Victory O Lord!
Victory O Lord! is a painting by John Everett Millais depicting Moses and Hur during the Battle of Rephidim against the Amalekites. Along with his landscape Chill October it represented a major turning point in Millais's career; the painting illustrates a passage in the Book of Exodus, chapter 17, which describes how Moses and his two companions watched the battle from the hill. Moses holds the Rod of God in his right hand, and Moses said unto Joshua, Choose us out men, go out, fight with Amalek: tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in mine hand. So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, fought with Amalek: and Moses and Hur went up to the top of the hill, and it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses hands were heavy, and Joshua discomfited his people with the edge of the sword. Millais depicts the "going down of the sun", when the three patriarchs watch the final moments of the battle.
Moses is in the middle while Hur hold up his arms to ensure victory. Aaron, in red, is on the right; the battle below is indicated by the arrow at the bottom right. Millais worked on the painting over many years and repainting the surface. F. G. Stephens commented that the painting depicted the conflict between the unyielding and steadfast willpower of Moses, the physical and emotional exhaustion of his companions, he praised the vivid painting of the aged flesh of the figures. The painting contrasts in style with the contemporary religious works of Millais's former companion, William Holman Hunt, such as The Shadow of Death, on which Hunt was working at the same time.
Denis Healey
Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey, was a British Labour Party politician who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979 and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. He was a Member of Parliament for 40 years and was the last surviving member of the cabinet formed by Harold Wilson after the Labour Party's victory in the 1964 general election. A major figure in the party, he was twice defeated in bids for the party leadership. To the public at large, Healey became well known for his bushy eyebrows and his creative turns of phrase. Denis Winston Healey was born in Mottingham, but moved with his family to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire at the age of five, his parents were William Healey. His middle name honoured Winston Churchill. Healey had one brother, Terence Blair Healey, known as Terry, his father was an engineering mechanic who worked his way up from humble origins, studying at night school and becoming head of a trade school.
His paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Healey's family summered in Scotland throughout his youth. Healey received early education at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition scholarship to Oxford, to read Greats, he there became involved in Labour politics. While at Oxford, Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Purge, but left in 1940 after the Fall of France. At Oxford, Healey met future Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom he succeeded as president of Balliol College Junior Common Room, who became a lifelong friend and political rival. Healey achieved a double first degree, awarded in 1940. After graduation, Healey served in the Second World War as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. Serving with the Royal Engineers, he saw action in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign, was the military landing officer for the British assault brigade at Anzio in 1944.
Healey became an MBE in 1945. He left the service with the rank of Major, he declined an offer to remain in the army, with the rank of Lieutenant colonel, as part of the team researching the history of the Italian campaign under Colonel David Hunt. He decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which would have led to an academic career. Healey joined the Labour Party. Still in uniform, he gave a left-wing speech to the Labour Party conference in 1945, declaring, "the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved and decadent" shortly before the general election in which he narrowly failed to win the Conservative-held seat of Pudsey and Otley, doubling the Labour vote but losing by 1,651 votes, he became secretary of the international department of the Labour Party, becoming a foreign policy adviser to Labour leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe. He was a strong opponent of the Communist Party at the Soviet Union internationally. From 1948 to 1960 he was a councillor for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies from 1958 until 1961.
He was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 until 1961. Healey was one of the leading players in the Königswinter conference, organised by Lilo Milchsack, credited with helping to heal the bad memories after the end of the Second World War. Healey met Hans von Herwarth, the ex soldier Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin and future German President Richard von Weizsäcker and other leading German decision makers; the conference included other leading British decisionmakers like Richard Crossman and the journalist Robin Day. Healey was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Leeds South East at a by-election in February 1952, with a majority of 7,000 votes. Following constituency boundary changes, he was elected for Leeds East at the 1955 general election, holding that seat until he retired as an MP in 1992, he was a moderate on the right during the series of splits in the Labour Party in the 1950s. He was a friend of Hugh Gaitskell, he persuaded Gaitskell to temper his initial support for British military action in 1956 when the Suez Canal was seized by the Nasser regime in Egypt, resulting in the Suez Crisis.
When Gaitskell died in 1963, he was horrified at the idea of Gaitskell's volatile deputy, George Brown, leading Labour, saying "He was like immortal Jemima. He voted for James Callaghan in Harold Wilson in the second. Healey thought Wilson would unite the Labour Party and lead it to victory in the next general election, he didn't think. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Defence after the creation of the position in 1964. Following Labour's victory in the 1964 general election, Healey served as Secretary of State for Defence under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, he was responsible for 450,000 uniformed servicemen and women, for 406,000 civil servants stationed around the globe. He was best known for his economising, liquidating most of Britain's military role outside of Europe, cancelling expensive projects; the cause was not a fiscal crisis but rather a decision to shift money and priorities to the domestic budget and maintain a commitment to NATO. He cut defence expenditure, scrapping the carrier HMS Centaur and the reconstructed HMS Victorious in 1967, cancelling the proposed CVA-01 fleet
Bubbles (painting)
Bubbles titled A Child's World, is an 1886 painting by Sir John Everett Millais that became famous when it was used over many generations in advertisements for Pears soap. During Millais's lifetime it led to widespread debate about the relationship between art and advertising; the painting was one of many child pictures for which Millais had become well known in his years. It was modelled by his five-year-old grandson William Milbourne James and was based on 17th-century Dutch precursors in the tradition of vanitas imagery, which commented upon the transience of life; these sometimes depicted young boys blowing bubbles set against skulls and other signs of death. The painting portrays a young golden-haired boy looking up at a bubble, symbolising the beauty and fragility of life. On one side of him is a young plant growing in a pot, emblematic of life, on the other is a fallen broken pot, emblematic of death, he is spot-lit against a gloomy background. The painting was first exhibited in 1886 under the title A Child's World at the Grosvenor Gallery in London.
The painting was acquired by Sir William Ingram of The Illustrated London News, who wished to reproduce it in his newspaper. When it was reproduced and presented in the weekly newspaper as a colour plate, it was seen by Thomas J. Barratt, managing director of A & F Pears. Barratt purchased the original painting from Ingram for £2,200 which gave him exclusive copyright on the picture. Millais' permission was sought in order to alter the picture by the addition of a bar of Pears Soap, so that it could be used for the purposes of advertising. At the time Millais was one of the most popular artists in Britain and he was apprehensive at the prospect of his work and his grandson being the subject of commercial exploitation. However, when he was shown the proofs of the proposed advertisements he grew to appreciate the idea, which portrayed the soap as if the child had used it to make the bubbles. Following the success of this advertisement Millais was attacked in print by the novelist Marie Corelli who accused him in her novel The Sorrows of Satan of prostituting his talent to sell soap.
Millais wrote to her pointing out that he had sold the copyright of the painting and so was unable to stop the company from altering it in reproduction. Millais's son claimed that he had tried to stop the advertisement being made, but had been advised that he had no legal power to do so. Corelli retracted her comments in a edition of the book; the advertisement became so well known that William Milbourne James, who rose to the rank of admiral in the Royal Navy, was known as "Bubbles" for the rest of his life. Since A & F Pears was acquired by Lever Brothers, the painting has been in their ownership, it was lent to the Royal Academy, but was transferred to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight in 2006. A reproduction of this painting hangs in a bomb shelter during the London blitz in the novel Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Victorian era
In the history of the United Kingdom, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, its half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of Continental Europe. In terms of moral sensibilities and political reforms, this period began with the passage of the Reform Act 1832. There was a strong religious drive for higher moral standards led by the nonconformist churches, such as the Methodist, the Evangelical wing of the established Church of England. Britain's relations with the other Great Powers were driven by the colonial antagonism of the Great Game with Russia, climaxing during the Crimean War. Britain embarked on global imperial expansion in Asia and Africa, which made the British Empire the largest empire in history. National self-confidence peaked. Ideologically, the Victorian era witnessed resistance to the rationalism that defined the Georgian period and an increasing turn towards romanticism and mysticism with regard to religion, social values, arts.
Domestically, the political agenda was liberal, with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform, industrial reform, the widening of the franchise. There were unprecedented demographic changes: the population of England and Wales doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901, Scotland's population rose from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. However, Ireland's population decreased from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901 due to emigration and the Great Famine. Between 1837 and 1901 about 15 million emigrated from Great Britain to the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia; the two main political parties during the era remained the Conservatives. These parties were led by such prominent statesmen as Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Lord Salisbury; the unsolved problems relating to Irish Home Rule played a great part in politics in the Victorian era in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement in Ireland.
In the strictest sense, the Victorian era covers the duration of Victoria's reign as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, from her accession on 20 June 1837—after the death of her uncle, William IV—until her death on 22 January 1901, after which she was succeeded by her eldest son, Edward VII. Her reign lasted for seven months, a longer period than any of her predecessors; the term'Victorian' was in contemporaneous usage to describe the era. The era has been understood in a more extensive sense as a period that possessed sensibilities and characteristics distinct from the periods adjacent to it, in which case it is sometimes dated to begin before Victoria's accession—typically from the passage of or agitation for the Reform Act 1832, which introduced a wide-ranging change to the electoral system of England and Wales. Definitions that purport a distinct sensibility or politics to the era have created scepticism about the worth of the label "Victorian", though there have been defences of it.
Michael Sadleir was insistent that "in truth the Victorian period is three periods, not one". He distinguished early Victorianism – the and politically unsettled period from 1837 to 1850 – and late Victorianism, with its new waves of aestheticism and imperialism, from the Victorian heyday: mid-Victorianism, 1851 to 1879, he saw the latter period as characterised by a distinctive mixture of prosperity, domestic prudery, complacency – what G. M. Trevelyan called the "mid-Victorian decades of quiet politics and roaring prosperity". In 1832, after much political agitation, the Reform Act was passed on the third attempt; the Act abolished many borough seats and created others in their place, as well as expanding the franchise in England and Wales. Minor reforms followed in 1835 and 1836. On 20 June 1837, Victoria became Queen of the United Kingdom on the death of her uncle, William IV, her government was led by the Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne, but within two years he had resigned, the Tory politician Sir Robert Peel attempted to form a new ministry.
In the same year, a seizure of British opium exports to China prompted the First Opium War against the Qing dynasty, British imperial India initiated the First Anglo-Afghan War—one of the first major conflicts of the Great Game between Britain and Russia. In 1840, Queen Victoria married her German cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, it proved a happy marriage, whose children were much sought after by royal families across Europe. In 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi established British sovereignty over New Zealand; the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 ended the First Opium War and gave Britain control over Hong Kong Island. However, a disastrous retreat from Kabul in the same year led to the annihilation of a British army column in Afghanistan. In 1845, the Great Famine began to cause mass starvation and death in Ireland, sparking large-scale emigration. Peel was replaced by the Whig ministry of Lord John Russell. In 1853, Britain fought alongside France in the Crimean War against Russia.
The goal was to ensure that Russia could not benefit from the declining status
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The name postcolonialism is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods, may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the ambiguous term colonialism may refer either to a system of government or to an ideology or world view underlying that system—in general postcolonialism represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than describing a system that comes after colonialism. The term postcolonial studies may be preferred for this reason. Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, it may seek through anthropological study to build a better understanding of colonial life from the point of view of the colonized people, based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators.
On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with contemporary history and critical theory, may draw examples from history, political science, sociology and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism and Christian thought; as an epistemology, as an ethics, as a politics, the field of postcolonialism addresses the politics of knowledge—the matters that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives from: the colonizer's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonized people. Postcolonialism is aimed at destabilizing these theories by means of which colonialists "perceive", "understand", "know" the world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language and economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.
Colonialism was presented as "the extension of civilization", which ideologically justified the self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over the non-Western world. This concept was espoused by Joseph-Ernest Renan in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale, whereby imperial stewardship was thought to affect the intellectual and moral reformation of the coloured peoples of the lesser cultures of the world; that such a divinely established, natural harmony among the human races of the world would be possible, because everyone has an assigned cultural identity, a social place, an economic role within an imperial colony. Thus: The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races, by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity.... Regere imperio populos is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, every man will be in his right role.
Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity, no sense of honour. Let each do what he is made for, all will be well. From the mid- to the late-nineteenth century, such racialist group-identity language was the cultural common-currency justifying geopolitical competition amongst the European and American empires and meant to protect their over-extended economies. In the colonization of the Far East and in the late-nineteenth century Scramble for Africa, the representation of a homogeneous European identity justified colonization. Hence and Britain, France and Germany proffered theories of national superiority that justified colonialism as delivering the light of civilization to unenlightened peoples. Notably, la mission civilisatrice, the self-ascribed'civilizing mission' of the French Empire, proposed that some races and cultures have a higher purpose in life, whereby the more powerful, more developed, more civilized races have the right to colonize other peoples, in service to the noble idea of "civilization" and its economic benefits.
Decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity, based on cultural interactions between different identities which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society. In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyzes the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the colonizer.
John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, was an English painter and illustrator, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home at 83 Gower Street. Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, painting the embodiment of the school, Ophelia, in 1850-51. By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art, his works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out. While these and early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late nineteenth-century art world, can now be seen as predictive of the art world of the present.
Millais's personal life has played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais's early work; the annulment of the marriage and her wedding to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles. Millais was born in England in 1829, of a prominent Jersey-based family, his parents were Emily Mary Millais. Most of his early childhood was spent in Jersey, to which he retained a strong devotion throughout his life; the author Thackeray once asked him "when England conquered Jersey." Millais replied "Never! Jersey conquered England." The family moved to Dinan in Brittany for a few years in his childhood. His mother's "forceful personality", she had a keen interest in art and music, encouraged her son's artistic bent, promoting the relocating of the family to London to help develop contacts at the Royal Academy of Art.
He said "I owe everything to my mother."His prodigious artistic talent won him a place at the Royal Academy schools at the unprecedented age of eleven. While there, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in September 1848 in his family home on Gower Street, off Bedford Square. Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents was controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Works were controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot, which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts, he repeated this theme in many works. All these early works were painted with great attention to detail concentrating on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. In paintings such as Ophelia Millais created dense and elaborate pictorial surfaces based on the integration of naturalistic elements; this approach has been described as a kind of "pictorial eco-system."
Mariana is a painting that Millais painted in 1850-51 based on the play Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare and the poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson from 1830. In the play, the young Mariana was to be married, but was rejected by her betrothed when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck; this style was promoted by the critic John Ruskin, who had defended the Pre-Raphaelites against their critics. Millais's friendship with Ruskin introduced him to Ruskin's wife Effie. Soon after they met she modelled for his painting The Order of Release; as Millais painted Effie they fell in love. Despite having been married to Ruskin for several years, Effie was still a virgin, her parents realised something was wrong and she filed for an annulment. In 1855, after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled and John Millais married, he and Effie had eight children: Everett, born in 1856. Their youngest son, John Guille Millais, became a naturalist, wildlife artist, Millais's posthumous biographer, their daughter Alice Alice Stuart-Wortley, was a close friend and muse of the composer Edward Elgar, is thought to be an inspiration for themes in his Violin Concerto.
Effie's younger sister Sophy Gray sat for several pictures by Millais, prompting some speculation about the nature of their fond relationship. After his marriage, Millais began to paint in a broader style, condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe." It has been argued that this change of style resulted from Millais's need to increase his output to support his growing family. Unsympathetic critics such as William Morris accused him of "selling out" to achieve popularity and wealth, his admirers, in contrast, pointed to the artist's connections with Whistler and Albert Moore, influence on John Singer Sargent. Millais himself argued that as he grew more confident as an artist, he could paint with greater boldness. In his article "Thoughts on our art of Today" he recommended Velázquez and Rembrandt as models for artists to follow. Paintings such as The Eve of St. Agnes and The Somnambulist show an ongoing
