Read and translate the text Prominent English artists

     William Hogarth (1697–1764) was one of the greatest of English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. He observed life with a keen and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an exceptional capacity for dramatic composition. Hogarth was a social painter who produced his own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of society’s social life and every aspect of its people. His art was a reflection, an interpretation, and a commentary on the social condition of his time. Hogarth’s magnificent powers of composition were fully displayed in his series of engravings, such as “The Harlot’s Progress”, “The Rake’s Progress”, and the masterpiece of the story series “The Marriage-a-la-Mode”.  “The Marriage-a-la-Mode” is perhaps the most famous of all Hogarth’s moral series which consists of six engravings. The subject of the series is contemporary high life and a marriage based on money and vanity. Hogarth was also a brilliant portrait painter. In portraiture he displayed a great variety. The charm of childhood, the ability to compose a vivid group, and a delightful delicacy of colour appear in “The Graham Children”. The picture is notable for its play of expression and movement and for the freshness of its colour.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) was one of the outstanding British portraitists who had an important influence on his contemporaries. Reynolds painted portraits, group pictures, and historical themes. His sitters included the socially prominent people of the time, representatives of the highest aristocratic circles as well as an exclusive literary and theatrical group. Reynolds collected Old Master paintings and made careful studies of Rembrandt, Titian, and Corregio. He believed that by analysis of Old Masters he could build a composite style of great art. His aim was not to copy their individual works, but to win a similar mastery of the effect which they knew how to achieve: to rival them in their own language but not to copy them. Reynolds was the first who insisted in his practice that a portrait should be a full, complex work of art. Each sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to be told. A fine colorist and a master of composition, Reynolds produced over two thousand portraits of statesmen, famous writers, actors and others, which had historical as well as artistic value. Among his best works are “The Portrait of Nelly O’Brien”, “The Portrait of Samuel Johnson”, “The Tragic Muse” (“The Portrait of Mrs. Siddons”), “Three Ladies Adorning the Term of Hymen”, “Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy”, and others.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) is the purest lyricist of English painters. He succeeded brilliantly as a portrait painter. His gift for catching a likeness was unrivalled, but his portraits became essays in poetic mood. Each of his portraits is distinct and individual. In his portraits Gainsborough is an out-door painter. The figures are inseparable from the landscape in which they move. The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitter and the background merge into a single entity. The landscape was not an additional element to the portrait but it was painted in order to achieve the greatest possible degree of spontaneity. “The Morning Walk”, an idealized portrait of Squire Hallet and his wife, has the beauty of the landscape. It represents the perfection of Gainsborough’s later style and goes beyond portraiture to an ideal conception of dignity and grace in the harmony of landscape and figure. The most fascinating of Gainsborough’s works are “The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat”, the portraits of Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. Siddons and the double portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews.  

John Constable (1776–1837) is the greatest of English landscape painters. Constable was an acute observer of nature and had a romantic passion for light. For him light was the means by which a tree or cloud could take on some particular significance in the ordinary scale of things. He painted exactly what he saw in the clearest and freshest tones; his capacity for rendering the freshness of atmosphere and incidence of light was unique. Constable’s method of painting was nearest to that of Impressionism, broken touches of colour animating the canvas with sparkling movement. All Constable’s works show picturesque variety of detail, a triumph of keen observation, truth of atmospheric colour, and directness of handling. “Hay Wain”, “The Valley Farm”, “Weymouth Bay”, “Brighton Beach with Colliers”, “The Leaping Horse and Handleigh Castle” are among his best known paintings.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was a genius in seascape painting. His marine canvases reveal the grand beauty of the sea, its dynamic force and movement. Turner’s love of the sea was deep. The sea absorbed him; his eyes were open to its beauty. Turner loved to depict the sea, and especially the sea as it affected ships. It was well seen on his famous canvases “Calais Pier” and “The Fighting Temeraire”. His highly atmospheric use of colour and the concern with generalized effects rather than with specific details make ships seem almost a part of the natural world.