Fine art
In European academic traditions, fine art is art developed for aesthetics or beauty, distinguishing it from applied art, which has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. The five main fine arts were painting, architecture and poetry, with performing arts including theatre and dance; the old master print and drawing were included as related forms to painting, just as prose forms of literature were to poetry. Today, the range of what would be considered fine arts includes additional modern forms, such as film, video production/editing and conceptual art. One definition of fine art is "a visual art considered to have been created for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness painting, drawing, watercolor and architecture." In that sense, there are conceptual differences between the applied arts. As conceived, as understood for much of the modern era, the perception of aesthetic qualities required a refined judgment referred to as having good taste, which differentiated fine art from popular art and entertainment.
The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline according to traditional Western European canons. Except in the case of architecture, where a practical utility was accepted, this definition excluded the "useful" applied or decorative arts, the products of what were regarded as crafts. In contemporary practice these distinctions and restrictions have become meaningless, as the concept or intention of the artist is given primacy, regardless of the means through which this is expressed. According to some writers the concept of a distinct category of fine art is an invention of the early modern period in the West. Larry Shiner in his The Invention of Art: A Cultural History locates the invention in the 18th century: "There was a traditional “system of the arts” in the West before the eighteenth century. In that system, an artist or artisan was a skilled maker or practitioner, a work of art was the useful product of skilled work, the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with their role in the rest of life.
“Art”, in other words, meant the same thing as the Greek word techne, or in English “skill”, a sense that has survived in phrases like “the art of war”, “the art of love”, “the art of medicine.” Similar ideas have been expressed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton, though the point of invention is placed earlier, in the Italian Renaissance. The decline of the concept of "fine art" is dated by George Kubler and others to around 1880, when it "fell out of fashion" as, by about 1900, folk art came to be regarded as of equal significance. ""fine art" was driven out of use by about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design... who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects". This was among theoreticians; the separation of arts and crafts that exists in Europe and the US is not shared by all other cultures. In Japanese aesthetics, the activities of everyday life are depicted by integrating not only art with craft but man-made with nature. Traditional Chinese art distinguished within Chinese painting between the landscape literati painting of scholar gentlemen and the artisans of the schools of court painting and sculpture.
A high status was given to many things that would be seen as craft objects in the West, in particular ceramics, jade carving and embroidery. Latin American art was dominated by European colonialism until the 20th-century, when indigenous art began to reassert itself inspired by the Constructivist Movement, which reunited arts with crafts based upon socialist principles. In Africa, Yoruba art has a political and spiritual function; as with the art of the Chinese, the art of the Yoruba is often composed of what would ordinarily be considered in the West to be craft production. Some of its most admired manifestations, such as sculpture and textiles, fall in this category. Drawing is one of the major forms of the visual arts. Common instruments include: graphite pencils and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, charcoals, pastels, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint. There are a number including cartooning and creating comics. There remains debate whether the following is considered a part of “drawing” as “fine art”: "doodling", drawing in the fog a shower and leaving an imprint on the bathroom mirror, or the surrealist method of "entopic graphomania", in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, the lines are made between the dots.
Mosaics are images formed with small pieces of glass, called tesserae. They can be functional. An artist who designs and makes mosaics is called a mosaicist. Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing on paper. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, called a print; each print is considered an original, as opposed to a copy. The reasoning behind this is that the print is not a reproduction of another work of art in a different medium — for instance, a painting — but rather an image designed from inception as a print. An individual print is referred to as an impression. Prints ar
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Frank Stella
Frank Philip Stella is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella works in New York City. Frank Stella was born in Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent, his father was a gynecologist, his mother was an artistically inclined housewife who attended a fashion school and took up landscape painting. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, where he learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development, his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved after his graduation, he is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
As of 2015, Stella lives in Greenwich Village and keeps an office there but commutes on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns, he began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more"; this was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by using the path of the brush stroke often using common house paint; this new aesthetic found expression in a series of new paintings, the Black Paintings in which regular bands of black paint were separated by thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas.
Die Fahne Hoch! is one such painting. It takes its name from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization, it has been suggested that the title has a double meaning, referring to Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In any case, its emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest, reflecting this new direction in Stella's work. Stella's art was recognized for its innovations. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1960 Stella began to produce paintings in aluminium and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings; however they use a wider range of colors, are his first works using shaped canvases being in L, N, U or T-shapes.
These developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series, for example. In the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors arranged in straight or curved lines, he began his Protractor Series of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s; the Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas. Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G. E. L. Stella produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's abstract prints used lithography, screenprinting and offset lithography. In 1967, he designed the set and costumes for a dance piece by Merce Cunningham.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one. During the following decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, which he came to call "maximalist" painting for its sculptural qualities; the shaped canvases took on less regular forms in the Eccentric Polygon series, elements of collage were introduced, pieces of canvas being pasted onto plywood, for example. His work became more three-dimensional to the point where he started producing large, free-standing metal pieces, although they are painted upon, might well be considered sculpture. After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series, created in high relief, he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his paintings; as the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these became more exuberant. Indeed, his earlier Minimalism became baroque, marked by curving forms, Day-Glo colors, scrawled brushstrokes, his prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques.
In 1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project. He has said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. In the old days there
Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage
The conservation and restoration of cultural heritage focuses on protection and care of tangible cultural heritage, including artworks, architecture and museum collections. Conservation activities include preventive conservation, documentation, research and education; this field is allied with conservation science and registrars. Conservation of cultural heritage involves protection and restoration using "any methods that prove effective in keeping that property in as close to its original condition as possible for as long as possible." Conservation of cultural heritage is associated with art collections and museums and involves collection care and management through tracking, documentation, storage, preventative conservation, restoration. The scope has widened from art conservation, involving protection and care of artwork and architecture, to conservation of cultural heritage including protection and care of a broad set of other cultural and historical works. Conservation of cultural heritage can be described as a type of ethical stewardship.
Conservation of cultural heritage applies simple ethical guidelines: Minimal intervention. There are compromises between preserving appearance, maintaining original design and material properties, ability to reverse changes. Reversibility is now emphasized so as to reduce problems with future treatment and use. In order for conservators to decide upon an appropriate conservation strategy and apply their professional expertise accordingly, they must take into account views of the stakeholder, the values and meaning of the work, the physical needs of the material. Cesare Brandi in his Theory of Restoration, describes restoration as "the methodological moment in which the work of art is appreciated in its material form and in its historical and aesthetic duality, with a view to transmitting it to the future"; some consider the tradition of conservation of cultural heritage in Europe to have begun in 1565 with the restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, but more ancient examples include the work of Cassiodorus.
The care of cultural heritage has a long history, one, aimed at fixing and mending objects for their continued use and aesthetic enjoyment. Until the early 20th century, artists were the ones called upon to repair damaged artworks. During the 19th century, the fields of science and art became intertwined as scientists such as Michael Faraday began to study the damaging effects of the environment to works of art. Louis Pasteur carried out scientific analysis on paint as well; however the first organized attempt to apply a theoretical framework to the conservation of cultural heritage came with the founding in the United Kingdom of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. The society was founded by William Morris and Philip Webb, both of whom were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin. During the same period, a French movement with similar aims was being developed under the direction of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect and theorist, famous for his restorations of medieval buildings.
Conservation of cultural heritage as a distinct field of study developed in Germany, where in 1888 Friedrich Rathgen became the first chemist to be employed by a Museum, the Koniglichen Museen, Berlin. He not only developed a scientific approach to the care of objects in the collections, but disseminated this approach by publishing a Handbook of Conservation in 1898; the early development of conservation of cultural heritage in any area of the world is linked to the creation of positions for chemists within museums. In the United Kingdom, pioneering research into painting materials and conservation and stone conservation was conducted by Arthur Pillans Laurie, academic chemist and Principal of Heriot-Watt University from 1900. Laurie's interests were fostered by William Holman Hunt. In 1924 the chemist Dr Harold Plenderleith began to work at the British Museum with Dr. Alexander Scott in the created Research Laboratory, although he was employed by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the early years.
Plenderleith's appointment may be said to have given birth to the conservation profession in the UK, although there had been craftsmen in many museums and in the commercial art world for generations. This department was created by the museum to address the deteriorating condition of objects in the collection, damages which were a result of their being stored in the London Underground tunnels during the First World War; the creation of this department moved the focus for the development of conservation theory and practice from Germany to Britain, made the latter a prime force in this fledgling field. In 1956 Plenderleith wrote a significant handbook called The Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art, which supplanted Rathgen's earlier tome and set new standards for the development of art and conservation science. In the United States, the development of conservation of cultural heritage can be traced to the Fogg Art Museum, Edward Waldo Forbes, its director from 1909 to 1944, he encouraged technical investigation, was Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the first technical journal, Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts, published by the Fogg from 1932 to 1942.
He brought onto the museum staff chemists. Rutherford John Gettens was the first of such in the US to be permanently employed by an art museum, he worked with the founder and first editor of Technical Studies. Gettens and Stout co-authored Painting Materials
Landscape architecture
Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic investigation of existing social and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, the design of interventions that will produce the desired outcome; the scope of the profession includes landscape design. A practitioner in the profession of landscape architecture is called a landscape architect. Landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of botany, the fine arts, industrial design, soil sciences, environmental psychology, geography and civil engineering; the activities of a landscape architect can range from the creation of public parks and parkways to site planning for campuses and corporate office parks, from the design of residential estates to the design of civil infrastructure and the management of large wilderness areas or reclamation of degraded landscapes such as mines or landfills. Landscape architects work on structures and external spaces with limitations toward the landscape or park aspect of the design - large or small, urban and rural, with "hard" and "soft" materials, while integrating ecological sustainability.
The most valuable contribution can be made at the first stage of a project to generate ideas with technical understanding and creative flair for the design and use of spaces. The landscape architect can conceive the overall concept and prepare the master plan, from which detailed design drawings and technical specifications are prepared, they can review proposals to authorize and supervise contracts for the construction work. Other skills include preparing design impact assessments, conducting environmental assessments and audits, serving as an expert witness at inquiries on land use issues; the variety of the professional tasks that landscape architects collaborate on is broad, but some examples of project types include: Parks of General design and public infrastructure Sustainable development Stormwater management including rain gardens, green roofs, groundwater recharge, Green infrastructure, constructed wetlands. Landscape design for educational function and site design for public institutions and government facilities Parks, botanical gardens, arboretums and nature preserves Recreation facilities.
Coastal and offshore developments and mitigation Ecological Design any aspect of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with natural processes and sustainabilityLandscape managers use their knowledge of landscape processes to advise on the long-term care and development of the landscape. They work in forestry, nature conservation and agriculture. Landscape scientists have specialist skills such as soil science, geomorphology or botany that they relate to the practical problems of landscape work, their projects can range from site surveys to the ecological assessment of broad areas for planning or management purposes. They may report on the impact of development or the importance of particular species in a given area. Landscape planners are concerned with landscape planning for the location, scenic and recreational aspects of urban and coastal land use, their work is embodied in written statements of policy and strategy, their remit includes master planning for new developments, landscape evaluations and assessments, preparing countryside management or policy plans.
Some may apply an additional specialism such as landscape archaeology or law to the process of landscape planning. Green roof designers design extensive and intensive roof gardens for storm water management, evapo-transpirative cooling, sustainable architecture and habitat creation. For the period before 1800, the history of landscape gardening is that of master planning and garden design for manor houses and royal properties, religious complexes, centers of government. An example is the extensive work by André Le Nôtre at Vaux-le-Vicomte for King Louis XIV of France at the Palace of Versailles; the first person to write of making a landscape was Joseph Addison in 1712. The term landscape architecture was invented by Gilbert Laing Meason in 1828, John Claudius Loudon was instrumental in the adoption of the term landscape architecture by the modern profession, he took up the term from Meason and gave it publicity in his Encyclopedias and in his 1840 book on the Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Repton.
The practice of landscape architecture spread from the Old to the New World. The term "landscape architect" was
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
Historic preservation
Historic preservation, heritage preservation or heritage conservation, is an endeavour that seeks to preserve and protect buildings, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance. This term refers to the preservation of the built environment, not to preservation of, for example, primeval forests or wilderness. In England, antiquarian interests were a familiar gentleman's pursuit since the mid 17th century, developing in tandem with the rise in scientific curiosity. Fellows of the Royal Society were also Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries. Many historic sites were damaged as the railways began to spread across the UK. In 1833 Berkhamsted Castle became the first historic site in England protected by statute under the London and Birmingham Railway Acts of 1833–1837, though the new railway line in 1834 did demolish the castle's gatehouse and outer earthworks to the south. Another early preservation event occurred at Berkhamsted. In 1866, Lord Brownlow who lived at Ashridge, tried to enclose the adjoining Berkhamsted Common with 5-foot steel fences in an attempt to claim it as part of his estate.
In England from early Anglo-Saxon times, Common land was an area of land which the local community could use as a resource. Across England between 1660 and 1845, 7 million acres of Common land had been enclosed by private land owners by application to parliament. On the night of 6 March 1866, Augustus Smith MP led gangs of local folk and hired men from London's East End in direct action to break the enclosure fences and protect Berkhamsted Common for the people of Berkhamsted in what became known nationally as the Battle of Berkhamsted Common. In 1870, Sir Robert Hunter and the Commons Preservation Society succeed in legal action that ensured protection of Berkhamsted Common and other open spaces threatened with enclosure. In 1926 the common was acquired by the National Trust. By the mid 19th century, much of Britain's unprotected cultural heritage was being destroyed. Well-meaning archaeologists like William Greenwell excavated sites with no attempt at their preservation, Stonehenge came under increasing threat by the 1870s.
Tourists were carving their initials into the rock. The private owners of the monument decided to sell the land to the London and South-Western Railway as the monument was "not the slightest use to anyone now". John Lubbock, an MP and botanist emerged as the champion of the country's national heritage. In 1872 he bought private land that housed ancient monuments in Avebury, Silbury Hill and elsewhere, from the owners who were threatening to have them cleared away to make room for housing. Soon, he began campaigning in Parliament for legislation to protect monuments from destruction; this led to the legislative milestone under the Liberal government of William Gladstone of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882. The first government appointed inspector for this job was the archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers; this legislation was regarded by conservative political elements as a grave assault on the individual rights of property of the owner, the inspector only had the power to identify endangered landmarks and offer to purchase them from the owner with his consent.
The Act only covered ancient monuments and explicitly did not cover historic buildings or structures. In 1877 the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded by the Arts and Crafts designer William Morris to prevent the destruction of historic buildings, followed by the National Trust in 1895 that bought estates from their owners for preservation; the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 had only given legal protection to prehistoric sites, such as ancient tumuli. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1900 took this further by empowering the government's Commissioners of Work and local County Councils to protect a wider range of properties. Further updates were made in 1910. Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire, a medieval manor house had been put up for sale in 1910 with its greatest treasures, the huge medieval fireplaces, still intact. However, when an American bought the house they were packaged up for shipping; the former viceroy of India, George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, was outraged at this cultural destruction and stepped in to buy back the castle and reinstall the fireplaces.
After a nationwide hunt for them they were found in London and returned. He restored the castle and left it to the National Trust on his death in 1925, his experience at Tattershall influenced Lord Curzon to push for tougher heritage protection laws in Britain, which saw passage as the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act 1913. The new structure involved the creation of the Ancient Monuments Board to oversee the protection of such monuments. Powers were given for the board, with Parliamentary approval, to issue preservation orders to protect monuments, extended the public right of access to these; the term "monument" was extended to include the lands around it, allowing the protection of the wider landscape. The National Trust was founded in 1894 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter, Hardwicke Canon Rawnsley as the first organisation of its type in the world, its formal purpose is: The preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements of beauty or historic interest and, as regards lands, for the preservation of their natural aspect and animal and plant life.
The preservation of furniture and chattels of any description having
