John Constable J.M.W. Turner

1. John Constable • J.M.W. Turner • William Morris • Paul Nash • John Singer Sargent • by Luca Vacchini • Matteo Carelli • Filippo Malagori

2. Constable & Turner • They are two famous English artists who expressed themselves in the same period. Their works were about landscapes. Despite their differences about the places they loved and philosophical ideas they both had great attention for “memory”.

3. John Constable • Life: he was the son of a miller but his artistic gift was discovered by an expert. At the beginning he copied famousworks expressing his great ability.His approach to nature came during sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk countryside. He managed to convince his father not to continue his business but to devote himself to art. He married Maria Bicknell in 1816. In 1819 he was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy. After her dead Constable cared for his children. He died in 1837. • Style: at the beginning he deveoped some features of his mature style such as freshness of light, colour and touch. His subjects were scenes of ordinary life. Later on he developed new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. He used to do preliminary sketches of his landscapes. This technique was innovative for the time.

4. J. M. W. Turner • Life: he was born in London in 1738. His father was a barber and his mother was mentally unstable. Then he was sent to live with his uncle where he became interested in painting. He entered the Royal Academy of art school. He become famous for his oil and watercolours landscape paintings. He studied also at the Louvre. Then he become eccentric and he died unmarried in 1851. • Style: suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity but its vulnerability and vulgarity in the “sublime” nature of the world. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shining colour.

5. William Morris He was the son of a rich broker and studied at Oxford University. Then he became interested in decorative arts. He was disappointed toward the application of indusry in architecture and decoration. He wanted the return of the craftsmen and manual work. Art should have been for eveybody and decorative arts shouldn't have to be considered inferior to painting and sculpture. He was a socialist and worked with Engel. He was a poet and a writer. As a editor he published books about design and very accurate in the binding. But what made him to be remembered is that he can be considered the father of industrial design. Even if he dissented about mass production he thought that his products could be useful for the craftsmen.

6. Paul Nash Life: he was born in London in 1889. He was educated at Slade School of Art. He was influenced by the poetry of Blake and the paintings of Palmer and Rossetti. He died in 1946. The War Artist: He was a witness of World War 1. He used his works to bring home the horrors of war. "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls."

7. His War Paintings These paintings show how he moved from Cubo-Futurism to Naturalism. Not a soldier to be seen, abandoned lorries and guns, flooded trenches, a limp corpse among the shells and rifles, smoke and, in the distance a plane, either dropping bombs or falling to the ground, we cannot tell. On top of everything, it rains continually. There can be no more hope of coming back alive from such a place which no longer has a name, which has become a field of death.

8. John Singer Sargent Life: he was born in 1856. He was interested in outdoor activities. He hadn't a regular education but his mother thought that travellig visiting museum would have been enough. She also encouraged him to face with art. Career: he was influenced by Carolous-Duran which was a progressive from whom he was influenced in portrays. After his return to England in 1918 from U.S. he was commissioned as a war artist by the British Ministry of Information. He died in 1925.

9. Gassed The painting shows soldiers after a gas-attack. The colours employed are unnatural in order to give an idea of horror to the scene stressed also by the pale disk of the sun. All these men are linked by the presence of the bendages on their eyes.