1.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
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London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
3.
England
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England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west, the Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east, the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain in its centre and south, and includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Wight. England became a state in the 10th century, and since the Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the worlds first industrialised nation, Englands terrain mostly comprises low hills and plains, especially in central and southern England. However, there are uplands in the north and in the southwest, the capital is London, which is the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland through another Act of Union to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the name England is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means land of the Angles. The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages, the Angles came from the Angeln peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea. The earliest recorded use of the term, as Engla londe, is in the ninth century translation into Old English of Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars, it has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape. An alternative name for England is Albion, the name Albion originally referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus, specifically the 4th century BC De Mundo, in it are two very large islands called Britannia, these are Albion and Ierne. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, the word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins. Albion is now applied to England in a poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago, Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years
4.
Henry Thomas Alken
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Henry Thomas Alken was an English painter and engraver chiefly known as a caricaturist and illustrator of sporting subjects and coaching scenes. His most prolific period of painting and drawing occurred between 1816 and 1831, Alken was born on 12 October 1785 in Soho, Westminster, and baptised on 6 November at St Jamess Church, Piccadilly. He was the son of Samuel Alken, a sporting artist. Two of his brothers were George and Samuel Alken the Younger, in 1789, the Alken family moved from Soho to 2, Francis Street East, Bedford Square. Young Henry first studied under his father and then with the miniature painter John Thomas Barber Beaumont, in 1801, Alken sent a miniature portrait of Miss Gubbins to the Royal Academy Exhibition. He exhibited a miniature at the Royal Academy before abandoning miniature painting and taking on painting and illustrating. Early in his career, he painted sporting subjects under the name of Ben Tally-O, Alken married Maria Gordon on 14 October 1809 at St Clement’s Church, Ipswich. On 22 August of the year later the couples first son was baptised. Alken went on to five children, of whom two were artists, Samuel Henry, also a sporting artist, known as Henry Alken junior. When Alken was 26, he and his family lived over a shop in Haymarket that belonged to print publisher Thomas McLean of the Repository of Wit. McLean paid Alken a daily wage of thirty shillings, considered a good income at the time, Alken died in April 1851 and was buried in Highgate cemetery. Although fairly affluent for most of his career, he fell on hard times towards the end of his life and was buried at his daughters expense, Alken worked in both oil and watercolor and was a skilled etcher. Alken provided the plates picturing hunting, coaching, racing and steeplechasing for The National Sports of Great Britain, Alken, known as an avid sportsman, is best remembered for his hunting prints, many of which he engraved himself until the late 1830s. Nimrods Life of a Sportsman, with 32 etchings by Alken, was published by Ackermann in 1842. One of his best known paintings, The Belvoir Hunt, Jumping Into And Out Of A Lane, hangs in the Tate Britain, a collection of his illustrations can be seen in the print department of the British Museum. Volume 2 By Pierce Egan The Art and Practice of Etching by Henry Alken,1849 Attribution This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Alken. Walter Shaw Sparrow, Henry Alken Henry Thomas Alken, The Grove Dictionary of Art
5.
Francis Bacon (artist)
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Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged and raw imagery. Bacon was a bon vivant and gambler who took up painting in his early 20s and he drifted as an interior decorator in his 20s and 30s, he admitted that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His abstracted figures are typically isolated geometrical spaces, set against flat, Bacon said that he saw images in series, and his work typically focused on a single subject or format for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. These were followed by his early 1960s variations on crucifixion scenes, from the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time, the climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including his 1982s Study for Self-Portrait and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86. Francis Bacon was the subject of two Tate retrospectives and a showing in 1971 at the Grand Palais. Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, in the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s popes and 1960s portraits, reemerged to set record prices at auction. In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set the record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction. Francis Bacon was born in a home in the heart of old Georgian Dublin at 63 Lower Baggot Street. His father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon was born in Adelaide, South Australia to an English father and an Australian mother. His father, a veteran of the Boer War, was a trainer, while his mother, Christina Winifred Firth, known as Winnie, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business. His father was a descendant of Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of Sir Francis Bacon. His great-great-grandmother, Lady Charlotte Harley, was acquainted with Lord Byron. When Bacons paternal grandfather was given the chance to revive the title of Lord Oxford by Queen Victoria, Bacon had an older brother, Harley, two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward. He was brought up by the nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as Nanny Lightfoot. In the 1940s, she helped him in keeping gambling houses in London, the family moved house often, moving back and forth between Ireland and England several times, leading to a feeling of displacement which remained with the artist throughout his life. They returned to Ireland after the First World War, as a child Bacon was shy and enjoyed dressing up. This, coupled with his manner, upset his father
6.
Robert Anning Bell
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Robert Anning Bell RA was an English artist and designer. Robert Anning Bell was born in London on 14 April 1863, the son of Robert George Bell, a cheesemonger and he studied at University College School, the Westminster College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, followed by a time in Paris. Bell was articled as an architect to his uncle, Samuel Knight, on his return he shared a studio with George Frampton. With Frampton he created a series of designs for an altarpiece which was exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and later installed in the Church of St Clare, from 1895 to 1899 Bell was an instructor at the Liverpool University school of architecture. During this time he associated with the Della Robbia Pottery in Birkenhead and also was becoming increasingly successful as a book designer. In 1911 Bell was appointed chief of the section at the Glasgow School of Art. He continued to paint and exhibited at the Royal Academy, the New English Art Club and he designed the great mosaic in the tympanum at Westminster Cathedral from sketches left by the architect John Francis Bentley, the work was completed in 1916. Bell worked from 1922 on mosaics for the Palace of Westminster, the last of these mosaics was unveiled in 1926. His second wife was fellow artist Laura Richard whom he married in 1914 and he had no children by either wife, Laura lost her only son by her previous husband in the first world war
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Vanessa Bell
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Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, the family, including her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian, and half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. In later life she alleged that during her childhood she had been molested by her half-brothers, George. The Bloomsbury Groups first Thursday evening meetings began at Bells house in Gordon Square, attendees included, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, and later on, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant. She married Clive Bell in 1907 and they had two sons, Julian and Quentin, the couple had an open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their lives. Bell had affairs with art critic Roger Fry and with the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918 and her first solo exhibition was at the Omega Workshops in 1916. On April 7,1961, Bell died from an illness at Charleston. In 1906, when Bell started to think of herself as an artist, Vanessa was encouraged by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organised by Roger Fry, and she copied their bright colours and bold forms in her artworks. In 1914, she turned to Abstraction, Bell rejected the examples of Victorian narrative painting and rejected a discourse on the ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. Some of Vanessa Bell’s works were related to her personal life and she used her artistry to design and illustrate book jackets. Bell is one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury group and she exhibited in London and Paris during her lifetime, and has been praised for innovative works during her early maturity and for her contributions to design. Bells paintings include Studland Beach, The Tub, Interior with Two Women, and portraits of her sister Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Bell worked with Duncan Grant to create murals for Berwick Church in Sussex. Bell’s first solo exhibition in 1916 was held in the Omega Workshop in London, Bell became the director of the Omega Workshop around 1912 Design for Overmantel Mural, oil on paper. It depicts herself and Molly MacCarthy naked in Bell’s studio at 46 Gordon Square, street Corner Conversation, features massive nudes with their schematic form being related to it. Summer Camp, oil on board, was an illustration of the interchange of imagery between the artists working for the Omega Workshop. The origin of painting is when Bell went on a summer camp organized at Brandon on the Norfolk-Suffolk border near Thetford. Summer Camp became part of the Bryan Ferry Collection, by the Estuary, oil on canvas, shows how the geometrical abstraction that distinguished Bell’s design for the Omega Workshop was also applied in her easel painting. In her wartime paintings, landscape is rarely seen, however, this modestly scaled landscape shows her fondness for clarity of design in which segments of contrasting but harmonious colour are not distracted by detail
8.
Thomas Birch (artist)
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Thomas Birch, was an English-born American portrait and marine painter. Birch was born in London, England and he came to the U. S. in 1794, and assisted his artist father, William Birch, in preparing a 29-plate collection of engravings, Birchs Views of Philadelphia. Subscribers to the series included President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson and this sold well and went into multiple editions, inspiring similar collected views of New York City, and of suburban estates surrounding Philadelphia and Baltimore. The sons first major painting appears to have been a view of Philadelphia from the Treaty Elm in Kensington and he painted portraits until about 1807, when he took up marine-painting. Some of his most famous works depict naval battles of the War of 1812, Birch was the first American ship portraitist, and his paintings were copied by countless artists and craftsmen in America and Europe. In addition to ships, they provide images of bridges, lighthouses, docksides. His paintings of suburban mansions and rural scenes were often turned into engravings. Historically, the Birches most important work may be a circa-1801 engraving documenting the unfinished U. S. Capitol. Another, may be the painting depicting an 1812 naval battle between USS United States and HMS Macedonian, that hung in the Oval Office of U. S. President John F. Kennedy. It was sold at auction in 2008, setting a price for the artist of $481,000. An assessment from 1867, Marine landscapes were painted thirty years ago by an Englishman in Philadelphia — Thomas Birch, the freshness of his atmosphere and clearly-painted waves were a marked feature. His delineation of the engagement between the U. S and he exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for forty years, beginning in 1811, and managed the museum, 1812-17. In 1833, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary member, marian Carson, Thomas Birch, Catalogue of the 150th Anniversary Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, p.34. Doris Jear Creer, Thomas Birch, A Study of the Condition of Painting, William H. Gerdts, Thomas Birch, Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Maritime Museum,1966. Richard Anthony Lewis, Interesting Particulars and Melancholy Occurrences, Thomas Birchs Representations of the Shipping Trade, tony Lewis, Sleigh Ride on a Grey Day,1832, American Paintings, pp. 36–38. Stefanie A. Munsing, Thomas Birch, Philadelphia, Three Centuries of American Art, michael W. Schantz, Celebrating Philadelphias Artistic Legacy, pp. 23–24. Martin P. Snyder, William Birch, His Philadelphia Views, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, S. Robert Teitelman, Birchs Views of Philadelphia, with Photographs of the Sites in 1960 &1982. Biography from ushistory. org artcyclopedia. com brooklynmuseum. org View of the Delaware near Philadelphia,1831, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C
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Kate Bisschop-Swift
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Catharina Seaton Foreman Bisschop-Swift, known as Kate was an English-born Dutch painter, known primarily for her domestic scenes and still-lifes. In the late 1860s, she took lessons from the Dutch painter. They were married in January 1869, and she went with him to the Netherlands and they lived in Scheveningen at a villa named Frisia, although she worked mostly in Leeuwarden. Two years later, she was a co-founder of the Hollandsche Teekenmaatschappij and she was named an honorary member of the Royal Frisian Society for History and Culture in 1914. After her death, her works and belongings were transferred from her villa to the Fries Museum. This included a selection of jewelry given to her by various European sovereigns. Hanna Klarenbeek, Penseelprinsessen & broodschilderessen, Vrouwen in de beeldende kunst 1808-1913, Thoth,2012 ISBN 90-686-8588-0 Arcadja Auctions, obituary @ Friesland Zoals het Was
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David Bomberg
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David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys. Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique he travelled widely through the Middle East, David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honor. Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham on December 5,1890 and he was the seventh of eleven children of a Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham, and his wife Rebecca. He was Orthodox but she less so and supported Davids painting ambitions, in 1895, his family moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London where he was to spend the rest of his childhood. After studying art at City and Guilds, Bomberg returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer, Bomberg and Rosenberg, from similar backgrounds, had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests. The emphasis in teaching at the Slade was on technique and draughtsmanship, still, Bomberg was staunchly independent and despite Lewis attempts he never officially joined Vorticism. I look upon Nature while I live in a city he explained in the exhibition catalogue I APPEAL to a Sense of Form. My object is the construction of Pure Form, I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form. With the help of Augustus John, Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn, despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the Kings Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, World War I was to bring a profound change to Bombergs outlook. The artists book Russian Ballet,1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom. From there followed Bombergs great period of painting and drawing in landscape, in Spain at Toledo, Ronda and Asturias, in Cyprus and intermittently in Britain, perhaps most powerfully in Cornwall. He developed a deeply considered philosophy of art, set out in pieces of writing. Following a collapse in Ronda, Bomberg died in London in 1957, after his early success before the First World War, he was in his lifetime the most brutally excluded artist in Britain. Having lived for years on the earnings of his wife, fellow artist Lilian Holt and remittances from his sister Kitty. Thirty years after his death, a retrospective of Bombergs work curated by Richard Cork was held at the Tate Gallery, London. In 2006, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Cumbria, mounted the first major exhibition of Bombergs paintings for nearly twenty years, David Bomberg, Spirit in the Mass
