Famous British PaintingsFamous British Paintings

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Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543): The Ambassadors (1533)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851): Rain, Steam and Speed (c. 1844)

Richard Hamilton (1922- ): Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956)

This picture memorialises two wealthy, educated and powerful young men. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, aged 29, French ambassador to England in 1533. To the right stands his friend, Georges de Selve, aged 25, bishop of Lavaur, who acted on several occasions as ambassador to the Emperor, the Venetian Republic and the Holy See.

The picture is in a tradition showing learned men with books and instruments. The objects on the upper shelf include a celestial globe, a portable sundial and various other instruments used for understanding the heavens and measuring time. Among the objects on the lower shelf is a lute, a case of flutes, a hymn book, a book of arithmetic and a terrestrial globe.

Certain details could be interpreted as references to contemporary religious divisions. The broken lute string, for example, may signify religious discord, while the Lutheran hymn book may be a plea for Christian harmony.

In the foreground is the distorted image of a skull, a symbol of mortality. When seen from a point to the right of the picture the distortion is corrected.

The Ambassadors (1533)

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543)

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Oil and tempera on oak, 207 x 209 cm. National Gallery, London

Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway has barely recognizable objects immersed in shimmering colour. This intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well. Thus, he is considered a forerunner of the Impressionists in his passion to record the changes of nature's atmosphere, reducing air and water to undetailed colour arrangements. But he was more affected by the poetic quality of light organized in abstract patterns than the Impressionists, who were mainly concerned with the effects of light on objects.

When this painting was first shown at the Royal Academy a number of critics responded as though they could feel the speed of the locomotive as it rushed towards them at fifty miles an hour. Very little detail is given of the surrounding landscape, which appears as a blur of light and colour out of which the train emerges, rivalling in speed the hare that runs along the railway lines in front of it.

Rain, Steam and Speed (c. 1844)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

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Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 121.9 cm. Tate Britain, London

Just what is it...? (1956)

Richard Hamilton (1922- )

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Collage, 26 x 24.8 cm. Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany

Pop Art was a movement of the 1960s that combined both fantasy and realism. It began in London in 1956 when a small group of artists, architects, sculptors, and art historians who were studying the symbolism and imagery of the art of mass society, staged the exhibition “This Is Tomorrow”. It included a provocative collage by one of the members, Hamilton, entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

The content of Hamilton's work could also be compared with 17th-century Dutch painting whose genre theme is brought up to date –a couple at home, served by an upstairs maid standing before a window view of an urban scene beyond. This work ridiculed the banalities of daily life and the fantasy world depicted by advertising. The idea was that there were certain things that were new in the visual environment of that time, such as cinema, the jukebox, Marilyn Monroe and comics.

Often called the intellectual father of Pop Art, Richard Hamilton is as active now as when he organized some of the most forward-thinking exhibitions of the 1950s. He has subsequently created several works in which he reworked the subject and composition of this pop art collage, including a 1992 version featuring a female bodybuilder.