Each of the ten pictures presented chronologically have been chosen for the light that they cast on a period of profound change which starts as English painting takes leave of the Rococo and ends in the beginning of modern art. They are William Hogarth's Portrait of Bishop Benjamin Hoadly with whom he shared a distinctly positive, rather pugnacious temperament; Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy with its vigorous brushwork that builds the firmly modelled figure and the cool blue of the costume given vitality by being placed against the stormy sky. Third is Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mrs Siddons as The Tragic Muse, the figure in costume with two shadowy attendants, she sitting on a thronelike chair in deep contemplation with a great pendent cluster of pearls adorning the front of her dress and heavy, sweeping draperies. Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie studied in detail again with close ups as per the other subjects. The fifth choice is Thomas Rowlandson's Mrs Siddons Rehearsing, a pen and watercolour created within a year or two of Reynolds' great portrait. She is shown being coached by her father Roger Kemble, while another actor declaims in front of a mirror in the background. The drawing is an amusing antidote. William Blake's Satan, Sin and Death comes from Paradise Lost as Satan, on his way to undertake the temptation of Adam and Eve, is stopped by Death at the gate of Hell and engaged in combat. Richard Wilson's River Scene with Bathers captures a warm summer evening. Gainsborough's The Cottage Door has the theme of a peasant family standing by the door of a country cottage, a scene the artist returned to again and again. John Constable's View on the Stour near Dedham represents a stretch of country for which the artist had deep affection. The final and tenth example is J. M. W. Turner's Grand Canal, Venice, in which the buildings appear relatively much higher and the Rialto much smaller in the background on the canal. Other examples are given throughout the text of the changing nature of each artist's work. 136pp in softback 18 x 25.5cm.
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