Render the text in brief. Use the active vocabulary.

Without translating the extracts give the English equivalents for the italicized words, groups of words or phrases and render the paragraphs.

1) Живой интерес к окружающей жизни подсказал Хогарту обратиться к совсем новому жанру, к созданию сатирико-моралистических сюжетных серий – области, еще не испробованной ни в одной стране и ни в какие времена. Вместе с писателями-просветителями первой половины XVIII века художник вступил в борьбу за искоренение пороков, в которых погрязло общество. А чтобы донести свой замысел до широких кругов зрителей, которым он и адресует свои работы, Хогарт воспроизводит свои полотна в гравюрах, расходившихся по стране большими тиражами.

2) Великолепным примером искусства Хогарта является «Портрет капитана Корэма». По своим изобразительным средствам он весьма близок к парадным портретам. Однако на фоне традиционных колонн и драпировок, в окружении атрибутов, характеризующих занятия портретируемого, на этот раз появился человек так называемого "среднего класса". Не знатность происхождения, высокий чин и богатство выделяют капитана Корэма на портрете Хогарта, а благородство доброго ума и достоинство много видевшего на своем веку старого человека. Художник не скрывает своих явных симпатий к капитану Корэму, и это чувство передается зрителю.

3) «Модный брак» по глубине замысла и совершенству художественного воплощения – одна из самых значительных среди серий Хогарта. Образы «Модного брака» настолько емки, что за ними стоят уже не отдельные лица, а целые социальные группы.

4) Совершенно особое место среди работ Хогарта занимает «Девушка с креветками». Она написана исключительно легко, свободными, стремительными мазками, жидкой, почти прозрачной краской. Манера исполнения настолько опережала его время, что было принято считать, что «Девушка с креветками» скорее всего просто эскиз. Но фиксация мимолетного впечатления превращается у Хогарта в нечто гораздо большее. Вся в движении, улыбающаяся, бьющая через край радостью жизни продавщица креветок воспринимается как частица шумной лондонской толпы, той, что заполняет полотна художника. Но она – и олицетворение этой толпы. В подлинно народном образе «Девушки с креветками» есть поэзия жизненной правды, что в сочетании с великолепным живописным мастерством ставит это полотно в один ряд с лучшими произведениями мирового искусства.

5) Созданные Хогартом образы высмеивают различные пороки, однако при этом они не являются карикатурами. Сам художник неоднократно утверждал, что в отличие от карикатуристов, допускающих искажения и преувеличения, он пишет характеры. Он говорил, что произведения художника, изображающего комическую сцену, отличаются от карикатур «точным воспроизведением» жизни.

PORTRAIT PAINTING

I. Read the texts for obtaining information.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

(1723-1792)

Reynolds was one of the outstanding British portraitists and an important influence on his contemporaries. He believed that by analysis of Old Masters he could build a composite style of great art. He made careful studies of Rembrandt, Titian and various French painters in the furtherance of this aim, but these eclectic procedures do not represent his best work. He did have a personal creative power and variety of pictorial invention when he chose to let himself go and to forget that he was a great man. We find many pictures with a life and a grandeur beyond the many borrowed elements. His portraits - the best ones - are effective because their expression is related to the type of the sitter. His colours are difficult to judge today because they were not scientifically applied, so that many paintings have cracked and faded, but the form design and pictorial rhythm are often quite impressive. Many of his portraits are originally composed in decorative pattern and organized in light and space arrangements.

In Reynolds' day society portraiture had become a monotonous repetition of the same theme, with only the most limited of variations permissible. 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 who might serve several painters. Pose and expression, even the features themselves, tended to be regulated to a standard of polite and inexpressive elegance; the portraits told little about their subjects other than that they were that sort of people who had their portraits painted - they certainly gave nothing away beyond the summary description of the features. They were effigies; life had departed.

It was Reynolds who insisted in his practice that a portrait could and should be also a full, complex work of art on many levels. Each fresh sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to be told (or sometimes, one suspects, a myth to be created). His people are no longer static, but caught between this movement and the next, between one moment and the next.

Reynolds painted portraits, group pictures and historical themes. His sitters included the socially prominent people of the time and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, he naturally became its first president.

Among his best works are those in which he departs from the traditional forms of ceremonial portraiture and abandons himself to inspiration, as in "The Portrait of Nelly O'Brien", which is aglow with light, warmth and feeling.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

(1727 - 1788)

If Reynolds was the solid prose of that age of prose, its incipient poetry was with the man whose name is often coupled and compared with his: Thomas Gainsborough. He, too, succeeded, and succeeded brilliantly, as a portrait painter. Society went to him for portraits, and his insight into the phases of womanhood made him essentially the woman's painter. Yet it was landscape that had his heart. Even in the portraits he is an out-of-door painter.

In contrast to Reynolds', the essence of his genius was intuitive, the touch of the brush getting ever lighter, the atmosphere ever more aerial. The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background, but in most cases man and nature are fused in a single whole through the atmospheric harmony of mood. It is no accident that in the works of Gainsborough's late maturity the figures blend with the background to such an extent that they become almost transparent.

Gainsborough's painting is not overburdened by too scrupulous an observance of rules and precepts. The immediacy and spontaneity which are present in nature are present also in his work, to the extent of giving the impression that the artist's supreme ability consists in making even the most artificial elements appear entirely natural and spontaneous.

In the evolution of the art of painting Gainsborough's actual method of putting on paint is an important step. This method consisted in putting tiny touches of pure colour on to the canvas so that the colour-mixing takes place not on the palette but as a phenomenon of optics between the canvas and the eye of the beholder. The result is vibrant, pure colour, which seems made of light itself rather than of pigment. Nearly a century later this method of painting became a formula in the hands of the great impressionists.

Contrasts of light and shade in a context of flowing, curved and broken lines, produce an impression of animation and mobility which is the characteristic of Gainsborough's art. This mobility is directly connected with his technique of seizing an effect in a rapid stroke, so that a beauty of form emerges from his bold execution and masterly technique. A mobile and weightless quality is found also in the background details and draperies, where vibrant patches of light have a fluid translucent consistency which recalls the manner of Rubens and anticipates Goya. The formal elements of the painting - colours and lines - thus become expressive in their own right. In his work there is at its best that sense of immediacy of contact with beauty. In the portrait it is in the catching of a flash of a personality, in the landscapes it is the moment of light and shadow as some sungleam and cloud shadow renders a landscape suddenly momentarily unfamiliar and thereby dramatic. In his search for the spontaneous expression of the effects which appealed to him he would use oil-colour as if it were water-colour, building up with those light feathery brush strokes in the pure colour we associate with his work.

Not for nothing was the master a musician. His painting has a quality belonging to this most abstract and fleeting of arts.

Gainsborough is the purest lyricist of English painters, Reynolds - the master of the epic style.

Exercises