2013年12月六级考试阅读训练（1）

　　In the past century Irish painting has changes from a British-influenced lyrical tradition to an art that evokes the ruggedness and roots of an Irish Celtic past. At the turn of the twentieth century Irish painters, including notables Walter Frederick Osborne and Sir William Orpen, looked elsewhere for influence. Osbornes exposure to plein air painting deeply impacted his stylistic development; and Orpen allied himself with a group of English artists, while at the same time participated in the French avant-garde experiment, both as painter and teacher.

　　However, nationalist energies were beginning to coalesce ，reviving interest in Irish culture-including Irish visual arts. Beatrice Elverys , a landmark achievement, merged the devotional simplicity of fifteenth-century Italian painting with the iconography of Irelands Celtic past, linking the history of Irish Catholicism with the still-nasce t Irish republic. And, although also captivated by the French plein air school, Sir John Lavery invoked the mythology of his native land for a 1928 commission to paint the central figure for the bank note of the new Irish Free State. Lavery chose as this figure, with her arm on a Celtic harp ，the national symbol of independent Ireland.

　　In Irish painting from about 1910, memories of Edwardian romanticism coexisted with a new sense of realism,exemplified by the paintings of Paul Henry and Se Keating, a student of Orpens. realism also crept into the work of Edwardians Lavery and Orpen, both of whom made paintings depicting World WarⅠ,Lavery with a distanced Victorian nobility, Orpen closer to the front, revealing a more sinister and realistic vision. Meanwhile, counterpoint to the Edwardians and realists came Jack B. Yeats, whose travels throughout the rugged and more authentically Irish West led him to depict subjects ranging from street scenes in Dublin to boxing matches and funerals. Fusing close observations of Irish life and icons with an Irish identity in a new way, Yeats changed the face of Irish painting and became the most important Irishartist of his century.