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If you look at the picture, you can see (5) … , in the background you can see (6) … . In the middle of the painting there is a (7) … and it moves along the snowy road.

Boyarynya Morozova sits in the sledge. Her sister, princess Urusova (8) … as a true symbol of deep suffering. Morozova in her fanatizm is ready to sacrifice for the sake of her religious outlook though she is sure, she‟ll die, nothing can stop her. And Surikov (9) … a deathlike hue to her face. Her dark wide open eyes seem to flare with religious passion. Surikov uses (10) … of a pale face and dark attire which vividly connects Morozova with other women‟s images in the canvas. And we can notice quite easily that her face is the solo bright (11) … in the picture: somber, strained and astoundingly expressive.

The colour used in this picture harmonizes with its tragic contents. The canvas is done in a (12) … manner. It is mostly done in (13) … colours, but there are some dark (14) … in it. This painting revives in my heart the feeling of sorrow, though the impression of the canvas is (15) … . The depth and fineness of psychological characteristics, (16) … of the national type, genuine realism place Surikov‟s Morozova among the best images in the world painting. This canvas must be and is among the best treasures of Russian Art.

4. Read through all the descriptions of the pictures in the section Language Focus again and make up your Personal Vocabulary with the phrases for describing pictures.

III. Reading and Speaking.

1. Match the pictures in the left-hand column with the English artists in the right-hand column:

2. Look at the reproductions of the paintings in this unit and say which of the words/phrases below you would use to describe your first impression of these pictures. Are there any phrases which are not appropriate for either painting?

sentimental, puzzling, dreamy, intriguing, charming, detached, evocative, thought-provoking, arresting, solemn; confusion, romance, isolation, tranquility, distance, innocence, sensitivity, fear; heavy shades, calming effect, dull colours, gentle brush strokes, oppressive surroundings, use of warm colours, glum lighting

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2. Here are the extracts from painting descriptions and analyses. Read them attentively drawing attention to the algorithm of the presentation. What do they all have in common? How do they differ? Write out all the phrases that can be used in the description of other pictures and add them to your Personal Vocabulary.

"Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Elizabeth_Delm%C3%A9_and_Her_Children

"Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children" by Reynolds is a typical family group portrait in the Grand Style of English portrait painting. Lady Delmé 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.

Reynolds has taken care that the gestures, facial expressions, and poses of his subjects are appropriate to their age, character, and social status. "The joy of a monarch," Dryden once wrote, "for the news of a victory must not be expressed like the ecstasy of a harlequin on the receipt of a letter from his mistress." So, in this portrait, Lady Delmé is dignified and gracious, secure in the knowledge of her beauty and wealth. Her son John, aged five, as if sensing

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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 colour scheme. These features were for Reynolds symbols of dignity and good taste.

(From: «Практический курс английского языка. 3 курс.», с. 166)

"The Cornfield"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cornfield

In this painting, our eyes are drawn along a country lane on a warm summer‟s day – past the sheepdog who has momentarily forgotten the sheep that he is supposed to be looking after, past the herd that progress stolidly forward, past the plough, and through the open gate into a field of lush golden corn. Across the cornfield is a river, and on the other side, a village with only the church tower and some red roofs visible.

The lane is Fen Lane, down which Constable walked as a boy from his home village of East Bergholt in Suffolk. He crossed the River Stour at Fen Bridge which took him to his school in Dedham. In reality, Dedham would have been to the right of the picture edge.

It is tempting to imagine that the boy drinking from the spring is Constable himself and that this is an idyllic scene from his youth. However, the painting contains some ambiguities. What is the purpose of the plough if the corn has not yet been harvested? Are the sheep heading towards the field or to the right along the lane? Why is the gate off its hinges? Why has the dead tree not been chopped down? Do these elements require interpretation or are they simply representations of the idiosyncrasies of life?

The painting has an interesting history for the Gallery; it was the first in the collection by Constable and the first to be purchased by public subscription, in 1837.

(From: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/picture-of-the-month)

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“Mrs. Sarah Siddons”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Siddons

By the time Sarah Siddons sat for Gainsborough in 1784, both were at the pinnacle of their respective fields. Just three years from his death, Thomas Gainsborough had painted some of the most illustrious names in England and he remained a particularly well-loved artist at the English court. Siddons, meanwhile, was a theatrical phenomenon. It was, therefore, inevitable that their paths should cross and when they did, the resultant portrait was not one that Gainsborough found easy.

If, in 1784, Reynolds painted Siddons as a figure of mythical grandeur, to Gainsborough she is a far less distant subject, and he has stripped her clean of the embellishments of mythology. Though still grand and dignified, he has very much rendered her as a human being, albeit one of fashion and success.

Rendered in Gainsborough's justly celebrated smooth, soft brushwork it is almost as though we could reach into the canvas and touch the rich fabrics Mrs Siddons wears, her artfully rumpled skirts falling just so about the chair on which she sits. Whereas she shared the canvas in Reynolds's iconic work, in this portrait there is nothing in the image to distract from the central figure of the actress. Looking off and away from the audience, we are in no doubt from her air of regal self-possession that this is a woman of no small importance. Although this purports to be a portrait of Mrs Sarah Siddons, she is in character here just as much as she is on stage.

In March 1785, Gainsborough completed the work and the painting was celebrated upon its unveiling at the National Gallery. Recent technological developments have offered us an insight into the methods Gainsborough employed and suggest that the painter did not find his painting of Mrs Siddons an easy one to produce.

X-rays on the painting have revealed pentimenti around the actress's right hand and nose, where Gainsborough has painted over the work several times in

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his search for perfection. Popular art legend has it that, frustrated and distracted by his inability to quite capture Mrs Siddons to his liking, Gainsborough threw down his brush and exclaimed, "Confound the nose, there‟s no end to it!”.

Happily for all of us, the artist finally did lay down his brush on a completed painting, leaving us with another breathtaking depiction of the most celebrated lady to grace the Georgian stage.

(Abridged from: http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.ru/2014/12/confound-nose-thomas- gainsborough-and.html)

“The Shrimp Girl”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shrimp_Girl

Artist: William Hogarth (1697-1764), the first pop artist who, as a painter and engraver, found inspiration in the popular culture of 18th-century London. Hogarth was a visual storyteller whose narratives of London life including The Rake's Progress, The Harlot's Progress, Industry and Idleness, and Marriage à la Mode offer graphic equivalents to the comic novels of his friend Henry Fielding.

Hogarth depicts aristocrats and street urchins with the same cruelty and compassion. The artist's tenderness comes out in his portraits of the children of a wealthy apothecary, and the family cat wickedly eyeing up a caged bird, in The Graham Children (1742) in the National Gallery, or in a painting of his household servants in the Tate collection.

Subject: An unknown street-seller. This imitates a genre of popular print sold widely in 18th-century Europe, featuring various trades, street-criers and

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hawkers. Hogarth takes this formulaic art and gives it a face. We don't doubt this is a real Londoner, a girl glimpsed by the artist and never forgotten.

Distinguishing features: This is a young woman working on the streets of London, peddling fish among crowds who would have been selling everything from political pamphlets to sex. But it is one face that has captivated the painter and one person, from the legions of the urban poor, whose dignified, joyful bearing Hogarth's portrait preserves. This is a deliberate attempt to humanise and individualise the stock types reproduced in cheap prints of the day. It's not a finished, neatened-up work, but a rapidly executed oil sketch. It makes us think of the fast, light brushwork with which the impressionists would try to capture the pace of city life in Paris a century later.

Hogarth's painting has a particular sense of beauty the beauty of the crowd rather than the powdered rich.

Here Hogarth celebrates a flowing, expansive, lively London woman. Her dress, jaunty face, basket balanced on her head, are glimpses of a loveliness of the streets rather than the academy, the unlikely grace of a great modern city going about its daily life. She is a personification of London.

Inspirations and influences: In The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth recommends "the serpentine line", a florid, fluid aesthetic that makes him a proponent of the 18th-century rococo style. We usually think of the rococo in relation to more delicate artists, but Hogarth too has a tough delicacy.

This portrait is comparable to work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (17321806), whose impressionistic portraits share this painting's spontaneity, and also the British artist most loyal to the rococo, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88).

(Abridged from: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/sep/15/art)

“Fishermen at Sea”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner

Fishermen at Sea (1796) is the first painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy, when he was about 21. Here Turner has absorbed all he ever will from the older Marine traditions and moved considerably beyond them. The painting is structured with moonlight, that favorite mood-setting trick of the Romantics. The moon shines through breaking clouds into a sky thick with moisture, silhouettes ambiguous shapes against a distant shore, and shines,

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disconcertingly, right through a swell, just as a fishing boat starts to climb it, and as a fisherman trains a lantern on a net cast into the rolling depths. The effect is both peaceful and ominous, as if hinting at the war with France, then threatening across the Channel, in the potential power of that rolling, translucent wave.

Described by a critic as “one of the greatest proofs of an original mind,” Fishermen at Seahelped launch Turner‟s long years of success at Royal Academy exhibitions. In 1802, still in his twenties, Turner was made a full academician. Nearly forty years later, Ruskin, then just 21 himself, became a particular fan. After he met him for the first time, Ruskin described Turner as “the man who beyond all doubt is the greats of the age… at once the painter and the poet of the day.”

Turner was moving quickly beyond Enlightenment order and English tidiness to the creative chaos of modernity, The sea was the perfect ally. Its rapidly changing moods, brilliant light, rich, constantly mixing colors, vast distances, turbulent clouds, rain, and mist, violent storms and dead calms, sublime beauty and destructive power, all fed his artistic imagination. The irrational, uncontrolled, unbound side of nature, so visible in the oceans, was his greatest inspiration.Turner‟s one ambition was to become a great artist. In this quest, the sea was his constant companion.

(From: http://artsfuse.org/111010/fuse-visual-arts-review-turner-the-sea-at-the-peabody- essex-museum-a-grand-performance/)

IV. On Your Own.

Choose a picture of an English artist you like most of all and present the description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation of it. Don’t forget to show the reproduction of the picture to your group mates. Use the Vocabulary lists you’ve made. Read the tips for describing pictures and follow the outline below. Ask your group mates if their impressions of the picture are the same.

Tips for picture descriptions.

Preparation

Have a close look at the picture and decide on how to structure your picture description. What is important or special? What should the viewer pay attention to?

Structure and Content

It's not easy to follow a picture description if the writer jumps randomly from one point to another. Therefore, make sure that your picture description is logically structured, for example:

from left to right (or from right to left)

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from the background to the foreground (or from the foreground to the background)

from the middle to the sides (or from the sides to the middle)

from details to general impressions (or from general impressions to details)

Which structure you finally choose depends on your taste and the picture you want to describe.

Pictures in General

short description of the scene (e. g. place, event)

details (who / what can you see)

background information (if necessary) on place, important persons or event

Paintings

name of artist and picture, year of origin (if known)

short description of the scene (e. g. place, event)

details (who / what can you see)

impression on the viewer

artist's intention

perspective, colours, forms, proportions etc.

Important Tenses

Simple Present

Present Progressive

both tenses also in Passive Voice

Outline.

1. THE GENERAL EFFECT.

(The title and the name of the artist. The period or trend represented. Does it appear natural and spontaneous or contrived and artificial?)

2. THE CONTENTS OF THE PICTURE.

(Place, time and setting. The accessories, the dress or environment. Any attempt to render the emotions of the model/the atmosphere of nature. What does the artist accentuate in his subject?)

3. THE COMPOSITION AND COLOURING. In a portrait:

(How is the sitter represented? Against what background? Any prevailing format? Is the picture bold or rigid? Do the hands (head, body) look natural and informal? How do the eyes gaze?)

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In a portrait or in a landscape:

Does the painter concentrate on the analysis of details? What tints predominate in the colour scheme? Do the colours blend imperceptibly? Are the brushstrokes left visible?).

What is the first thing that catches your eye? What can you see in the background?

What can you see in the foreground?

4.INTERPRETATION AND EVALUATION.

(Does it exemplify a high degree of artistic skill? What feelings or ideas does it evoke in the viewer?) What feelings and emotions does the painting give you?

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UNIT 2.

ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS

I. Lead-in.

Discuss the following questions:

a)Do you ever visit art galleries and museums?/ Which art galleries and museums have you visited? Which of them did you like most of all? Why?

b)What could be done to make art galleries more attractive to the general public?

c)How important is the art of painting in your community? Where are pieces of art usually exhibited in your city/town? What were the latest art exhibitions in your city/town that stirred the public‟s interest? What contributed to that?

d)What art galleries and museums of Great Britain do you know? Which of them would you like to visit?

II. Language Focus.

1. Read the text about the Wallace Collection. Have you heard of it? Explain the meaning of the phrases in bold. Translate the italicized words.

THE WALLACE COLLECTION

The Wallace Collection displays superb works of art in probably the most sumptuous interiors of any museum in London. Many people regard it as their favourite place in the capital.

The Collection was bequeathed to the nation by Sir Richard's widow in 1897 and is displayed on the ground and the first floors of Hertford House, the family's main London residence.

There you can see unsurpassed collections of French eighteenth-century painting, furniture and porcelain together with Old Master paintings by, among others, Titian, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens, Velazquez and Gainsborough. The finest collection of arms and armour in England outside the Tower of London is shown in four galleries and further displays of gold boxes, miniatures, French and Italian sculpture and medieval and Renaissance works of art including Limoges enamels, maiolica, glass, silver, cuttings from illuminated manuscripts and carvings in ivory, rock crystal and boxwood.

The Wallace Collection owes its splendid display of eighteenth-century French painting, particularly Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard and its important collection of pictures by French and English artists of the early nineteenth century including Delacroix and Bonington. The collection of miniatures numbers more than three hundred.

The spectacular collection of eighteenth-century French furniture contains a number of pieces made for royal residences including the chest of drawers

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