Monet's "charing cross bridge series" discussed with particular reference to the terms of englishness/britishness (eBook)

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Art - Painting, grade: 60 out of 80, University of Essex, course: Decadents, vorticists impressionists, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: If asked, most British inhabitants define English in contrast to Scottish or Welsh as an ethnic part of the mainland England, whereas British would be considering all the surrounding islands and Northern Ireland. In an extended version, the commonwealth including Australia, India and South Africa, for example, are British, too, but not English. But the fact that the English culture, namely the Anglo-Saxon English and not the Gaelic-Celtic Scottish or Welsh culture, was transferred to these former colonies, leaves us with the following conclusion: Britishness is the transferred Englishness into any country of the commonwealth outside of Great Britain. Still we have not solved the main problem: what is Englishness? What is British? Is it bets, Victorian prudishness, tea, rainy weather and black humour? In addition, what is British Art? The visionary William Blake, the critic of society William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough's portraits, John Constables' and William Turner's landscapes, the Pre-Raphaelites or the Arts & Crafts movement by Mackintosh? To be more precise, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was Scottish; he would never have considered himself as English and it must have caused him some pain to confess he was despite his Scottish origin considered as British. And there we have our first problem of definition: what is English and what is British? Does the fact that an average dictionary does not include the word Britishness at all in the first place give us a hint about its artificial construction?