Джон Констебл
Характерный расцвет английской живописи XVIII века, проявившийся в полотнах великих английских художников Уильяма Хогарта, Томаса Гейнсборо и Джошуа Рейнолдса, в XIX веке порождает поистине всплеск самых различных направлений. Богатая английская школа живописи, известная пестрым разнообразием жанров и ярких индивидуальностей, все больше тяготеет к не слишком яркому, но удивительно лиричному английскому пейзажу.
Художником, который сумел воплотить эту тенденцию на основе прогрессивных достижений западноевропейских пейзажистов первой половины XIX века, был Джон Констебл. Он родился в семье владельца мельницы на реке Стор и всю свою жизнь воспевал родные места. В 1799 году художник уехал в Лондон и поступил в Королевскую Академию. А после завершения образования он вернулся к своим любимым мотивам, которые часто повторял с небольшими изменениями. Такими работами можно считать варианты пейзажа Вересковая пустошь в Хемпстеде или авторское повторение работы Собор в Солсбери.
Художник отбрасывал традиционные нормы и образцы, стараясь сочетать в своей живописи непосредственность восприятия природы с глубоким ее изучением. Стремясь к совершенству в передаче пейзажа, художник дарит ему колористическое богатство, очищая его от глухих цветов. Его жесткий, грубоватый мазок вблизи даже кажется выпуклым. Но если смотреть на картину с расстояния, возникает эффект, делающий изображение совсем живым. Все это в полной мере относится к картине Кукурузное поле, написанной в 1826 году.
Лучшим полотном Констебла считается написанная в 1821 году Телега для сена. Изображение буквально пронизано удивительными отблесками. Они заметны и на воде, и на серебрящейся части какого-то растения, погрузившего в воду свои ветви. Поражают видные в просветах листвы стволы могучих деревьев. И над всем этим – неспокойное, холодное английское небо. Эта работа в 1824 году была выставлена в парижском Салоне и имела огромный успех. Позднее она вернулась на свое место в Лондонскую Национальную галерею.
Supplementary reading
The Royal Academy of Arts
The Royal Academy of Arts was founded through a personal act of King George III on 10th December 1768 with a mission to promote the arts of design through education and exhibition. The motive in founding the Academy was twofold: to raise the professional status of the artist by establishing a sound system of training and expert judgment in the arts and to arrange the exhibition of contemporary works of art attaining an appropriate standard of excellence. Behind this concept was the desire to foster a national school of art and to encourage appreciation and interest in the public based on recognised canons of good taste.
Fashionable taste in XVIII century Britain centered on continental and traditional art forms providing contemporary artists little opportunity to sell their works. From 1746 the Foundling Hospital, through the efforts of William Hogarth, provided an early venue for contemporary artists to show their work in Britain. The success of this venture led to the formation of the Society of Artists and the Free Society of Artists. Both these groups were primarily exhibiting societies and their initial success was marred by internal fractions amongst the artists. The combined vision of education and exhibition to establish a national school of art set the Royal Academy apart from the other exhibiting societies. It provided the foundation upon which the Royal Academy came to dominate the art scene of the XVIII and XIX centuries supplanting the earlier art societies.
Sir William Chambers used his connections with King George III to gain royal patronage and financial support of the Academy and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds was made its first President. The 34 founding Members were a group of prominent artists and architects who were determined to achieve professional standing for British art and architecture. They also wanted to provide a venue for exhibitions that would be open to the public; and to establish a school of art through which their skills and knowledge could be passed to future generations of practitioners.
The first Royal Academy exhibition of contemporary art, open to all artists, was held on 25th April 1769 and ran through until 27th May 1769. 136 works of art were shown and this exhibition, now known as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, has been staged annually without interruption to the present day. In 1870 The Royal Academy expanded its exhibition program to include a temporary annual loan exhibition of Old Masters’ following the cessation of a similar annual exhibition of Old Masters’ held by the British Institution. The range and frequency of these loan exhibitions has grown enormously since that time making the Royal Academy a leading art exhibition institution of international importance.
The Academy today continues to aspire, in the words of its XVIII founders, “to promote the arts of design”, that is: to present a broad range of visual art to the widest possible audience; to stimulate debate, understanding and creation through education; and to provide a focus for the interests of artists and art-lovers. The Academy has held an annual Summer Exhibition of works for sale since its formation and its first loan exhibition was held in 1870. The Academy now enjoys an unrivalled reputation as a venue for exhibitions of international importance.
The Academy is an independent institution. The Academicians are all practising painters, sculptors, engravers, printmakers, draughtsmen and architects and are elected by their peers. There are up to 80 Academicians and a number of Senior Academicians who are over 75. The current President of the Academy is Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, an architect. He is the 25th President in a period of 241 years. Past Royal Academicians include John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wiliam Turner, Lord Leighton and Stanley Spencer, while current Members include Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor.
The Academy is governed by a Council selected by rotation from the Academicians, and includes the four principal Officers of the Royal Academy – the President, Keeper, Treasurer and the Secretary and Chief Executive, all of whom attend Council ex officio. In addition, following a review of governance in 2007, there can now be three co-opted outside members of Council, currently including John Coombe, the former Finance Director of GSK and Lord Justice Moses. Alongside Council, the Royal Academy Trust, chaired by The Hon Richard S Sharp, looks after the endowment and assists with fund-raising.
APPLIED ARTS: English Porcelain
The English started making porcelain rather late compared with the rest of Europe, and several of the English factories used the glassy type of soft paste. In trying to improve the recipes two other basic types of soft paste porcelain were made in England. One type used soapstone (soapy) in the mix and the other used bone ash (bony). The three basic English porcelains can loosely be called glassy, soapy or bony.
The early factories at Chelsea, Bow, Derby, Worcester and Longton Hall all started work between 1745 and 1752. There were many porcelain based factories in England and some of them like the factories operating during the XVIII century at Chelsea and Worcester were the most consistent in their use of marks. This helped the collectors to identify the original from the fake ones.
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Of the factories operating before 1785, Chelsea and Worcester were the most consistent in their use of marks but quite a large proportion of their output, like that of the other makers, is unmarked. Some of the factories copied the crossed swords of Dresden, and some copied each other. After 1785, the position grew better, but there were still more unmarked pieces than marked. |
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Chelsea Porcelain plateA few cream jugs with the word “Chelsea”, a triangle and the date 1745 incised in the clay under the base before it was fired have been preserved. They prove that the works was in being by that year, and it has been argued that because the jugs are so well finished whoever made them had practiced his skill for some time prior.
A number of other pieces also marked with a scratched triangle are known, and to about the same early date belongs a mark in under glaze blue in the form of a trident intersecting a crown. Most of these wares were unpainted but glazed, and some show that French porcelain of the period was probably their inspiration as regards both the modeling and the glassy body.
English porcelain figures often imitated those of Meissen, and the influence of Sevres appears in the more extravagant pieces made at Chelsea. Suggestions were also taken from Chinese and Japanese porcelain and the shapes of English silverwork. But each factory developed its own interpretation of the rich and fanciful rococo style, which after 1770 changed into the slight but graceful neoclassical style practised at the combined Chelsea-Derby factory and at Worcester. Realistic landscape and figure-painting, with more stiffly disciplined shapes and ornament, appeared after 1800. Besides decorative wares, Bow and Worcester produced quantities of cheap “useful” porcelain; this was painted in blue-and-white, or printed by, paper transfers from copperplate engravings (a process invented in England).
The English factories, lacking such influential support, faced financial problems which had proved fatal to some of them by 1770, when cheaper cream-coloured earthenware of Wedgwood type came into fashion. Derby and Worcester, however, managed to survive into the XIX century.
English porcelain is, with the exception of Plymouth, all of soft-paste, and it is important for the collector to learn to recognize this feature. Like so many difficult things, it cannot be done at once; some are able to recognize it quickly and almost by intuition, but for most it is a matter of patience and experience.
One feature of decorating should be mentioned: the practice of factories selling their ware, white and glazed, to men with decorating establishments of their own. This was not at all uncommon in the early days of porcelain making, and the name of James Giles is among the best known of those doing this type of work. William Duesbury, later owner of the Derby factory and purchaser of both Chelsea and Bow, began his career similarly. There was a further outburst of activity of this nature early in the XIX century, when Randall and Robins painted Nantgarw porcelain in London. Men who worked in this way are known as “outside decorators”, because their workshops were unconnected with a particular factory.
SCIENCE PAINTING
Joseph Wright, styled Wright of Derby, was an English painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London-trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed, practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. He saw the world in a forced and sharpening light – sometimes artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces caught in the circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting monstrous shadows. With it Wright brought out a sense of exploration and exploitation – scientific, intellectual and commercial, the spirit of the Midlands of his time. He has been acclaimed as “the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution”.
Wright is notable for his use of Chiaroscuro effect, which emphasises the contrast of light and dark, and for his paintings of candle-lit subjects. His paintings of the birth of science out of alchemy, often based on the meetings of the Lunar Society, a group of very influential scientists and industrialists living in the English Midlands, are a significant record of the struggle of science against religious values in the period known as the Age of Enlightenment.
The “Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump”, painted in 1768, is perhaps his masterpiece. Air-pumps were in considerable production in the Midlands at the time, but this is not merely an excellently painted and composed study of scientific experiment. It is raised to the pitch of a true and moving drama of life by the tender yet unsentimental exploration of a human situation. The bird in the globe will die, as the vacuum is created in it; the elder girl on the right cannot bear the idea and hides her face in her hands, while the younger one, though half-turned away also, looks up still to the bird with a marvellous and marvelling expression in which curiosity is just overcoming fear and pity. The moon, on the edge of cloud, seen through the window on the right, adds another dimension of weird-ness and mystery.
This is a picture that exists on many levels but, as it was not expressed in terms of the classical culture of the age, Wright’s subject pictures were for long not given their due. He himself stood apart from that (classical) culture; although he early became an associate of the Royal Academy, he soon quarrelled with it.
items of self-study work.
English kings and queens as the subject of British painting.
The Royal Academy of Art and its masters.
Newlyn School of painting.
Miniature as a genre of painting.
The Grand Style and its characteristic features.
Prints and Watercolours.
Arts and Crafts movement.
English porcelain.
Galleries of London.
The Nation’s Mantelpiece: a history of the National Gallery.
The Pre-Raphaelites.
The XX century: modernization versus restoration.
Art exhibitions in the UK.
Modern school of English painting.