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Use our A-Z glossary of art terminology to learn about art, painting and sculpture words, phrases and terms.
2 days ago · Hockney is an alumnus of the Royal College of Art, as is another artist represented in the Contemporary Evening Auction: Bridget Riley. Aged 93, she is six years his senior. She made her name in the early 1960s with abstract black-and-white paintings that comprised beguiling patterns of geometric shapes.
Oct 5, 2023 · The dark shape or outline of someone or something visible in restricted light against a brighter background. In art, it often refers to an image represented as a solid shape of a single colour.
- Line. Line is the most basic element of art. Without line the other elements couldn’t exist so let's start here and then we will gradually go more advanced.
- Shape. When a line meets up to enclose a space, a shape is formed. Shapes can be: Geometric or organic. Shapes are 2-dimensional, i.e. they have height and width but no depth e.g.
- Form. Form is the next step up from shape as we now add depth to it to create a three dimensional form. A square (shape) vs a cube, a triangle vs a cone etc.
- Space. Space is what lies between, around or within an object. To show space in a 2-dimensional medium the artist must use techniques to create the illusion of space between items that are in reality on a flat surface.
- Beginnings
- The English Renaissance
- Elizabethan Portraiture and Beyond
- English Art Before and After The Civil War
- The Seventeenth Century and Enlightenment
- The Royal Academy
- Romanticism
- The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and The Arts and Crafts Movement
- Women Artists Emerge
- The British Museum
Some of the earliest examples of British art come from sumptuous metalwork of the Anglo-Saxon period and the stone churches, abbeys and castles belonging to the early medieval period. Very rare, early decorative works, including the famous Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 690-750 AD) with their intricately patterned lacework, were also to be found in church...
The period of the English Renaissance (c. 1520 to 1620) differed from the earlier Italian Renaissance in that playwrights and poets were awarded higher societal status than visual artists. In the visual arts, however, religious painting, which was widely demonized as a relic of the Catholic church, was overtaken by portraiture which took on a domin...
The transition to Elizabethan rule (daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I was crowned in 1558) brought with it a period of great social upheaval though this was not reflected through its portraiture. Indeed, while portrait painting grew in popularity, artists who had previously found themselves employed by the church, brought with the...
Despite the success of artists such as Gower, William Dobson, Peter Lely, Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver and Robert Walker, Europeans were held in higher esteem than British artists and the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck arrived from Antwerp in 1632 to be employed by the court of Charles I. Influenced by the Baroque period and the High Renaissan...
The second half of the seventeenth century saw advancements in science and (led to a large extent by Christopher Wren) artists and thinkers started to look to the natural world as the source of all knowledge. Wren himself produced drawings of magnified creatures, including a flea and a louse, while Peter Lely shocked the public with his sensual nud...
The idea of an Academy dates back to the fourth century BC when Plato established a school to teach philosophy. Raphael followed suit in 1509 with the School of Athens. Based on the teachings of ancient Greek philosophy, Raphael painted four stanzas representing different fields of knowledge but with a self-portrait on the right of the picture, as ...
With the dawning of Romanticism, many artists began to question the centralized authority of the Academy. Indeed, by the late-18th century, many artists were rejecting authority entirely. Modernists formed an opposition to "academic" art which was dismissed by them as old-fashioned and moribund. In this respect, one could argue that Romanticism car...
Founded in 1848, by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood offered a more forceful challenge than the Ancients to the "official" art in British history. Opposed to the dominance of the British Royal Academy and its narrow preference for Victorian subjects and styles, which owed a debt to...
Emily Mary Osborn was the most important artist associated with the campaign for women's rights in the arts and arts education during the Victorian era. She trained as an artist at Dickinson's academy in Maddox Street and became an established figurative genre painter of "unpretending characters" during the 1850s. She was associated with Barbara Bo...
Offering free admission to all "studious and curious persons," The British Museum, housed in a seventeenth mansion called Montagu House at Bloomsbury, was the first public museum in the world. Opened in 1759, the museum's origins owe a debt to the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane. Having collected some 70,000 artefacts in his lifetime, on h...
What makes British art ‘British’? Alastair Sooke takes a walk through the newly re-hung galleries of London’s Tate Britain – and wonders what makes a national style of art.
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Apr 6, 2017 · The term installation art is used to describe large-scale, mixed-media constructions, often designed for a specific place or for a temporary period of time.
