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1. Geographical position:
2. The British political system:
3. English art and culture.
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7. Put these artists in chronological order of birth:
Royal Assent:
This is the final stage in the legislative process whereby the Queen signs the Act of Parliament. It may come into force immediately or at a future stage, as stipulated in the Act. For example, the Human Rights Act was passed in 1998 but came into force in October 2000 once training and other preparations had been completed.
Overview of the system:
The key feature of the legislative process is that it is strongly controlled by the Government, and the bigger the Government’s majority the greater that control. Almost all legislation is initiated by the Government and even backbench MPs of the party in power have relatively little scope to influence its content. Through the system of Whips, MPs who enforce party discipline, they are required to support their party line on almost all important legislative decisions. Occasionally backbenchers will revolt and vote against the Government, or threaten to do so unless amendments are made. But this is a card which most MPs can only play rarely without threatening their chances of ever being asked to join the Government, or indeed, without running the risk of having the Whip withdrawn, thus being expelled from the parliamentary party.
The advantage of this system of strong Government control is that the party elected can implement the manifesto on which it was given a mandate by the electorate. The disadvantage is that those who voted for another party, who may constitute a majority of the population, have almost no effective representation in the law-making process.
In addition, the quality of legislation may be weakened by lack of meaningful debate or unwillingness to take account of valid input from those outside the Government. There are many examples of ill-thought-out and unworkable legislation which has been rushed through by the Government in response to a perceived crisis.
3. English art and culture.
1) Architects and artists.
1. Who painted:
a) “Marriage a la Mode” – the series of pictures consisting six works of art painted in 1743–1745 by William Hogarth. These pictures are moralistic warning showing the disastrous results of an ill-considered marriage for money and satirizing patronage and aesthetics.
b) “The Cornfield” – is an oil-on-canvas painting by the English artist John Constable. It was finished in 1826 and was first exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year. It measures 143 by 122 cm.
c) “Portrait of a Lady in blue” – the picture painted in 1770 by Thomas Gainsborough an English portrait and landscape painter.
d) “The Fighting Temeraire” – is an oil painting executed in 1839 by the English artist J. M. W. Turner. It depicts one of the last second-rate ships of the line which played a distinguished role in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
2. Who were the Pre-Raphaelites? Name the most famous of them.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were soon joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form a seven-member "brotherhood".
The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art. Hence the name: Pre-Raphaelite. In particular, they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua". To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting and hence anything or person of a commonplace or conventional kind". In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colors, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.
The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform-movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal.
3. Which is the most famous building by each of these men:
a) Inigo Jones – is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England. He left his mark on London by single buildings, such as the Banqueting House, Whitehall, and in area design for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He also made major contributions to stage design by his work as theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.
List of works:
b) Sir Christopher Wren – is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history. He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and the south front of Hampton Court Palace.
c) Sir Charles Barry – was an English architect, best known for his role in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (also known as the Houses of Parliament) in London during the mid-19th century, but also responsible for numerous other buildings and gardens. He is known for his major contribution to the use of Italianate architecture in Britain, especially the use of the Palazzo as basis for the design of country houses, city mansions and public buildings, he also developed the Italian Renaissance garden style for the many gardens he designed around country houses.
List of works:
d) Sir Joseph Paxton – was an English gardener and architect, best known for designing The Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 564 m) long, with an interior height of 39 m. Because of the recent invention of the cast plate glass method in 1848, which allowed for large sheets of cheap but strong glass, it was at the time the largest amount of glass ever seen in a building and astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights, thus a "Crystal Palace".
4. Who was:
a) A theatrical designer, collaborator with Ben Jonson, and the first great English architect?
Inigo Jones (15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England. He left his mark on London by single buildings, such as the Banqueting House, Whitehall, and in area design for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He also made major contributions to stage design by his work as theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.
b) Born in Devon, and having studied in Italy, became the first President of the Royal Academy?
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education and debate.
The Royal Academy of Arts was founded through a personal act of King George III on 10 December 1768 with a mission to promote the arts of design in Britain through education and exhibition. The motive in founding the Academy was twofold: to raise the professional status of the artist by establishing a sound system of training and expert judgment in the arts and to arrange the exhibition of contemporary works of art attaining an appropriate standard of excellence. Behind this concept was the desire to foster a national school of art and to encourage appreciation and interest in the public based on recognised canons of good taste.
Sir William Chambers used his connections with King George III to gain royal patronage and financial support of the Academy and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds was made its first President.
5. Who were:
а) William Kent (1685 – 1748), born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, was an eminent English architect, landscape architect and furniture designer of the early 18th century.
Kent started practicing as an architect relatively late, in the 1730s. He is better remembered as an architect of the revived Palladian style in England. Kent applied this style to several public buildings in London: the Royal Mews at Charing Cross (1731–1733, demolished in 1830), the Treasury buildings in Whitehall (1733–1737), the Horse Guards building in Whitehall, (designed shortly before his death and built 1750–1759). These neo-antique buildings were inspired as much by the architecture of Raphael and Giulio Romano as by Palladio. Kent could provide sympathetic Gothic designs, free of serious antiquarian tendencies, when the context called; he worked on the Gothic screens in Westminster Hall and Gloucester Cathedral.
As a landscape designer, Kent was one of the originators of the English landscape garden, a style of 'natural' gardening that revolutionised the laying out of gardens and estates. His projects included Chiswick House, Stowe, Buckinghamshire, from about 1730 onwards, designs for Alexander Pope's villa garden at Twickenham, for Queen Caroline at Richmond and notably at Rousham House, Oxfordshire, where he created a sequence of Arcadian set-pieces punctuated with temples, cascades, grottoes and Palladian bridges, opening the field for the larger scale achievements of Capability Brown in the following generation.
His stately furniture designs complemented his interiors: he designed furnishings for Hampton Court Palace (1732), Lord Burlington's Chiswick House (1729), London, Thomas Coke's Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Robert Walpole's pile at Houghton, for Devonshire House in London, and at Rousham. The royal barge he designed for Frederick, Prince of Wales can still be seen at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Lancelot Brown (30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783),more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect.
He is remembered as "the last of the great English eighteenth-century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's greatest gardener". He designed over 170 parks, many of which still endure. His influence was so great that the contributions to the English garden made by his predecessors Charles Bridgeman and William Kent are often overlooked; even Kent's apologist Horace Walpole allowed that Kent had been followed by "a very able master".
It is estimated that Brown was responsible for over 170 gardens surrounding the finest country houses and estates in Britain. His work still endures at Croome Court (where he also designed the house), Blenheim Palace, Warwick Castle, Harewood House, Bowood House, Milton Abbey (and nearby Milton Abbas village), in traces at Kew Gardens and many other locations. This man who refused work in Ireland because he had not finished England was called "Capability" Brown, because he would characteristically tell his landed clients that their estates had great "capability" for landscape improvement.
His style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a "gardenless" form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles.
His landscapes were at the forefront of fashion. They were fundamentally different from what they replaced, the well-known formal gardens of England which were criticized by Alexander Pope and others from the 1710s.
Capability Brown's essays in the field of architecture were a natural outgrowth of his unified picture of the English country house in its setting:
"In Brown's hands the house, which before had dominated the estate, became an integral part of a carefully composed landscape intended to be seen through the eye of a painter, and its design could not be divorced from that of the garden".
Brown's first country house project was the remodeling of Croome Court, Worcestershire, (1751–1752) for the 6th Earl of Coventry. Fisherwick, Staffordshire, Redgrave Hall, Suffolk, and Claremont, Surrey, were classical, while at Corsham his outbuildings are in a Gothick vein. Gothick stable blocks and decorative outbuildings, arches and garden features constituted many of his designs. From 1771 he was assisted in the technical aspects by the master builder Henry Holland, and by Henry's son Henry Holland the architect, whose initial career Brown supported; the younger Holland was increasingly Brown's full collaborator and became Brown's son-in-law in 1773.
Brown's popularity declined rapidly after his death, because his work was seen as a feeble imitation of wild nature. A reaction against the smooth blandness of Brown's landscapes was inevitable: the landscapes lacked the sublime thrill which members of the Romantic generation. During the nineteenth century he was widely criticized, but during the twentieth century his popularity returned. Later landscape architects like William Gilpin would opine that Brown's 'natural curves' were as artificial as the straight lines that were common in French gardens.
b) Robert Boyle (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was a 17th century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology.
Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry.
Boyle was an alchemist; and believing the transmutation of metals to be a possibility, he carried out experiments in the hope of achieving it; and he was instrumental in obtaining the repeal, in 1689, of the statute of Henry IV against multiplying gold and silver. With all the important work he accomplished in physics – the enunciation of Boyle's law, the discovery of the part taken by air in the propagation of sound, and investigations on the expansive force of freezing water, on specific gravities and refractive powers, on crystals, on electricity, on colour, on hydrostatics, etc. – chemistry was his peculiar and favourite study.
6. For what type of paintings are these artists famous:
a) Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. King George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769
Sir Peter Lely (14 September 1618 – 30 November 1680) was a painter of Dutch origin, whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court.
Lely played a significant role in introducing the mezzotint (меццо-тинто) to Britain, as he realized its possibilities for publicising his portraits. He encouraged Dutch mezzotinters to come to Britain to copy his work, laying the foundations for the English mezzotint tradition.
Mezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio (гравировка) family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching (щтриховка), cross-hatching (координатная сетка) or stipple (точечный пунктир). Mezzotint achieves tonality by roughening the plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth, called a "rocker." In printing, the tiny pits in the plate hold the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean. A high level of quality and richness in the print can be achieved.
b) John Robert Cozens (1752 – 14 December 1797) was a British draftsman and painter of romantic watercolour landscapes.
Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospherical effects and illusions which had some influence on Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Indeed, his work is full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views and a sense of vastness, a tender tranquillity and a kind of mystery in most of his paintings, leaving parts in his pictures for the imagination of the spectator to dwell on and search into. John Constable called him "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape." On the other hand, Cozens never departed from his primitive, almost rudimentary, manner of painting, which causes several of his works to look very like colored engravings (гравюры).
John Crome (December 22, 1768 – April 22, 1821) was an English landscape artist of the Romantic era, one of the principal artists of the "Norwich school". He is known as Old Crome to distinguish him from his son, John Berney Crome, who was also a well-known artist.
Along with John Constable (1776–1837), Crome was one of the earliest English artists to represent identifiable species of trees, rather than generalised forms. His works, renowned for their originality and vision, were inspired by direct observation of the natural world combined with a comprehensive study of Old Masters.
Crome went on to become the founder of the Norwich school of painters, of which John Sell Cotman is another famous member. He worked both in watercolour and oil. His oil paintings alone number in excess of 300. Many can be seen at major galleries around the world, including the Tate Gallery and the Royal Academy, but he is also very well represented in Norwich itself at the Castle Museum and Art Gallery. He also produced etchings (гравюры) and taught art.
7. Put these artists in chronological order of birth:
William Hogart (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764); Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792); Nhomas Gainsborough (14 May 1727 – 2 August 1788); John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837); William Turner (12 November 1789 – 7 August 1862).
2) Monuments and Statues.
1. Whose monument or statue stands in:
a) Princes Street is one of the major thoroughfares in central Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and its main shopping street. It is the southernmost street of Edinburgh's New Town, stretching around 1 mile (1.6 km) from Lothian Road in the west to Leith Street in the east. The street is mostly closed to private cars, with public transport given priority. The street has virtually no buildings on the south side, allowing panoramic views of the Old Town, Edinburgh Castle, and the valley between.
Only the east end of the street is open to all traffic. The bulk of the street is limited to buses and taxis only. During 2009 and again in 2012, parts of the street have been closed to all traffic as part of the Edinburgh Trams construction works.
The Gardens contain the Ross Bandstand (an open-air theatre), a war memorial to U.S. soldiers of Scottish descent and a floral clock, together with other attractions. Two of the main Scottish art galleries, the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Gallery of Scotland, are located at the foot of The Mound. Further along is the Scott Monument, a huge intricate Gothic monument dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, the author of the Waverley Novels, after which is named Waverley station, which lies at the east end of the Gardens, its westward lines dividing them. Next to the station on its north side is the former railway hotel, previously known as the North British Hotel, latterly renamed the Balmoral Hotel, and the North Bridge which sails at high level over the station. The hotel has a counterpart at the extreme west end of Princes Street. The Caledonian Hotel, now the Caledonian Hilton, sits at the north end of Lothian Road. This was built by the Caledonian Railway for their Princes Street Station which closed in the 1960s along with the lines it served.