Answer the following questions based on the Required Reading: Honour & Fleming, A World History of Art, Chapter 13, sections on Dutch Painting: sections on Dutch Painting: Hals, pp. 590-591, Rembrandt, pp. 591-595 and Still Life and Genre, pp. 600-603.
What influenced the work of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1609-69)?
What subjects dominated his work?
Identify recognisable features of Rembrandt’s style.
What was particular about Dutch still life and genre painting in the seventeenth century?
What subjects were often painted by Frans Hals (c. 1581-1666)?
What creates the ‘impression of instantaneous life’ in Hals’s work?
ARH 402 Introduction to the History of Art II – questions for readings
Week 3 Baroque to Rococo painting
Required Reading: Honour & Fleming, A World History of Art, Chapter 14, ‘Enlightenment and Liberty’, sections on French Rococo Art, pp. 608-616, English Sense and Sensibility, pp. 622-627, Neoclassicism, or the ‘True Style’, pp. 627-633.
French Rococo Art
Identify significant political and social changes during this period.
What is this century often called? Identify some of its key thinkers and concepts.
French Rococo Art
How is the art of the first half of the 18th century, especially in France, described?
How was ‘taste’ defined by Voltaire?
Why did the Rococo first develop in France?
Identify the two main groups of artists and what they believed was most important in art.
English Sense and Sensibility
How was Hogarth set off from his contemporaries on the continent?
How was nature understood?
The works of which artists did Sir Joshua Reynolds look at in Italy? What was his desire?
Neoclassicism, or the ‘True Style’
Date when reaction against the Rococo set in and what played a part.
Explain neo-classicism as promoted by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68).
ARH 402 Introduction to the History of Art II – questions for readings
Week 4 Eighteenth century English portrait painting
Reading: Vaughan, British Painting: The Golden Age, Introduction, pp. 7-23 and Chapter 4 ‘The Grand Portrait’, pp. 68-97.
Introduction
What was appreciated in le style anglais?
What was the historical context for this development in English art?
What was the role of the Royal Academy?
Chapter 4 ‘The Grand Portrait’
When was Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) the leading British portrait painter?
When did he return from Italy?
When did he become President of the Royal Academy?
What aspects of Reynolds’s style helped to make him so successful?
When did Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) emerge on the London scene?
What was Gainsborough’s approach to portraiture?
What was striking about the portrait of Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781, by Joseph Wright of Derby?
Sample Solution