Search results for ""author robin simon""

In London in 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) remarked, ‘What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.’ Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon’s highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge.William Hogarth (1697–1764) and David Garrick (1717–1779) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century.History painting was considered the highest form of art: a picture illustrating a moment drawn from just a few lines in a revered text. Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III (1745) transformed those ideas because, although it looked like a history painting, it was also a portrait of an actor in performance. With it, Hogarth established the genre of theatrical portraiture, a new and distinctively British kind ofhistory painting.This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. In this context another trio of genius features prominently: Lichtenberg, GottholdEphraim Lessing and Denis Diderot.Familiar paintings and performances are seen in an entirely new light, while unfamiliar pictures are also introduced, including major paintings and drawings that have never been published.The final chapter shows that the inter-relationship between plays, painting and performance survived into the age of cinema, revealing the pictorial sources of Laurence Olivier’s legendary film Richard III.

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Published in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London Animated by an unprecedented study of its collections, this book tells the story of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and illuminates the history of art in Britain over the past two and a half centuries. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings, as well as silver, furniture, medals, and historic photographs, make up this monumental collection, featured here in stunning illustrations, and including an array of little-studied works of art and other objects of the highest quality. The works of art complement an archive of 600,000 documents and the first library in Britain dedicated to the fine arts. This fresh history reveals the central role of the Royal Academy in British national life, especially during the 19th century. It also explores periods of turmoil in the 20th century, when the Academy sought either to defy or to come to terms with modernism, challenging linear histories and frequently held notions of progress and innovation.Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Royal Academy of Arts, London

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Though his father had faced bankruptcy, James Clarke Hook (1819–1907) nevertheless managed to paint himself into country-gentlemanhood, becoming famous for his landscapes of British coastal scenes and his ability to evoke not just the sights but also the sounds and even the smell of the sea.James Clarke Hook, Juliet McMaster’s lively biography of the brilliant but underappreciated Victorian painter, brings the reader through Hook’s rigorous training at the Royal Academy Schools, his travelling studentship in Florence and Venice, and his work as a historical painter, to the discovery of his métier as a painter of contemporary rural and coastal scenes. Part of the secret of Hook’s success was his resolution to paint the final large canvas of his seascapes onsite, braving wind and weather – for which he invented an easel that was adaptable to uneven terrain. McMaster’s research led her to retrace the painter’s footsteps to the rocky headlands and sheltered bays where, over a hundred years ago, Hook had set up his easel to capture the tang of sea. McMaster connects Hook, an academician for half a century, with the major figures and movements of Victorian art – including the Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt, the etcher Samuel Palmer, and the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts.James Clarke Hook worked alongside the fishermen and rural families who populate and enliven his canvases; this book reinvigorates our understanding of his artistic process and unique sense of place.

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