Which have you heard about? What do you know about them?

John Everett Millais William Holman Hunt Dante Gabriel Rossetti Ford Madox Brown Edward Burne-Jones John William Waterhouse William Morris

Edwin Landseer Lord Leighton

Lawrence Alma-Tadema William Powell Frith Luke Filde

Augustus Egg

James McNeill Whistler Richard Redgrave William Bell Scott

II. Language Focus.

Transcribe and pronounce the following words from the text you are going to read in this Unit.

Pre-Raphaelite; minutely; the decorative arts; aesthetic; magisterial; an amateur artist; era; to alternate; accolade; the ridicule praise; Hogarthian; perennial; to decipher; Orientalism; lithographs; Palestine; rural scenes; memoirs; a quasi-Impressionist technique; Art Nouveau; to re-Gothicize.

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III. Reading and Speaking.

1. Read the text below and complete the tasks that follow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_(Millais_painting) John Everett Millais. Isabella, 1849

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) achieved considerable influence after its foundation in 1848 with paintings that concentrated on religious, literary, and genre subjects executed in a colourful and minutely detailed style, rejecting the loose painterly brushwork of the tradition represented by Sir Joshua Reynolds. PRB artists included John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown (never officially a member), and figures such as Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse were later much influenced by aspects of their ideas, as was the designer William Morris. Morris advocated a return to hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts over the industrial manufacture that was rapidly being applied to all crafts. His efforts to make beautiful objects affordable (or even free) for everyone led to his wallpaper and tile designs defining the Victorian aesthetic and instigating the Arts and Crafts movement.

The PRB, like Turner, was supported by the magisterial art critic John Ruskin, himself a very fine amateur artist. For all their technical innovation, the PRB were both traditional and Victorian in their adherence to the history painting as the highest form of art, and their subject matter was thoroughly in tune with Victorian taste, and indeed "everything that the publishers of steel engravings welcomed", enabling them to merge easily into the mainstream in their later careers.

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http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/frederic-lord-leighton-cimabues-celebrated- madonna

Lord Leighton, 1855, Cimabue's celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence. 222 × 521 cm

While the Pre-Raphaelites had a turbulent and divided reception, the most popular and expensive painters of the period included Edwin Landseer, who specialized in sentimental animal subjects, which were favourites of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the later part of the century artists could earn large sums from selling the reproduction rights of their paintings to print publishers, and works of Landseer, especially his Monarch of the Glen (1851), a portrait of a Highland stag, were among the most popular. Like Millais' Bubbles (painting) (1886) it was used on packaging and advertisements for decades, for brands of whisky and soap respectively.

During the late Victorian era in Britain the academic paintings, some enormously large, of Lord Leighton and the Dutch-born Lawrence AlmaTadema were enormously popular, both often featuring lightly clad beauties in exotic or classical settings, while the allegorical works of G.F. Watts matched the Victorian sense of high purpose. The classical ladies of Edward Poynter and Albert Moore wore more clothes and met with rather less success.

William Powell Frith painted highly detailed scenes of social life, typically including all classes of society, that include comic and moral elements and have an acknowledged debt to Hogarth, though tellingly different from his work.

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/drawings-watercolors/john-frederick-lewis-a-kibab-shop- scutari-5576236-details.aspx

John Frederick Lewis, The Kibab Shop, a scene from Scutari, 1858 97

For all such artists the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was an essential platform, reviewed at huge length in the press, which often alternated ridicule and extravagant praise in discussing works. The ultimate, and very rare, accolade was when a rail had to be put in front of a painting to protect it from the eager crowd; up to 1874 this had only happened to Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners, Frith's The Derby Dayand Salon d'Or and Luke Fildes‟ The Casuals. A great number of artists laboured year after year in the hope of a hit there, often working in manners to which their talent was not really suited, a trope exemplified by the suicide in 1846 of Benjamin Haydon, a friend of Keats and Dickens and a better writer than painter, leaving his blood splashed over his unfinished King Alfred and the First British Jury.

British history was a very common subject, with the Middle Ages, Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots and the English Civil War especially popular sources for subjects. Many painters mentioned elsewhere painted historical subjects, including Millais (The Boyhood of Raleighand many others), Ford Madox Brown (Cromwell on his Farm), David Wilkie, Watts and Frith, and West, Bonington and Turner in earlier decades. The London-based Irishman Daniel Maclise and Charles West Cope painted scenes for the new Palace of Westminster. Lady Jane Grey was, like Mary Queen of Scots, a female whose sufferings attracted many painters, though none quite matched The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, one of many British historical subjects by the Frenchman Paul Delaroche. Painters prided themselves on the increasing accuracy of their period settings in terms of costume and objects, studying the collections of the new Victoria and Albert Museum and books, and scorning the breezy approximations of earlier generations of artists.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/redgrave-the-emigrants-last-sight-of-home-t02110 Richard Redgrave. The Emigrants' Last Sight of Home, 1858

Victorian painting developed the Hogarthian social subject, packed with moralizing detail, and the tradition of illustrating scenes from literature, into a range of types of genre painting, many with only a few figures, others large and

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crowded scenes like Frith's best-known works. Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853) and Augustus Egg's set of Past and Present (1858) are of the first type, both dealing with "fallen women", a perennial Victorian concern. As Peter Conrad points out, these were paintings designed to be read like novels, whose meaning emerged after the viewer had done the work of deciphering it. Other "anecdotal" scenes were lighter in mood, tending towards being captionless Punch cartoons.

Towards the end of the 19th century the problem picture left the details of the narrative action deliberately ambiguous, inviting the viewer to speculate on it using the evidence in front of them, but not supplying a final answer (artists learned to smile enigmatically when asked). This sometimes provoked discussion on sensitive social issues, typically involving women, that might have been hard to raise directly. They were enormously popular; newspapers ran competitions for readers to supply the meaning of the painting.

British Orientalism, though not as common as in France at the same period, had many specialists, including John Frederick Lewis, who lived for nine years in Cairo, David Roberts, a Scot who made lithographs of his travels in the Middle East and Italy, the nonsense writer Edward Lear, a continual traveller who reached as far as Ceylon, and Richard Dadd. Holman Hunt also travelled to Palestine to obtain authentic settings for his Biblical pictures. The Frenchman James Tissot, who fled to London after the fall of the Paris Commune, divided his time between scenes of high society social events and a huge series of Biblical illustrations, made in watercolour for reproductive publication. Frederick Goodall specialized in scenes of Ancient Egypt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturne_in_Black_and_Gold_%E2%80%93_The_Falling_Roc ket

James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874).

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A near abstraction, in 1877 Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face."

Larger paintings concerned with the social conditions of the poor tended to concentrate on rural scenes, so that the misery of the human figures was at least offset by a landscape. Painters of these included Frederick Walker, Luke Fildes (although he made his name in 1874 with Applicants for Admission to the Casual Ward at Saint Martin in the Fields see above), Frank Holl, George Clausen, and the German Hubert von Herkomer.

William Bell Scott, a friend of the Rossettis, painted historical scenes and other types of work, but was also one of the few artists to depict scenes from heavy industry. His memoirs are a useful source for the period, and he was one of several artists to be employed for a period in the greatly expanded system of government art schools, which were driven by the administrator Henry Cole (the inventor of the Christmas card) and employed Richard Redgrave, Edward Poynter, Richard Burchett, the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser and many others. Burchett was headmaster of the "South Kensington Schools", now the Royal College of Art, which gradually replaced the Royal Academy School as the leading British art school, though around the start of the 20th century the Slade School of Fine Art produced many of the forward-looking artists.

The Royal Academy was initially by no means as conservative and restrictive as the Paris Salon, and the Pre-Raphaelites had most of their submissions for exhibition accepted, although like everyone else they complained about the positions their paintings were given. They were especially welcomed at the Liverpool Academy of Arts, one of the largest regional exhibiting organizations; the Royal Scottish Academy was founded in 1826 and opened its grand new building in the 1850s. There were alternative London locations like the British Institution, and as the conservatism of the Royal Academy gradually increased, despite the efforts of Lord Leighton when President, new spaces opened, notably the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street, from 1877, which became the home of the Aesthetic Movement. The New English Art Club exhibited from 1885 many artists with Impressionist tendencies, initially using the Egyptian Hall, opposite the Royal Academy, which also hosted many exhibitions of foreign art. The American portrait painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), spent most of his working career in Europe and he maintained his studio in London (where he died) from 1886 to 1907.

Alfred Sisley, who was French by birth but had British nationality, painted in France as one of the Impressionists; Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer at the start of their careers were also strongly influenced, but despite the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bringing many exhibitions to London, the movement made little impact in England until decades later. Some members of the Newlyn

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