The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner, 1839 (The National Gallery of Art)
Artists in Britain have delved into all major genres of painting, including history painting, landscapes, still life, and portraiture. In this richly illustrated course, art historian Bonita Billman introduces major artists and movements in British painting and the pivotal roles these painters have played from the Tudor period to the present. King Henry VIII’s court painter Hans Holbein, a German, launched 200 years of foreign domination in portrait painting. The modern period encompasses giants of Britain’s contemporary painting, including David Hockney, still working at age 87. Billman examines how British painting has evolved over the last five centuries, the social and cultural context in which the paintings were created that influenced the various genres, and how British artists have shown a strong predilection for subjects from the real world and a resistance to abstraction and non-representational painting. She also looks at the major role played by foreign-born painters. Billman, an independent lecturer, is retired from the department of art and art history at Georgetown University.
June 2 Early Modern England
The court portraitist Hans Holbein; Nicholas Hilliard, master miniaturist; connoisseur King Charles I; the legacy of Sir Anthony van Dyck and his successors Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller.
June 9 A Surfeit of Georgian Painters
The 18th century was a golden age of portrait painters: Allan Ramsay, Henry Raeburn, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many more, including miniaturists.
June 16 The Great Landscape Painters of Romanticism
John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
June 23 Artists of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras
James A.M. Whistler; John Singer Sargent; William Orpen; Sir John Lavery; the Camden Town Group of Modernists including Walter Sickert.
June 30 20th-Century British Painting
The Bloomsbury Group, including artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry; Augustus John and Gwen John; Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; Sir Peter Blake and David Hockney.
5 sessions
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