Caroline Chapman – författare

Cambridge Exam Boosters for the Revised 2020 Exam contain essential exam task practice for class or home study for use alongside a coursebook or intensively before the exam. Focus on essential exam practice for the revised 2020 exams with the Exam Booster for A2 Key and A2 Key for Schools. Maximise learners' potential with dedicated exam task practice for class or home study. 48 exam tasks practise each part of the exam three times while exam facts provide practical information. Exam tips provide useful advice on how to approach the exercises and 'Get it right' boxes highlight typical candidate errors in the exam. This Exam Booster is suitable for both A2 Key and A2 Key for Schools and is photocopiable. The downloadable audio is available from www.cambridge.org/keybooster2.

Cambridge Exam Boosters for the Revised 2020 Exam contain essential exam task practice for class or home study for use alongside a coursebook or intensively before the exam. Focus on essential exam practice for the revised 2020 exams with the Exam Booster for A2 Key and A2 Key for Schools. Maximise learners' potential with dedicated exam task practice for class or home study. 48 exam tasks practise each part of the exam three times while exam facts provide practical information. Exam tips provide useful advice on how to approach the exercises and 'Get it right' boxes highlight typical candidate errors in the exam. This student edition Exam Booster is suitable for both A2 Key and A2 Key for Schools. The downloadable audio is available from www.cambridge.org/keybooster2.

Exotic lair, freezing garret or convivial rendezvous, artists’ studios reflect their personalities, the way they work, their dreams and obsessions. Some are battlegrounds where hopes are dashed and original concepts fail dismally in their execution. A few artists became celebrities and flaunted their success by furnishing huge studios with exotic objects, while others lived in a haze of opium in squalid tenements in Montmartre. Spanning 500 years of Western art history from 1400 to 1900, and accompanied by glorious images, Caroline Chapman describes the skilful techniques employed in a Renaissance workshop; Michelangelo’s agony and ecstasy while painting the Sistine Chapel; the murky world of the artist’s model; the looting by Napoleon of Veronese’s masterpiece; Van Gogh’s wretched first studio; how Géricault painted his Raft of the Medusa; the way Rodin worked in his plaster-spattered environment and the ateliers of the Impressionists in Paris.

For much of the nineteenth century, women artists laboured under the same restrictions and taboos they had endured for centuries, and it was assumed that marriage and child-bearing were their goals in life. However, by the 1870s female art students of every nation were flocking to Paris in search of instruction in the city’s private art schools. With proper training, they now had the confidence to tackle a wider range of subjects and by the century’s end they were at last able to study the nude figure. During these breakthrough years, women won the right to work and exhibit alongside men, both in Europe and America, and the advent of art galleries and art dealers opened up new ways of selling their work. This book is full of surprising adventures: young women, still not allowed to visit a museum unchaperoned, travelled thousands of miles in a quest for first-class tuition; several Americans, while still in their twenties, journeyed to Rome to study sculpture; numerous free and independent women joined the artists’ colonies that sprang up all over Europe, where they made lasting friendships, painting from dawn to dusk en plein air and enjoying the bohemian life. These trailblazing women rose to the challenges of the century’s dramatic development in art styles – from Realism to the Avant-Garde – and triumphantly succeeded in becoming successful professional artists.

When looking at a painting of the Madonna with the Christ Child, do you know why Jesus is clutching a goldfinch? Or why a peacock often appears in paintings of the Annunciation? Can you use your knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology to interpret what is going on in Botticelli’s Primavera? Are you so steeped in the Bible that you know why Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt? Past generations would have known the answers: religious belief and the mythology of antiquity permeated people’s lives and decoding symbols within a painting was automatic.Today we no longer have the background knowledge and the layers of meaning contained in some of the greatest works of art escapes us. Our gaze is superficial; recent research has shown that on average a visitor to an art gallery looks at a painting for less than two seconds, reads the label for ten seconds, glances again at the painting, then moves on. Even the Mona Lisa receives only about fifteen seconds of a viewer’s attention.In Painted Mysteries Caroline Chapman aims to encourage art lovers to look more deeply into pictures and to understand better what they see. In over 100 images, many of them famous masterpieces, she dissects the paintings, recounting the stories the artists were depicting and unravelling the layers of meaning that modern viewers may find elusive or mysterious.