The University of Geneva is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin as a theological law school, it remained focused on theology until the 17th century, when it became a center for Enlightenment scholarship. In 1873, it dropped its religious affiliations and became secular. Today, the university is the third largest university in Switzerland by number of students. In 2009, the University of Geneva celebrated the 450th anniversary of its founding. 40% of the students come from foreign countries. The university holds and pursues teaching and community service as its primary objectives. In 2016, it was ranked 53rd worldwide by the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, 89th by the QS World University Rankings, 131st in the TIMES Higher Education World University Ranking. UNIGE is a member of the League of European Research Universities the Coimbra Group and the European University Association; the University of Geneva is located in several districts in the eastern part of the city and in the nearby city of Carouge, the different buildings are sometimes distant from each other.

The oldest building is the Collège Calvin, is not anymore a university building. Lectures are given in six different main locations, Les Bastions, Uni Dufour, Sciences I, II and III, Uni Mail and Uni Pignon, Centre Médical Universitaire, Battelle. Built between 1868 and 1871, Uni Bastions is the symbol of Geneva's academic life, it is located in the middle of a park and is host to the faculty of Protestant Theology and to the Faculty of Arts. Its architecture was inspired by Le Corbusier, it hosts the administration of the University. It is Switzerland's biggest building dedicated to social sciences, it hosts the Faculty of Law, of Economics and Management, of Psychology and Education and the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. The University of Geneva is structured in various faculties and interfaculty centers which are representing teaching and service to society in the various disciplines; the University is composed of nine faculties: Faculty of Sciences Faculty of Medicine Faculty of Humanities Faculty Geneva School of Economics and Management Faculty Geneva School of Social Sciences Faculty of Law Faculty of Theology Faculty of Psychology and School of Education Faculty of Translation and Interpreting The university is composed of fourteen interfacultary centers.

Amongst others: Institute for Reformation History Computer Science Department Institute for Environmental Sciences The Global Studies Institute Interfaculty Center of Gerontology Swiss Center for Affective Sciences The university has several partnerships with the nearby institutions, where students at the university may take courses. Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Bossey Ecumenical Institute Wyss Center for Bio- and Neuro-engineering Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Art-Law Centre Center for Biomedical Imaging University Centre of Legal Medicine The Institute for Work and Health The University of Geneva had a budget of 760 million CHF for the year 2016, it comes from the cantonal subventions, the other notable contributors being the federal state and the tuition fees. UNIGE's library facilities are spread across four sites. Uni Arve is host to seven libraries: the Bibliothèque Ernst & Lucie Schmidheiny, the Bibliothèque d'Anthropologie, the Bibliothèque du Centre universitaire d'informatique, the Bibliothèque Georges de Rham, the Bibliothèque de l'Institut des Sciences de l'environnement, Bibliothèque de l'Observatoire and the Bibliothèque des Sciences de la Terre et de l'environnement.

Uni Bastions hosts the language libraries, as well as the university's libraries focused on history and musicology. Uni CMU is home to an extensive collection of medical issues. Besides, it is hosts the Centre de documentation en santé and the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de la médecine et de la santé et de l’Institut d’éthique biomédicale. Uni Mail's collection is focused on the following themes: Economics and social sciences, Law and Learning Sciences and Interpreting, European studies, French as a foreign language and Musicology. Besides, it hosts UNIGE's multimedia library; the journal de l'UNIGE is released biweekly. Its purpose is to ease communication inside the university, to inform the students about the research being carried at UNIGE, to convey new opinions and to inform students and teachers of upcoming university events via l'Agenda. Campus is released monthly with the objective to ease communication between the scientific community and the citizens and to be a "bridge between science and city".

To be enrolled in a bachelor programme, one must hold a Swiss maturity diploma or a secondary diploma considered by the University of Geneva to be equivalent. If the degree was not pursued in French, applicants must pass an eliminatory French language test at the beginning of September, which consists of an oral and a written comprehension test and of a piece of argumentative writing. Tuition

John Bettes the Elder was an English artist whose few known paintings date from between about 1543 and 1550. His most famous work is his Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap, his son John Bettes the Younger, with whom he is sometimes confused, was a pupil of Nicholas Hilliard who painted portraits during the reign of Elizabeth I and James I. Nothing is known of John Bettes's life, except that he was living in Westminster in 1556, according to a documented court case, he is first recorded as working for Henry VIII at Whitehall Palace in 1531. Queen Catherine Parr's accounts for 1546/47 record payments to Bettes for "lymning" the king's and queen's portraits, for six other portraits, her new year's gift of 1547 to Prince Edward was a pair of portraits of herself. Bettes has been identified as the designer of the engraved title-border for William Cuningham's Cosmographical Glasse, printed by John Day in 1559, he may be the designer of engravings for Edward Hall's Chronicle, published in 1550, of a woodcut portrait of Franz Burchard, the Saxon ambassador to England, published in 1560.

In 1576, John Foxe referred to Bettes as dead. An earlier second edition of Foxe's Actes and Monuments printed in 1570 refers to Bettes' death; the identification of John Bettes's work stems from the inscription on the back of Man in a Black Cap: "faict par Johan Bettes Anglois". The painting is dated 1545 on the front. On the basis of its style, four further portraits have been attributed to Bettes: two of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Baron Wentworth,. Man in a Black Cap's technique is reminiscent of Hans Holbein the Younger's, suggesting that Bettes may have worked with Holbein as part of his workshop. Nothing, however, is known of Holbein's workshop other than paintings associated with it. Holbein does not appear to have founded a school, Bettes is the only artist whose work reveals his technical influence. For example, he paints over a pink priming. According to art historian Roy Strong, "He is the artist who, on grounds of style, has the best claim to have worked under Holbein". On the other hand, Bettes's style is distinct from Holbein's.

In the view of art historian Susan Foister, on the evidence of this portrait, Bettes is "unlikely to have assisted" Holbein. The recording of an artist's name on a painting is rare in this period; the addition of Bettes' nationality suggests. Since the work's creation, the blue smalt pigment of the background has turned brown, it has been speculated that the portrait may be of Edmund Butts, the brother of the William Butts whom Bettes painted. Both were sons of William Butts, a court physician whose portrait Holbein painted in 1543. Media related to John Bettes the Elder at Wikimedia Commons 6 paintings by or after John Bettes the Elder at the Art UK site

John Harris Jr. was an English artist who specialised in pen-and-ink facsimile work, Masonic catechetical designs. His father was the watercolour painter, his son John Harris, continued his work after Harris himself became incapacitated, after his death. Harris earned his income as an artist chiefly from the production of facsimiles, used to replace pages of books, damaged or become decayed. Harris himself suggested that the process of replacing damaged pages with facsimile reproductions was first popularised by George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, who commissioned such work through Harris's employer, John Whittaker. During his time working at the British Museum, Harris repaired or replaced sections of many books in the national collection, contemporary reports state that his facsimile work was indistinguishable from the original. A British Museum colleague, Robert Cowtan, gave an account of the examination of a book from the national collection by the British Museum's foremost book experts, Messrs Panizzi and Watts, their abject failure to discover the reproduced sections.

"After a fruitless search, page by page, the consultation ended in a summons to Mr. Harris himself to point out the leaves that he had supplied." Cowtan stated of Harris, "In this curious art he is unrivalled....and some of the leaves that he has supplied are so done that, after a few years, he has himself been puzzled to distinguish his own work from the original, so perfect has the facsimile been, both in paper and typography."It was because of the success of Harris's work that the Trustees of the British Museum enacted a regulation that all facsimile pages added to restored books must be marked with a symbol at the base of the page, so that the librarians of future generations would be able to distinguish original pages from reproductions. It is known that Harris carried out book restoration work for Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the Grand Master of English Freemasonry. In 1841 the Duke wrote to Albert, Prince Consort warmly commending the work of Harris, stating that he had "experienced much advantage from his services in my library".

Harris became a Freemason in 1818, at a time when the United Grand Lodge of England was encouraging all masonic lodges to move from Tracing boards chalked on the floor, or painted onto cloths, towards permanent painted and framed boards, displayed in lodge rooms. Harris became fascinated by masonic tracing boards, painted large numbers of boards for each of the three degrees of Freemasonry, in multiple different designs. Many of his boards remain extant, Harris made a significant income from designing and selling the boards. In 1823 he dedicated a set of miniature tracing boards to Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge, which further enhanced his reputation. In 1845 the Emulation Lodge of Improvement ran a competition for the design of a standardised set of tracing boards, to be recommended for use in all lodges. Harris submitted designs for all three degrees, was the immediate winner of the competition, he made slight alterations, issued a revised form of the designs in 1849, these "Emulation" tracing boards are today considered a definitive design in much of the English-speaking world of Regular Masonic jurisdictions.

The enormous original boards are still in use by the Emulation Lodge of Improvement, may be viewed weekly, although they are sealed in protective glass cases. Harris's original proof designs for the Emulation boards, several other designs, are all today in the possession of the Sussex Masonic Museum in Brighton. In 1957 the original Harris tracing boards, in regular use for well over a century, were found to be falling into a state of decay, they were meticulously restored following an appeal for funds. The boards were found to be painted on mahogany sheets, which were fixed to mahogany panelling by means of 900 countersunk screws, with the art painted on the top level and varnished. During the complex restoration of the cracked and split boards, cracks were filled and stippled with colour-matched paint before a fresh layer of varnish was applied; the restored boards returned to use in October 1957. Harris was married in 1820, he and his wife, had eight children, five of whom died in infancy. Two sons and a daughter survived to adulthood.

Their son named John Harris, shared in his father's artistic work. Harris suffered poor health in his advancing years. Following a stroke in 1850 he began to lose his sight, in 1856 or 1857 became blind, he suffered a further stroke at about the same time, was paralysed. Unable to work, Harris became impoverished, but was supported by the masonic charitable foundations, chiefly the Asylum for Worthy and Decayed Freemasons, which became part of the Royal Masonic Benevolent Institution. In his latter years Harris wrote some poetry, including pieces in praise of masonic charity, some of his work was published. Harris and his wife lived in the RMBI residential home at East Croydon, where he died on 28 December 1873, he was buried in Queen's Road Cemetery, where his wife was also interred. Owing to their impoverished lifestyle their grave was not marked with a stone, its location was lost. Following research the site of the grave was rediscovered in 2016, Surrey Freemasons, led in particular by the members of the Croydon Lodge of Endeavour No.

7315, purchased the grave plot from Croydon London Borough Council and had a headstone erected. The stone follows the dimensions of a Harris tracing board