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5
Пейзаж в портретах Гейнсборо имеет большое значение. В зрелом возрасте, когда
Гейнсборо переселился в Лондон, он начал писать портреты во весь рост на фоне пейзажа.
Модели Гейнсборо поэтичны. Художник придает особую хрупкость и изящество несколько
удлиненным женским фигурам. Светлая колористическая гамма становится отличительной
чертой его живописи. В портретах Гейнсборо отсутствуют аллегории. Гейнсборо прошел
творческую эволюцию от детальной манеры, близкой "малым голландцам" к живописи
широкой и свободной.
V. Summarize the text.
VI. Topics for discussion.
1. Gainsborough's portraits.
2. Gainsborough's style.
UNIT III REYNOLDS (1723-1792)
Sir Joshua Reynolds was in his own day a commanding figure, whose authority outlived him
and who eventually became a target for Romantic attacks. In Reynolds's day society portraiture had
become a monotonous repetition of the same theme. According to the formula, the sitter was to be
posed centrally, with the background (curtain, pillar, chair, perhaps a hint of landscape) disposed
like a back-drop behind; normally the head was done by the master, the body by a pupil or "drapery
assistant", who might serve several painters. Pose and expression tended to be regulated to a
standard of polite and inexpressive elegance; the portrait told little about their subjects other than
that they were that sort of people who had their portraits painted. They were effigies; life departed.
It was Reynolds who insisted in his practice that a portrait could and should be also full,
complex work of art on many levels; he conceived his portraits in terms of history-painting. Each
fresh sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to be told. His people are no
longer static, but caught between one moment and the next. Reynolds was indeed a consummate
producer of character, and his production methods reward investigation. For them he called upon
the full repertoire of the Old Masters.
Reynolds did the Grand Tour and remained in Rome spellbound by the grandeur of
Michelangelo, Raphael, Tintoretto and Titian. He acquired a respectable knowledge of European
painting of the preceding two centuries, and gave at the Royal Academy of Arts -which he helped to
found in 1768 - the famous Discourses, which in published form, remain a formidable body of
Classical doctrine. In his Discourses Reynolds outlined the essence of grandeur in art and suggested
the means of achieving it through rigorous academic training and study of the Old Masters. From
1769 nearly all Reynolds's paintings appeared in the Academy. Reynolds's success as a portraitist
was so great that he was employing studio assistants to lay out the canvases for him and to do much
of the mechanical work. The artist's technique was sound, and many of his works of art suffered as
a result. After his visit to the Netherlands where he studied the works of Rubens Reynolds's picture
surface became far richer. This is particularly true of his portrait the Duchess of Devonshire and
Her Daughter. Reynolds's state portraits of the King and Queen were never successful, and he
seldom painted for them. There is inevitably something artificial about the grandiloquence of the
Classical or Renaissance poses in which he painted solid English men and women of his own day,
investing them with qualities borrowed from a noble past. Nonetheless, we owe our impression of
English aristocracy in the eighteenth century to his majestic portraits, with their contrived
backgrounds of Classical architecture and landscape. Lady Sara Bun-bury Sacrificing to the Graces,
of 1783, speaks eloquently for itself. Among Reynolds's best works are those in which he departs
from the tradition of ceremonial portraiture and abandons himself to inspiration, as in The Portrait
of Nelly O'Brien, which is aglow with light, warmth and feeling.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the following words:
Joshua Reynolds [
]; Sarah [
]; grandeur [
];
inevitably [
]; majestic [
]; grandiloquence [
];
discourses [
]
TASKS