Before you read. Discuss these questions

Discuss these questions:

1) Why do personal reactions to art differ so much?

2) Is it possible to have common standarts and yet disagree about individual artistic approaches?

3) What kind of painting attracts you mostly?

4) Give your reasons.

5) Can an adequate likeness be a poor painting? Why?

Vocabulary:

· target – цель, мишень

· sitter – тот, кто позирует художнику, натурщик

· pillar – колонна, столп

· back-drop – задник (театр.)

· effigy - изображение

· conceive – представить себе, задумывать

· consummate – законченный, полный, совершенный

· endeavor – попытка, стремление

· essence - сущность

· grandeur – величие, великолепие

· relish – склонность, пристрастие

· rigorous – доскональный, тщательный

· apparent – очевидный, явный

· tinder - трут

· divine - божественный

· spark - искра

· flatter - льстить

· mist - дымка

· captivate - пленять

· discriminative – умеющий различать, разборчивый

· imperceptible - незначительный

· conversant – сведущий, знакомый

· servile - подобострастный

· torpid – оцепеневший, бездеятельный

· delusive – обманчивый, мнимый

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was in his own day a commanding figure, whose authority outlived him and who eventually became a target for Romantic attacks. In Reynolds’s day society portraiture had become a monotonous repetition of the same theme. According to the formula, the sitter was to be posed centrally, with the background (curtain, pillar, chair, perhaps a hint of landscape) disposed like a back-drop behind; normally the head was done by the master, the body by a pupil or “drapery assistant”, who might serve several painters. Pose and expression tended to be regulated to a standard of polite and inexpressive elegance; the porttraittold little about their subjects other than that they were that sort of people who had their portraits painted. They were effigies; life departed.

It was Reynolds who insisted in his practice that a portrait could and should be also full, complex work of art on many levels; he conceived his portraits in terms of history painting. Each fresh sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to be told. His people are no longer static, but caught between one moment and the next. Reynolds was indeed a consummate producer of character, and his production method reward investigation. For them he called upon the full repertoire of the Old Masters.

Reynolds gave at the Royal Academy of Arts – which he helped to found in 1768 – the famous Discourses, which in publishd form remain a formidable body of Classical doctrine. In his Discourses Reynolds outlined the essence of grandeur in art and suggested the means of achieving it through rigorous academic training and study of the Old Masters.

Read what Sir Joshua Reynolds says about his own experience: