title: Danse Macabre

text: The earliest recorded visual example is the lost mural on the South wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. It was painted in 1424–25 during the regency of John, Duke of Bedford (1389–1435). It features an emphatic inclusion of a dead crowned king at a time when France did not have a crowned king. The mural may well have had a political subtext.


title: Danse Macabre

text: There were also painted schemes in Basel (the earliest dating from ); a series of paintings on canvas by Bernt Notke (1440–1509) in Lübeck (1463); the initial fragment of the original Bernt Notke painting "Danse Macabre" (accomplished at the end of the 15th century) in the St Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, Estonia; the painting at the back wall of the chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama in the Istrian town of Beram (1474), painted by Vincent of Kastav; the painting in the Holy Trinity Church of Hrastovlje, Istria by John of Kastav (1490).


title: Danse Macabre

text: A notable example was painted on the cemetery walls of the Dominican Abbey, in Bern, by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484–1530) in 1516/7. This work of art was destroyed when the wall was torn down in 1660, but a 1649 copy by Albrecht Kauw (1621–1681) is extant. There was also a "Dance of Death" painted around 1430 and displayed on the walls of Pardon Churchyard at Old St Paul's Cathedral, London, with texts by John Lydgate (1370–1451) known as the 'Dance of (St) Poulys', which was destroyed in 1549.


title: Danse Macabre

text: The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years' War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death, were culturally assimilated throughout Europe. The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penance, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The "Danse Macabre" combines both desires: in many ways similar to the medieval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death (see "memento mori" and "Ars moriendi").


title: Danse Macabre

text: Short verse dialogues between Death and each of its victims, which could have been performed as plays, can be found in the direct aftermath of the Black Death in Germany and in Spain (where it was known as the "Totentanz" and "la Danza de la Muerte", respectively).


title: Danse Macabre

text: The French term "Danse Macabre" may derive from the Latin "Chorea Machabæorum", literally "dance of the Maccabees." In 2 Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, the grim martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons is described and was a well-known medieval subject. It is possible that the Maccabean Martyrs were commemorated in some early French plays, or that people just associated the book's vivid descriptions of the martyrdom with the interaction between Death and its prey.


title: Danse Macabre

text: An alternative explanation is that the term entered France via Spain, the , "maqabir" (pl., "cemeteries") being the root of the word. Both the dialogues and the evolving paintings were ostensive penitential lessons that even illiterate people (who were the overwhelming majority) could understand.


title: Danse Macabre

text: Frescoes and murals dealing with death had a long tradition, and were widespread. For example, the legend of the "Three Living and the Three Dead." On a ride or hunt, three young gentlemen meet three cadavers (sometimes described as their ancestors) who warn them, "Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis" ("What we were, you are; what we are, you will be"). Numerous mural versions of that legend from the 13th century onwards have survived (for instance, in the of Wismar or the residential Longthorpe Tower outside Peterborough). Since they showed pictorial sequences of men and corpses covered with shrouds, those paintings are sometimes regarded as cultural precursors of the new genre.


title: Danse Macabre

text: A "Danse Macabre" painting may show a round dance headed by Death or, more usually, a chain of alternating dead and live dancers. From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each mortal's hand is taken by an animated skeleton or cadaver. The famous "Totentanz" by Bernt Notke in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck (destroyed during the Allied bombing of Lübeck in World War II), presented the dead dancers as very lively and agile, making the impression that they were actually dancing, whereas their living dancing partners looked clumsy and passive. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre. The "Totentanz" of Metnitz, for example, shows how a pope crowned with his tiara is being led into Hell by Death.


title: Danse Macabre

text: Usually, a short dialogue is attached to each pair of dancers, in which Death is summoning him (or, more rarely, her) to dance and the summoned is moaning about impending death. In the first printed "Totentanz" textbook (Anon.: "Vierzeiliger oberdeutscher Totentanz", Heidelberger Blockbuch, ), Death addresses, for example, the emperor:


title: Danse Macabre

text: Renowned for his "Dance of Death" series, the famous designs by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) were drawn in 1526 while he was in Basel. They were cut in wood by the accomplished Formschneider (block cutter) Hans Lützelburger.


title: Danse Macabre

text: ""Nothing indeed, by knife or by graver, is of higher quality than this man's doing.' For by common acclaim the originals are technically the most marvelous woodcuts ever made"."


title: Danse Macabre

text: These woodcuts soon appeared in proofs with titles in German. The first book edition, containing forty-one woodcuts, was published at Lyons by the Treschsel brothers in 1538. The popularity of the work, and the currency of its message, are underscored by the fact that there were eleven editions before 1562, and over the sixteenth century perhaps as many as a hundred unauthorized editions and imitations. Ten further designs were added in later editions.


title: Danse Macabre

text: The "Dance of Death" (1523–26) refashions the late-medieval allegory of the "Danse Macabre" as a reformist satire, and one can see the beginnings of a gradual shift from traditional to reformed Christianity. That shift had many permutations however, and in a study Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that the contemporary reception and afterlife of Holbein's designs lent themselves to neither purely Catholic or Protestant doctrine, but could be outfitted with different surrounding prefaces and sermons as printers and writers of different political and religious leanings took them up. Most importantly, ""The pictures and the Bible quotations above them were the main attractions […] Both Catholics and Protestants wished, through the pictures, to turn men's thoughts to a Christian preparation for death."".


title: Danse Macabre

text: The 1538 edition which contained Latin quotations from the Bible above Holbein's designs, and a French quatrain below composed by Gilles Corrozet (1510–1568) actually did not credit Holbein as the artist. It bore the title: Les simulachres & / HISTORIEES FACES / DE LA MORT, AUTANT ELE/gammēt pourtraictes, que artifi/ciellement imaginées. / A Lyon. / Soubz l'escu de COLOIGNE. / M.D. XXXVIII. ("Images and Illustrated facets of Death, as elegantly depicted as they are artfully conceived.") These images and workings of death as captured in the phrase "histories faces" of the title "are the particular exemplification of the way death works, the individual scenes in which the lessons of mortality are brought home to people of every station."


title: Danse Macabre

text: In his preface to the work Jean de Vauzèle, the Prior of Montrosier, addresses Jehanne de Tourzelle, the Abbess of the Convent at St. Peter at Lyons, and names Holbein's attempts to capture the ever-present, but never directly seen, abstract images of death "simulachres." He writes: ""[…] simulachres les dis ie vrayement, pour ce que simulachre vient de simuler, & faindre ce que n'est point."" ("Simulachres they are most correctly called, for simulachre derives from the verb to simulate and to feign that which is not really there.") He next employs a trope from the memento mori (remember we all must die) tradition and a metaphor from printing which well captures the undertakings of Death, the artist, and the printed book before us in which these simulachres of death barge in on the living: ""Et pourtant qu'on n'a peu trouver chose plus approchante a la similitude de Mort, que la personne morte, on d'icelle effigie simulachres, & faces de Mort, pour en nos pensees imprimer la memoire de Mort plus au vis, que ne pourroient toutes les rhetoriques descriptiones de orateurs."" ("And yet we cannot discover any one thing more near the likeness of Death than the dead themselves, whence come these simulated effigies and images of Death's affairs, which imprint the memory of Death with more force than all the rhetorical descriptions of the orators ever could.").


title: Danse Macabre

text: Holbein's series shows the figure of "Death" in many disguises, confronting individuals from all walks of life. None escape Death's skeletal clutches, not even the pious. As Davis writes, "Holbein's pictures are independent dramas in which Death comes upon his victim in the midst of the latter's own surroundings and activities. This is perhaps nowhere more strikingly captured than in the wonderful blocks showing the plowman earning his bread by the sweat of his brow only to have his horses speed him to his end by Death. The Latin from the 1549 Italian edition pictured here reads: "In sudore vultus tui, vesceris pane tuo." ("Through the sweat of thy brow you shall eat your bread"), quoting Genesis 3.19. The Italian verses below translate: ("Miserable in the sweat of your brow,/ It is necessary that you acquire the bread you need eat,/ But, may it not displease you to come with me,/ If you are desirous of rest."). Or there is the nice balance in composition Holbein achieves between the heavy-laden traveling salesman insisting that he must still go to market while Death tugs at his sleeve to put down his wares once and for all: "Venite ad me, qui onerati estis." ("Come to me, all ye who [labor and] are heavy laden"), quoting Matthew 11.28. The Italian here translates: ("Come with me, wretch, who are weighed down,/ Since I am the dame who rules the whole world:/ Come and hear my advice,/ Because I wish to lighten you of this load.").


title: Danse Macabre

text: The "Danse Macabre" was a frequent motif in poetry, drama and other written literature in the Middle Ages in several areas of western Europe. There is a Spanish , a French , and a German with various Latin manuscripts written during the 14th century. Printed editions of books began appearing in the 15th century, such as the ones produced by Guy Marchant of Paris. Similarly to the musical or artistic representations, the texts describe living and dead persons being called to dance or form a procession with Death.


title: Danse Macabre

text: There is one danse macabre text devoted entirely to women: "The Danse Macabre of Women". This work survives in five manuscripts, and two printed editions. In it, 36 women of various ages, in Paris, are called from their daily lives and occupations to join the Dance with Death. An English translation of the French manuscript was published by Ann Tukey Harrison in 1994.


title: Danse Macabre

text: The "Death and the Maiden motif", known from paintings since the early 16th century, is related to, and may have been derived from, the "Danse Macabre". It has received numerous treatments in various mediamost prominently Schubert's lied "Der Tod und das Mädchen" (1817) and the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", partly derived from its musical material. Further developments of the "Danse Macabre" motif include:


title: RocknRolla

text: RocknRolla is a 2008 action crime film written and directed by Guy Ritchie, featuring an ensemble cast that includes Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandiwe Newton, Mark Strong, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, Toby Kebbell, Jeremy Piven, and Chris Bridges. It was released in the United Kingdom on 5 September 2008, hitting number one in the UK box office in its first week of release. Over the years, the film has gained a cult following.


title: RocknRolla

text: In London, mob boss Lenny Cole rules the ever-growing real estate business, using a corrupt councillor for bureaucratic fixing, and his right-hand man Archy for the dirty side of things. A billionaire Russian businessman, Uri Omovich, plans a fixed land deal, and London's crooks seem to all want a piece of it — particularly Uri's underhanded accountant Stella, and a gang called "The Wild Bunch" led by small-time crook "One-Two", his partner "Mumbles", and their driver "Handsome Bob".


title: RocknRolla

text: Uri agrees to Lenny's price of €7,000,000 for bribing the Council, and as a sign of trust, loans him his "lucky painting". Yet when Uri arranges for Stella to move the funds, she double-crosses him and hires the Wild Bunch to steal the money. Additionally, Lenny's estranged and drug-addicted stepson Johnny Quid steals the painting from Lenny's office after faking his own death. Lenny and Archy then coerce Johnny's former talent managers Mickey and Roman into tracking down Johnny. In a subplot, Handsome Bob gets close to Stella's gay husband, a lawyer who has information on a longtime unknown informant in their criminal circle.


title: RocknRolla

text: Uri tasks Stella once more with covertly siphoning the necessary payoff from his holdings, despite his growing suspicion of her. Yet when his moneymen are once again robbed by the Wild Bunch, his assistant Victor convinces him that it's likely Lenny who is behind the robberies, and is also purposely keeping Uri's lucky painting from him. Uri and Victor then invite Lenny to a private golf game, where Victor beats him with a golf club, finishing by breaking Lenny's leg as a warning to return his painting.


title: RocknRolla

text: Wild Bunch friend Cookie happens to buy the painting from a couple of crackheads who stole it from Johnny's hideout. Cookie then gives the painting to One-Two who, in turn, offers the painting to Stella as a token of appreciation after a sexual encounter. After Stella leaves his flat, One-Two is surprised by Uri's henchmen but is rescued, and subsequently kidnapped, by Archy and his goons who had come looking for Uri's money.


title: RocknRolla

text: Uri wants to marry Stella, whom he has long admired. He goes to Stella's house to propose, but he then spots the painting. Stella lies and says she has had it for years. Uri, enraged by Stella's betrayal, orders Victor to kill her.


title: RocknRolla

text: Archy brings Johnny, Roman, Mickey and the Wild Bunch to Lenny's warehouse where Lenny orders Johnny and the Wild Bunch executed. Handsome Bob offers the legal documents concerning the informant in his pocket to Archy. Archy recognizes the pseudonym used on documents, "Sidney Shaw", as belonging to Lenny. Lenny had arranged with the police to routinely lock up many criminal associates (including Archy) for years at a time to ensure his own freedom and while also enhancing his own standing in the criminal underworld. Archy orders Lenny's men to free the Wild Bunch and has Lenny drowned and fed to crayfish.


title: RocknRolla

text: In the elevator, Johnny explains to Roman and Mickey that they will also be killed to leave no witnesses, and graphically explains the manner of their executions. His description unnerves the man tasked to execute the trio, prompting him to act prematurely. Having already anticipated this move, Johnny warns Mickey and Roman to intervene and kill their would-be executioner. Johnny shoots two more men waiting at the top of the elevator and with help from the Wild Bunch, they escape the last of Archy's men.


title: RocknRolla

text: Later, Archy picks up Johnny from rehab and gives him Uri's lucky painting as a welcome home present, remarking that obtaining the painting "cost a very wealthy Russian an arm and a leg". Johnny proclaims that, with his new-found freedom from addiction and his stepfather, he will do what he could not before: "become a real RocknRolla".


title: RocknRolla

text: In addition to the film's main cast, its supporting cast features Jimi Mistry as the Councillor, Matt King as Cookie, Dragan Mićanović as Victor (Omovich's right-hand man), David Bark-Jones as Bertie (Stella's gay husband who works as a criminal lawyer), Geoff Bell as Fred the Head, Gemma Arterton as June, Nonso Anozie as Tank, David Leon as Malcolm, Bronson Webb as Paul, Michael Ryan as Pete, Jamie Campbell Bower as Rocker, Tiffany Mulheron as Jackie, and Robert Stone as the nightclub bouncer. A scheduling conflict prevented director Guy Ritchie from casting actor Jason Statham, who had appeared in three of his previous films.


title: RocknRolla

text: In May 2007, director Guy Ritchie announced the production of "RocknRolla", to be produced by Ritchie's own company, Toff Guy Films, Joel Silver's Dark Castle Entertainment, and French company StudioCanal, with distribution by Warner Bros. The following June, Ritchie hired the cast for "RocknRolla", and filming began on location in London on 19 June 2007. Two scenes were filmed at Stoke Park, Buckinghamshire: the opening scene on the grass tennis courts, and the round of golf which takes place on the 21st green with the clubhouse in the background.


title: RocknRolla

text: Critical reaction to the film has been mixed, with a 60% rating out of 147 reviews on the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 5.98/10. The critical consensus states: "Mixed reviews for Guy Ritchie's return to his London-based cockney wideboy gangster movie roots, but most agree, it's a step in the right direction following two major turkeys." The website Metacritic, which compiles and then aggregates major film critics' reviews, gave the film a 53 out of 100, which is categorised as having mixed or average reviews. While the film's unoriginal themes were criticised, the script and direction, as well as the performances of Strong, Butler and Kebbell, were praised.


title: RocknRolla

text: IGN gave the film a positive review with four out of five stars, saying "[Guy Ritchie is] hardly re-inventing the wheel with this movie, but "RocknRolla" is nonetheless a comedy thriller that is every bit as accomplished as his early work, and without doubt a witty, adrenaline-fuelled blast from start to finish." Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, stating that "It never slows down enough to be really good, and never speeds up enough to be the Bourne Mortgage Crisis, but there's one thing for sure: British actors love playing gangsters as much as American actors love playing cowboys, and it's always nice to see people having fun."


title: RocknRolla

text: The film took a total gross of US$25,739,015 worldwide, compared to US$83,000,000 for "Snatch", seeing a modest return on the film's US$18,000,000 budget.


title: RocknRolla

text: Newton revealed that Ritchie stated that he hopes to extend "RocknRolla" into a trilogy, in the event that the film receives enough positive attention. At the end of the film there is a title card stating "Johnny, Archy and the Wild Bunch will be back in "The Real RocknRolla"". According to both the audio commentary and an interview with Ritchie, the second film has been written and is awaiting studio approval.


title: RocknRolla

text: In a 2011 interview, promoting "", when asked about a possible "RocknRolla" sequel, Ritchie said "You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it! I've written a script, I think it's a great script, and Joel [Silver] wants to pay for me to do it. But up until now we haven't had the time to do it. It's sitting there and we'd all like to do it, it's just a question of when we're going to fit it in. So we'll wait and see." He also mentioned that as long as Warner Bros. keeps throwing him "big movies like the "Sherlock Holmes" films and "The Man from UNCLE", then it may not be happening soon."


title: Adeel Akhtar

text: Adeel Akhtar (born 18 September 1980) is a British actor. In 2017, he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his role in "Murdered by My Father". He was also nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor for his role on Channel 4's "Utopia", as well as a British Academy Film Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for "Ali & Ava".


title: Adeel Akhtar

text: Akhtar was born in London, to a Pakistani father and a Kenyan mother. He was educated at Cheltenham College Junior School from 1991 to 1994 and then moved to Cheltenham College in Newick House from 1994 to 1999. He originally completed a degree in law from Oxford Brookes University in 2002, but decided to follow his passion and change to acting, training at the Actors Studio Drama School, then within The New School, in New York.


title: Adeel Akhtar

text: Akhtar's first major role was as the bumbling Muslim extremist Faisal in Chris Morris's film "Four Lions". Other comedic performances include Gupta in "The Angelos Epithemiou Show", Maroush in "The Dictator" and Smee in Joe Wright 's" Pan".


title: Adeel Akhtar

text: Akhtar has also won acclaim for his dramatic performances: in 2015, he was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor for his 2014 role as Wilson Wilson on Channel 4's "Utopia". He played shopkeeper Ahmed alongside Toby Jones in the BBC mini-series "Capital", and DS Ira King in the BBC's "River". Reviewing "River" in "The Daily Telegraph", Michael Hogan wrote, "This series was beautifully written by Abi Morgan, stylishly directed, and most of all, superbly acted. The quieter, less showy supporting players also shone. Not just stalwarts [...] but fresher faces: Adeel Akhtar as River's endlessly patient sidekick and Georgina Rich as his psychiatrist".


title: Adeel Akhtar

text: In 2016 Akhtar appeared as Shahzad in the BBC one-off drama "Murdered by My Father". He won the 2017 BAFTA award for Lead Actor for this role, the first non-white actor to do so. In 2017 he also took part in the American romantic comedy film "The Big Sick", playing the role of the protagonist's brother, Naveed. He appeared as Rob Singhal in the acclaimed BBC miniseries based on John le Carré's "The Night Manager". In 2019, Akhtar appeared as Billy in the critically acclaimed BBC Three series, "Back to Life", written by Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon, returning in 2021 for the second series.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Lucian Michael Freud (; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.


title: Lucian Freud

text: His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was the fourth child of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Lucian, the second of their three boys, was the elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.


title: Lucian Freud

text: The family emigrated to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. Lucian became a British subject in 1939, having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School, for a year before being expelled owing to disruptive behaviour.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 to 1942 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths' College, part of the University of London, in 1942–43. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.


title: Lucian Freud

text: In 1943, the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower". It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in "The Painter's Room" on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months to visit John Craxton. In the early fifties he was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio. He remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud was one of a number of figurative artists who were later characterised by artist R. B. Kitaj as a group named the "School of London". This group was a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style. The group was active contemporaneously with the boom years of abstract painting and in contrast to abstract expressionism. Major figures in the group included Freud, Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Reginald Gray. Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud's early paintings, which are mostly very small, are often associated with German Expressionism (an influence he tended to deny) and Surrealism in depicting people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. Some very early works anticipate the varied flesh tones of his mature style, for example "Cedric Morris" (1940, National Museum of Wales), but after the end of the war he developed a thinly painted very precise linear style with muted colours, best known in his self-portrait "Man with a Thistle" (1946, Tate) and a series of large-eyed portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, such as "Girl with a Kitten" (1947, Tate). These were painted with tiny sable brushes and evoke Early Netherlandish painting.


title: Lucian Freud

text: From the 1950s, he began to focus on portraiture, often nudes (though his first full-length nude was not painted until 1966), to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and by the middle of the decade developed a much more free style using large hog's-hair brushes, concentrating on the texture and colour of flesh, and much thicker paint, including impasto. "Girl with a White Dog", 1951–1952, (Tate) is an example of a transitional work in this process, sharing many characteristics with paintings before and after it, with relatively tight brushwork and a middling size and viewpoint. He would often clean his brush after each stroke when painting flesh, so that the colour remained constantly variable. He also started to paint standing up, which continued until old age, when he switched to a high chair. The colours of non-flesh areas in these paintings are typically muted, while the flesh becomes increasingly highly and variably coloured. By about 1960, Freud had established the style that he would use, with some changes, for the rest of his career. The later portraits often use an over life-size scale, but are of mostly relatively small heads or in half-lengths. Later portraits are often much larger. In his late career he often followed a portrait by producing an etching of the subject in a different pose, drawing directly onto the plate, with the sitter in his view.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something else, as in "Girl With a White Dog" (1951–52) and "Naked Man With Rat" (1977–78). According to Edward Chaney, "The distinctive, recumbent manner in which Freud poses so many of his sitters suggests the conscious or unconscious influence both of his grandfather's psychoanalytical couch and of the Egyptian mummy, his dreaming figures, clothed or nude, staring into space until (if ever) brought back to health and/or consciousness. The particular application of this supine pose to freaks, friends, wives, mistresses, dogs, daughters and mother alike (the latter regularly depicted after her suicide attempt and eventually, literally mummy-like in death), tends to support this hypothesis."


title: Lucian Freud

text: The use of animals in his compositions is widespread, and often he features a pet and its owner. Other examples of portraits with both animals and people in Freud's work include "Guy and Speck" (1980–81), "Eli and David" (2005–06) and "Double Portrait" (1985–86). He had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables. His portraits solely of horses include "Grey Gelding" (2003), "Skewbald Mare" (2004), and "Mare Eating Hay" (2006). Wilting houseplants feature prominently in some portraits, especially in the 1960s, and Freud also produced a number of paintings purely of plants. Other regular features included mattresses in earlier works, and huge piles of the linen rags with which he used to clean his brushes in later ones. Some portraits, especially in the 1980s, have very carefully painted views of London roofscapes seen through the studio windows.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud's subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really." However the titles were mostly anonymous, and the identity of the sitter not always disclosed; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a portrait of one of Freud's daughters as a baby for several years before he mentioned who the model was. In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt."


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud painted from life, and usually spent a great deal of time with each subject, demanding the model's presence even while working on the background of the portrait. "Ria, Naked Portrait 2007", a nude completed in 2007, required sixteen months of work, with the model, Ria Kirby, posing all but four evenings during that time. With each session averaging five hours, the painting took approximately 2,400 hours to complete. A rapport with his models was necessary, and while at work, Freud was characterised as "an outstanding raconteur and mimic". Regarding the difficulty in deciding when a painting is completed, Freud said that "he feels he's finished when he gets the impression he's working on somebody else's painting". Paintings were divided into day paintings done in natural light and night paintings done under artificial light, and the sessions, and lighting, were never mixed.


title: Lucian Freud

text: It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished. The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon and produced a large number of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery. He also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. A series of huge nude portraits from the mid-1990s depicted Sue Tilley, or "Big Sue", some using her job title of "Benefits Supervisor" in the title of the painting, as in his 1995 portrait "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping", which in May 2008 was sold by Christie's in New York for $33.6 million, setting a world record auction price for a living artist.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud's most consistent model in his later years was his studio assistant and friend David Dawson, the subject of his final, unfinished work. Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.


title: Lucian Freud

text: His painting "After Cézanne", noteworthy because of its unusual shape, was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.


title: Lucian Freud

text: In 1996, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering Freud's output to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945. In 1997 Freud received the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen. From September 2000 to March 2001, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt was able to show 50 paintings, drawings and etchings from the late 1940s to 2000 in a larger overview exhibition despite the artist's considerable resentment towards Germany. All print media bore the motif of Freud's outstanding painting "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" (1995-1996) depicting the nude Sue Tilley. In addition to some of his most important nude portraits of women, the large-format picture "Nude with leg up (Leigh Bowery)" from 1992 was also shown in Frankfurt, which was removed in the Metropolitan Museum New York from the exhibition in 1993. The Frankfurt exhibition was realised in a personal dialogue between curator Rolf Lauter and Lucian Freud and is thus the only project Freud authorised in direct cooperation with a German museum. The major retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 1988 was the focal point for the BBC "Omnibus" programme which saw one of the very few conversations with Freud ever recorded, in this case with "Omnibus" director Jake Auerbach. The conversations with the artist were made possible by Duncan MacGuigan from Acquavella Galleries New York. This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. In 2001, Freud completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of the portrayal in some sections of the British media. In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of etchings went on display at the Museum of Modern Art.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud died in London on 20 July 2011 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Archbishop Rowan Williams officiated at the private funeral.


title: Lucian Freud

text: In 2008 "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" (1995), a portrait of civil servant Sue Tilley, sold for $33.6 million – the highest price ever at the time for a work by a living artist. At a Christie's New York auction in 2015, "Benefits Supervisor Resting" sold for $56.2 million.


title: Lucian Freud

text: On 13 October 2011, his 1952 "Boy's Head", a small portrait of Charlie Lumley, his neighbour, reached $4,998,088 at Sotheby's London contemporary art evening auction, making it one of the highlights of the 2011 auction autumn season.


title: Lucian Freud

text: On November 10, 2015 Freud's 2004 painting "The Brigadier", a portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles in his British Royal Army uniform sold for $34.89 million US at Christie's in New York City, beating the $30 million US presale estimate for the work.


title: Lucian Freud

text: In the 1940s Freud and fellow artists Adrian Ryan and John Minton were in a homosexual love triangle. After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kitty Garman, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. They had two daughters, Annabel Freud and the poet Annie Freud, before their marriage ended in 1952. Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011.


title: Lucian Freud

text: In late 1952, Freud eloped with Guinness heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood to Paris, where they married in 1953; they divorced in 1959.


title: Lucian Freud

text: Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration. Fourteen children have been identified, two from Freud's first marriage and 12 by various mistresses. Writer Esther Freud and fashion designer Bella Freud are his daughters by Bernadine Coverley.


The 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in New York were held on November 8, 2022, to elect the 26 U.S. representatives from the State of New York, one from each of the state's 26 congressional districts. The elections coincided with elections for Governor, U.S. Senate, Attorney General, Comptroller, state senate, and assembly, and various other state and local elections.


title: 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in New York

text: Following the 2020 Census, New York lost one seat in the U.S. House. Incumbent representatives Lee Zeldin (R), Thomas Suozzi (D), Kathleen Rice (D), John Katko (R), Chris Jacobs (R), and Joe Sempolinski (R) are retiring. Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D) and Mondaire Jones (D) lost renomination in their primary contests. The primary elections were set to happen on June 28, 2022, but due to a court-ordered redraw of the state's Congressional maps, they were held on August 23, 2022.


text: The 1st district is based on the eastern end and North Shore of Long Island, including the Hamptons, the North Fork, Riverhead, Port Jefferson, Smithtown, and Huntington, all in Suffolk County. Due to redistricting, the district lost most of Brookhaven to the 2nd district and picked up Huntington from the 3rd district. The district has a PVI of R+4 but voted for Joe Biden by 0.2 points in 2020. The incumbent is Republican Lee Zeldin, who was re-elected with 54.8% of the vote in 2020. He is retiring to run for governor.


text: The 2nd district is based on the South Shore of Suffolk County, including the towns of Babylon, Islip, and most of Brookhaven all in Suffolk County, and a small part of Oyster Bay in Nassau County. Due to redistricting, the district lost portions of Nassau County and now stretches farther east along the South Shore. The district has a PVI of R+4 and voted for Donald Trump by 1.5 points in 2020. The incumbent is Republican Andrew Garbarino, who was elected with 52.9% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 3rd district is based on the North Shore of Nassau County, including all of the towns of North Hempstead and Glen Cove, most of the town of Oyster Bay, and a small part of Hempstead, and parts of Northeast Queens, including the neighborhoods of Whitestone, Beechhurst, Little Neck, and Douglaston. Due to redistricting, the district lost Huntington to the 1st district. It has a PVI of D+2 and voted for Joe Biden by 8 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Thomas Suozzi, who was re-elected with 55.9% of the vote in 2020. Suozzi declined to run for re-election, instead opting to run for governor. The general election between Democrat Robert Zimmerman and Republican George Santos marks the first time in United States history where both major party nominees are openly gay.


text: The 4th district is based on the South Shore of Nassau County and is entirely within the town of Hempstead. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+5 and voted for Joe Biden by 15 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Kathleen Rice, who was re-elected with 56.1% of the vote in 2020. On February 15, 2022, Rice announced that she will retire at the end of her term.


text: The 5th district is based in Southeast Queens, including the neighborhoods of Jamaica, Hollis, Laurelton, Richmond Hill, Ozone Park, Howard Beach, and the Rockaways. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+32 and voted for Joe Biden by 63 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Gregory Meeks, who was re-elected unopposed with 99.3% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 6th district is based in Central and Eastern Queens, including the neighborhoods of Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Kew Gardens, Flushing, Bayside, and Fresh Meadows. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+17 and voted for Joe Biden by 31 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Grace Meng, who was re-elected with 67.9% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 7th district is based in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, including the neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Woodhaven, Fresh Pond, Maspeth, Sunnyside, and Long Island City. The seat was significantly altered due to redistricting, losing all of its previous territory in Manhattan and South Brooklyn in exchange for parts of Queens formerly in the 12th district. The district has a PVI of D+32 and voted for Joe Biden by 60 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Nydia Velázquez, who was re-elected with 84.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: Nominal challenger Paperboy Prince became notable for both their flamboyant 2021 run for New York City Mayor, and their attempt to get on the ballots in 11 congressional districts simultaneously. They only succeeded in this one.


text: The 8th district is based in Southern and Eastern Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, East New York, Canarsie, Bergen Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, and Coney Island. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+25 and voted for Joe Biden by 49 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, who was re-elected with 84.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 9th district is based in South and Central Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Midwood, and Borough Park. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+27 and voted for Joe Biden by 52 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Yvette Clarke, who was re-elected with 83% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 10th district is based in Lower Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Gowanus, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Sunset Park, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and the Financial District. The district was significantly altered due to redistricting, resembling the previous 10th so little as to be a new seat. It has a PVI of D+36 and voted for Joe Biden by 71 points in 2020. There is no incumbent. Rep. Mondaire Jones, the incumbent from the Rockland and Westchester-based 17th district, lost to lawyer Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary.


text: A last-minute, court-ordered redistricting on the district turning what was a nominal race between safe incumbent Jerry Nadler and two non-notable challengers, into a free for all of 13 candidates, several of whom were notable.


text: The 11th district includes all of Staten Island and the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Fort Hamilton, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. The seat was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of R+5 and voted for Donald Trump by 8 points in 2020, making it the only Republican-leaning district in New York City. The incumbent is Republican Nicole Malliotakis, who was elected with 53.0% of the vote in 2020 over then-incumbent Max Rose, who is running again in 2022 for his old seat.


text: The 12th district is entirely based in Manhattan, comprising the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Midtown, Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea, Murray Hill, and Gramercy. The district was significantly altered by redistricting, losing all previous territory in Queens and now including both the west and east sides of Manhattan. The district was altered so significantly in redistricting as to be a new seat, combining the Manhattan parts of the old 10th and 12th districts. The district has a PVI of D+35 and voted for Joe Biden by 71 points in 2020. The incumbents are Democrats Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler. Maloney was re-elected with 82.1% of the vote in 2020 (in the old 12th district), and Nadler was re-elected with 74.5% of the vote in 2020 (in the old 10th district).


text: Nadler and Maloney both chose to run in the new 12th, and Nadler defeated Maloney in the Democratic primary.


text: The 13th district is based in Upper Manhattan and the Northwest Bronx, including the neighborhoods of Harlem, Morningside Heights, Spanish Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill, Fordham, Kingsbridge, and Bedford Park. The seat was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+40, making it the most democratic leaning district in the nation, and voted for Joe Biden by 78 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Adriano Espaillat, who was re-elected with 90.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 14th district is based in North Queens and the East Bronx, including the neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst, Astoria, College Point, Hunts Point, Castle Hill, Throggs Neck, Parkchester, Middletown, Country Club, Co-Op City, and City Island. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+30 and voted for Joe Biden by 58 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was re-elected with 71.6% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 15th district is based in the West Bronx, including the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania, Highbridge, Tremont, West Farms, Belmont, Norwood, Woodlawn, Riverdale, and Spuyten Duyvil. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting, though it did add Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil. The district has a PVI of D+37 and voted for Joe Biden by 70 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Ritchie Torres, who was elected with 88.7% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 16th district is based in southern Westchester County, including Yonkers, White Plains, New Rochelle, and Rye. It also includes Wakefield in the Bronx. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting, though it did lose Riverdale and Spuyten Devil to the 15th district. It has a PVI of D+21 and voted for Joe Biden by 44 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Jamaal Bowman, who was elected with 84% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 17th district is based in the Lower Hudson Valley, including all of Rockland and Putnam Counties, northern Westchester County, and a small part of Dutchess County. The district was significantly altered due to redistricting, now including all of northern Westchester and adding Putnam County and a small part of Dutchess County. The district has a PVI of D+3 and voted for Joe Biden by 10 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Mondaire Jones, who announced on May 20 that he would instead be running for re-election in the Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn-based 10th district. Sean Patrick Maloney, the Democratic incumbent of the neighboring 18th district and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, announced his intention to run in this seat. Jones had been elected to this seat with 59.3% of the vote in 2020, while Maloney had been re-elected to the neighboring 18th district with 55.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: Maloney defeated state senator Alessandra Biaggi in the Democratic primary. Republican candidate Mike Lawler narrowly won the general election, with Maloney conceding.


text: The 18th district is based in the mid Hudson Valley, including all of Orange County and most of Dutchess and Ulster Counties. The seat was modestly altered due to redistricting, losing all of Putnam County to the 17th district while picking up the portions of Dutchess and Ulster Counties formerly in the 19th district. The district has a PVI of D+1 and voted for Joe Biden by 8 points in 2020. The incumbents are Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney, who was re-elected with 55.8% of the vote in 2020, and Democrat Pat Ryan, who was first elected in 2022 in a special election with 51.2% of the vote. Maloney is running for re-election in the neighboring 17th district instead, while Pat Ryan is running for re-election in this district. In the general election Pat Ryan would narrowly beat Schmitt, with Schmitt conceding defeat.


text: The 19th district stretches from the Upper Hudson Valley across the Catskill Mountains to parts of the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes, including Hudson, Woodstock, Monticello, Oneonta, Binghamton, and Ithaca. It includes all of Columbia, Greene, Sullivan, Delaware, Chenango, Cortland, Broome, Tioga, and Tompkins counties, and parts of Otsego and Ulster Counties. The district was modestly altered by redistricting, losing all of its territory in Dutchess County and most of its territory in Ulster County in exchange for Binghamton and Ithaca. The district has an even PVI and voted for Joe Biden by 5 points in 2020. The incumbent was Democrat Antonio Delgado, who was re-elected with 54.8% of the vote in 2020. However, on May 3, 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul announced her intent to appoint Delgado to the vacant Lieutenant Governor position, triggering a special election in which Democrat Pat Ryan won with 51.2% of the vote. However, Ryan was redistricted into the neighboring 18th district, thus leaving this seat open.


text: The 20th district is based in the Capital Region, including Albany, Troy, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs. It includes all of Albany, Schenectady, and Saratoga counties and parts of Rensselaer County. Due to redistricting, the district lost Amsterdam to the 21st district. It has a PVI of D+7 and voted for Joe Biden by 20 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Paul Tonko, who was re-elected with 61.2% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 21st district is based in the North Country and Adirondack Mountains, including Glens Falls, Lake George, Plattsburgh, Potsdam, Amsterdam, and Cooperstown. Redistricting added parts of the Mohawk Valley to the district while removing Watertown. The district has a PVI of R+9 and voted for Donald Trump by 12 points in 2020. The incumbent is Republican Elise Stefanik, who was re-elected with 58.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 22nd district is based in Central New York and the Mohawk Valley, including Syracuse and Utica. It includes all of Onondaga, Oneida, and Madison Counties and a small sliver of Oswego County. The district was significantly altered by redistricting, losing all of its previous territory in the Southern Tier while adding Syracuse. The district has a PVI of D+1 and voted for Joe Biden by 8 points in 2020, similar to the partisanship of the old 24th district. The incumbent is Republican John Katko of the 24th district, who was elected with 53.1% of the vote in 2020. Katko is retiring.


text: District 23 is based in the Southern Tier and Western New York, including Elmira, Corning, Jamestown, and outer Erie County. Due to redistricting, the district lost parts of the Finger Lakes such as Ithaca while picking up parts of Erie County formerly in the 27th district. The district has a PVI of R+12 and voted for Donald Trump by 17 points in 2020. The district's two incumbents, both Republicans, both declined to run for re-election: Joe Sempolinski, who was elected in August 2022 to fulfill the remaining term caused by Tom Reed's resignation, specifically ran for the seat as a placeholder and not as a permanent representative; and Chris Jacobs, of the old 27th district, announced that he would no longer seek election to the seat after his comments in support of gun control in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting upset many other Republicans and drew threats of primary challengers.


text: The 24th district is based along the Lake Ontario coast (minus Rochester) and the upper Finger Lakes, including Watertown, Oswego, Auburn, Seneca Falls, and Batavia. It was significantly altered by redistricting, taking in all of the old 27th district outside of Erie County while only retaining the rural parts of the old 24th district. The district has a PVI of R+12 and voted for Donald Trump by 17 points in 2020. Republican Claudia Tenney, the incumbent of the old 22nd district, is moving to this district. She was narrowly elected with 47.8% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 25th district is based in the Rochester area, including all of Monroe County and most of Orleans County. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+7 and voted for Joe Biden by 21 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Joseph Morelle, who was re-elected with 59.3% of the vote in 2020.


text: The 26th district is based in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area, including the more urban parts of Erie County and western Niagara County. The district was mostly unchanged by redistricting. It has a PVI of D+8 and voted for Joe Biden by 26 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Brian Higgins, who was re-elected with 69.8% of the vote in 2020.


title: David Lean

text: Sir David Lean (25 March 190816 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Widely considered one of the most important figures in British cinema, Lean directed the large-scale epics "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957), "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "Doctor Zhivago" (1965), and "A Passage to India" (1984). He also directed the film adaptations of two Charles Dickens novels, "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948), as well as the romantic drama "Brief Encounter" (1945).


title: David Lean

text: Originally a film editor in the early 1930s, Lean made his directorial debut with 1942's "In Which We Serve", which was the first of four collaborations with Noël Coward. Beginning with "Summertime" in 1955, Lean began to make internationally co-produced films financed by the big Hollywood studios; in 1970, however, the critical failure of his film "Ryan's Daughter" led him to take a fourteen-year break from filmmaking, during which he planned a number of film projects which never came to fruition. In 1984 he had a career revival with "A Passage to India", adapted from E. M. Forster's novel; it was an instant hit with critics but proved to be the last film Lean would direct.


title: David Lean

text: Lean's affinity for pictorialism and inventive editing techniques has led him to be lauded by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott. Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute "Sight & Sound" "Directors' Top Directors" poll in 2002. Nominated seven times for the Academy Award for Best Director, which he won twice for "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia", he has seven films in the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films (with three of them being in the top five) and was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990.


title: David Lean

text: David Lean was born on 25 March 1908 at 38 Blenheim Crescent, South Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labeled a "dud" of a student; he left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at the age of 18, and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice. A more formative event for his career than his formal education was an uncle's gift, when Lean was aged ten, of a Brownie box camera. "You usually didn't give a boy a camera until he was 16 or 17 in those days. It was a huge compliment and I succeeded at it." Lean printed and developed his films, and it was his "great hobby". In 1923, his father deserted the family and Lean would later follow a similar path after his own first marriage and child.


title: David Lean

text: Bored by his work, Lean spent every evening in the cinema, and in 1927, after an aunt had advised him to find a job he enjoyed, he visited Gaumont Studios where his obvious enthusiasm earned him a month's trial without pay. He was taken on as a teaboy, promoted to clapperboy, and soon rose to the position of third assistant director. By 1930 he was working as an editor on newsreels, including those of Gaumont Pictures and Movietone, while his move to feature films began with "Freedom of the Seas" (1934) and "Escape Me Never" (1935).


title: David Lean

text: He edited Gabriel Pascal's film productions of two George Bernard Shaw plays, "Pygmalion" (1938) and "Major Barbara" (1941). He edited Powell & Pressburger's "49th Parallel" (1941) and "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" (1942). After this last film, Lean began his directing career, after editing more than two dozen features by 1942. As Tony Sloman wrote in 1999, "As the varied likes of David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher and Dorothy Arzner have proved, the cutting rooms are easily the finest grounding for film direction." David Lean was given honorary membership of the Guild of British Film Editors in 1968.


title: David Lean

text: His first work as a director was in collaboration with Noël Coward on "In Which We Serve" (1942), and he later adapted several of Coward's plays into successful films. These films are "This Happy Breed" (1944), "Blithe Spirit" (1945) and "Brief Encounter" (1945) with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as quietly understated clandestine lovers, torn between their unpredictable passion and their respective orderly middle-class marriages in suburban England. The film shared Grand Prix honors at the 1946 Cannes film festival and garnered Lean his first Academy nominations for directing and screen adaptation, and Celia Johnson a nomination for Best Actress. It has since become a classic, one of the most highly regarded British films.


title: David Lean

text: Two celebrated Charles Dickens adaptations followed – "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948). David Shipman wrote in "The Story of Cinema: Volume Two" (1984): "Of the other Dickens films, only Cukor's "David Copperfield" approaches the excellence of this pair, partly because his casting, too, was near perfect". These two films were the first directed by Lean to star Alec Guinness, whom Lean considered his "good luck charm". The actor's portrayal of Fagin was controversial at the time. The first screening in Berlin during February 1949 offended the surviving Jewish community and led to a riot. It caused problems too in New York, and after private screenings, was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis. "To our surprise it was accused of being anti-Semitic", Lean wrote. "We made Fagin an outsize and, we hoped, an amusing Jewish villain." The terms of the production code meant that the film's release in the United States was delayed until July 1951 after cuts amounting to eight minutes.


title: David Lean

text: The next film directed by Lean was "The Passionate Friends" (1949), an atypical Lean film, but one which marked his first occasion to work with Claude Rains, who played the husband of a woman (Ann Todd) torn between him and an old flame (Howard). "The Passionate Friends" was the first of three films to feature the actress Ann Todd, who became his third wife. "Madeleine" (1950), set in Victorian-era Glasgow is about an 1857 "cause célèbre" with Todd's lead character accused of murdering a former lover. "Once more", writes film critic David Thomson "Lean settles on the pressing need for propriety, but not before the film has put its characters and the audience through a wringer of contradictory feelings." The last of the films with Todd, "The Sound Barrier" (1952), has a screenplay by the playwright Terence Rattigan and was the first of his three films for Sir Alexander Korda's London Films. "Hobson's Choice" (1954), with Charles Laughton in the lead, was based on the play by Harold Brighouse.


title: David Lean

text: "Summertime" (1955) marked a new departure for Lean. It was partly American financed, although again made for Korda's London Films. The film features Katharine Hepburn in the lead role as a middle-aged American woman who has a romance while on holiday in Venice. It was shot entirely on location there. Although best known for his epics, Lean's personal favourite of all his films was "Summertime", and Hepburn his favourite actress.


title: David Lean

text: Lean's films now began to become infrequent but much larger in scale and more extensively released internationally. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) was based on a novel by Pierre Boulle recounting the story of British and American prisoners of war trying to survive in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. The film stars William Holden and Alec Guinness and became the highest-grossing film of 1957 in the United States. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness, who had battled with Lean to give more depth to his role as an obsessively correct British commander who is determined to build the best possible bridge for his Japanese captors in Burma.


title: David Lean

text: After extensive location work in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere, Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" was released in 1962. This was the first project of Lean's with a screenplay by playwright Robert Bolt, rewriting an original script by Michael Wilson (one of the two blacklisted writers of "Bridge on the River Kwai"). It recounts the life of T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who is depicted in the film as uniting the squabbling Bedouin peoples of the Arab peninsula to fight in World War I and then push on for independence.


title: David Lean

text: After some hesitation, Alec Guinness once again appeared, in his fourth David Lean film, as the Arab leader, Prince Faisal, despite his misgivings from their conflicts on "Bridge on the River Kwai". French composer Maurice Jarre, on his first Lean film, created a soaring film score with a famous theme and won his first Oscar for Best Original Score. The film turned actor Peter O'Toole, playing Lawrence, into an international star, and was nominated for ten Oscars, winning seven, including Best Picture and Lean's second win for Best Director. He remains the only British director to win more than one Oscar for directing.


title: David Lean

text: Lean had his greatest box-office success with "Doctor Zhivago" (1965), a romance set during the Russian Revolution. The film, based on the banned novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Boris Pasternak, tells the story of a brilliant and warm-hearted physician and poet (Omar Sharif) who, while seemingly happily married into the Russian aristocracy, and a father, falls in love with a beautiful abandoned young mother named Lara (Julie Christie) and struggles to be with her in the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War.


title: David Lean

text: Initially, reviews for "Doctor Zhivago" were lukewarm, but critics have since come to see it as one of Lean's best films, with film director Paul Greengrass calling it "one of the great masterpieces of cinema". , it is the 9th highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. Producer Carlo Ponti used Maurice Jarre's lush romantic score to create a pop tune called "Lara's Theme", which became an international hit song with lyrics under the title "Somewhere My Love", one of cinema's most successful theme songs. The British director of photography, Freddie Young, won an Academy Award for his color cinematography. Around the same time, Lean also directed some scenes of "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) while George Stevens was committed to location work in Nevada.


title: David Lean

text: Lean's "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) was released after an extended period on location in Ireland. A doomed romance set against the backdrop of 1916 Ireland's struggles against the British, it is loosely based on Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". Starring the aging Hollywood 'bad boy' Robert Mitchum in an uncharacteristic role as a long-suffering Irish husband and British actress Sarah Miles as his faithless young wife, the film received far fewer positive reviews than the director's previous work, being particularly savaged by the New York critics. Some critics felt the film's massive visual scale on gorgeous Irish beaches and extended running time did not suit its small-scale romantic narrative. Nonetheless, the film was a box office success, earning $31 million and making it the 8th highest-grossing film of that year. It won two Academy Awards the following year, another for cinematographer Freddie Young and for supporting actor John Mills in his role as a village halfwit.


title: David Lean

text: The poor critical reception of the film prompted Lean to meet with the National Society of Film Critics, gathered at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, including "The New Yorker" Pauline Kael, and ask them why they objected to the movie. "I sensed trouble from the moment I sat down", Lean says of the now famous luncheon. "Time" critic Richard Schickel asked Lean point blank how he, the director of "Brief Encounter", could have made "a piece of bullshit" like "Ryan's Daughter". These critics so lacerated the film for two hours to David Lean's face that the devastated Lean was put off from making films for a long time. "They just took the film to bits", said Lean in a later television interview. "It really had such an awful effect on me for several years ... you begin to think that maybe they're right. Why on earth am I making films if I don't have to? It shakes one's confidence terribly."


title: David Lean

text: From 1977 until 1980, Lean and Robert Bolt worked on a film adaptation of "Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian", a dramatized account by Richard Hough of the Mutiny on the "Bounty". It was originally to be released as a two-part film, one named "The Lawbreakers" that dealt with the voyage out to Tahiti and the subsequent mutiny, and the second named "The Long Arm" that studied the journey of the mutineers after the mutiny as well as the admiralty's response in sending out the frigate HMS "Pandora", in which some of the mutineers were imprisoned. Lean could not find financial backing for both films after Warner Bros. withdrew from the project; he decided to combine it into one and looked at a seven-part TV series before getting backing from Italian mogul Dino De Laurentiis. The project then suffered a further setback when Bolt suffered a serious stroke and was unable to continue writing; the director felt that Bolt's involvement would be crucial to the film's success. Melvyn Bragg ended up writing a considerable portion of the script.


title: David Lean

text: Lean was forced to abandon the project after overseeing casting and the construction of the $4 million "Bounty" replica; at the last possible moment, actor Mel Gibson brought in his friend Roger Donaldson to direct the film, as producer De Laurentiis did not want to lose the millions he had already put into the project over what he thought was as insignificant a person as the director dropping out. The film was eventually released as "The Bounty".


title: David Lean

text: Lean then embarked on a project he had pursued since 1960, a film adaptation of "A Passage to India" (1984), from E. M. Forster's 1924 novel of colonial conflicts in British-occupied India. Entirely shot on location in the sub-continent, this became his last completed film. He rejected a draft by Santha Rama Rau, responsible for the stage adaptation and Forster's preferred screenwriter, and wrote the script himself. In addition, Lean also edited the film with the result that his three roles in the production (writer, editor, director) were given equal status in the credits.


title: David Lean

text: Lean recruited long-time collaborators for the cast and crew, including Maurice Jarre (who won another Academy Award for the score), Alec Guinness in his sixth and final role for Lean, as an eccentric Hindu Brahmin, and John Box, the production designer for "Dr. Zhivago". Reversing the critical response to "Ryan's Daughter", the film opened to universally enthusiastic reviews; the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and Lean himself nominated for three Academy Awards in directing, editing, and writing. His female star, in the complex role of a confused young British woman who falsely accuses an Indian man of rape, gained Australian actress Judy Davis her first Academy nomination. Peggy Ashcroft, as the sensitive Mrs. Moore, won the Oscar for best supporting actress, making her, at 77, the oldest actress to win that award. According to Roger Ebert, it is "one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen".


title: David Lean

text: He was signed on to direct a Warner Bros.-backed adaptation of J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun" after director Harold Becker left the project. Steven Spielberg was brought on board as a producer for Lean, but later assumed the role of director when Lean dropped out of the project; Spielberg was drawn to the idea of making the film due to his long-time admiration for Lean and his films. "Empire of the Sun" was released in 1987.


title: David Lean

text: During the last years of his life, Lean was in pre-production of a film version of Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo". He assembled an all-star cast, including Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Quaid, with Georges Corraface as the title character. Lean also wanted Alec Guinness to play Dr. Monygham, but the aged actor turned him down in a letter from 1989: "I believe I would be disastrous casting. The only thing in the part I might have done well is the crippled crab-like walk." As with "Empire of the Sun", Steven Spielberg came on board as producer with the backing of Warner Bros., but after several rewrites and disagreements on the script, he left the project and was replaced by Serge Silberman, a respected producer at Greenwich Film Productions.


title: David Lean

text: The "Nostromo" project involved several writers, including Christopher Hampton and Robert Bolt, but their work was abandoned. In the end, Lean decided to write the film himself with the assistance of Maggie Unsworth (wife of renowned cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth), with whom he had worked on the scripts for "Brief Encounter", "Great Expectations", "Oliver Twist", and "The Passionate Friends". Originally Lean considered filming in Mexico but later decided to film in London and Madrid, partly to secure O'Toole, who had insisted he would take part only if the film was shot close to home. "Nostromo" had a total budget of $46 million and was six weeks away from filming at the time of Lean's death from throat cancer. It was rumoured that fellow film director John Boorman would take over direction, but the production collapsed. "Nostromo" was finally adapted for the small screen with an unrelated BBC television mini-series in 1997.


title: David Lean

text: Lean was a long-term resident of Limehouse, East London. His home on Narrow Street is still owned by his family. His co-writer and producer, Norman Spencer, has said Lean was a "huge womaniser," and that "to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women". He was married six times, had one son, and at least two grandchildren—all from whom he was completely estranged—and was divorced five times. He was survived by his last wife Sandra Cooke, art dealer and co-author (with Barry Chattington) of


title: David Lean

text: Lean was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1953, and was knighted for his contributions and services to the arts in 1984. Lean received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990. In 2012, Lean was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover—celebrating the British cultural figures of his lifetime that he most admires.


title: David Lean

text: In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled its list of the Top 100 British films. Seven of Lean's films appeared on the list:


title: David Lean

text: In addition, on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of 100 Years...100 Movies, "Lawrence of Arabia" placed 5th, "The Bridge on the River Kwai" 13th, and "Doctor Zhivago" 39th. In the 2007 revised edition, "Lawrence of Arabia" placed 7th and "The Bridge on the River Kwai" placed 36th.


title: David Lean

text: With five wins out of six nominations, Lean directed more films that won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars than any other director, for "Great Expectations", "The Bridge on the River Kwai", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago" and "Ryan's Daughter"—the last nomination being for "A Passage to India".


title: David Lean

text: Lean died in Limehouse, London on April 16, 1991, at the age of 83. He was interred at Putney Vale Cemetery.


title: David Lean

text: As Lean himself pointed out, his films are often admired by fellow directors as a showcase of the filmmaker's art. According to Katharyn Crabbe, "[t]he rewards of watching a David Lean film are most often described in terms of his skillful use of cinematic conventions, his editing, his alertness to the ability of film to create effects." In "The Rough Guide to Film", Tom Charity writes:


title: David Lean

text: In his introduction to "David Lean: Interviews", Steven Organ claims that Lean "often straddl[ed] that fine line between commercialism and artistry. To view one of Lean's films is to see the complete spectrum of tools available to the filmmaker - and used to their fullest potential. Like his contemporaries (Michael Powell, Orson Welles, John Ford), Lean understood fully that telling a story cinematically requires several components: a quality script, precision editing, dramatic composition, and structured sound. Nothing was overlooked or neglected."


title: David Lean

text: Steven Ross has written that Lean's films "reveal a consistently tragic vision of the romantic sensibility attempting to reach beyond the constraints and restrictions of everyday life", and that they tend to feature "intimate stories of a closely-knit group of characters [whose] fates are indirectly but powerfully shaped by history-shaking events going on around them." He further observes that, in his work, "setting [is used] as a presence with as much dramatic and thematic form as any character in the film." Similarly, Lean biographer Gene D. Phillips writes that the director "saw in his style an attraction to characters who refuse to accept defeat, even when their most cherished hopes go unfulfilled. His protagonists seek to transform their lives, but often fail to do so. Pip in "Great Expectations", Colonel Nicholson in "The Bridge on the River Kwai", and T. E. Lawrence in "Lawrence of Arabia", among others, struggle against the limitations of their own personalities to achieve a level of existence that they deem higher or nobler."


title: David Lean

text: John Orr, author of "Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema", examines Lean in terms of "the stylised oscillation of romance and restraint that shapes so much of his work", as well as of "the intersection of culture and nature, where a story's momentous events are not only framed against landscape settings but also integrated into the very texture of the image that his camera produces." He argues that "Lean could have given us kitsch, syrupy imitations of landscape photography, but his staging and cutting blend so fluently that his evocation of the romantic sublime is linked, inextricably, to his "découpage" and sense of place."


title: David Lean

text: In 1991, shortly after Lean's death, Hugh Hudson wrote a tribute to the director in "Sight & Sound"; in it he asserts:


title: David Lean

text: Lean was notorious for his perfectionist approach to filmmaking; director Claude Chabrol stated that he and Lean were the only directors working at the time who were prepared to wait "forever" for the perfect sunset, but whereas Chabrol measured "forever" in terms of days, Lean did so in terms of months.


title: David Lean

text: Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese in particular are fans of Lean's epic films and claim him as one of their primary influences. Spielberg and Scorsese also helped in the 1989 restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia", which had been substantially altered both by the studio in theatrical release and in particular in its televised versions; the theatrical re-release greatly revived Lean's reputation.


title: David Lean

text: Several of the many other later directors who have acknowledged significant influence by Lean include Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Spike Lee, Sergio Leone, Sir John Boorman, Paul Thomas Anderson and Guillermo del Toro.


title: David Lean

text: John Woo once named "Lawrence of Arabia" among his top three films. More recently, Joe Wright ("Pride & Prejudice", "Atonement") has cited Lean's works, particularly "Doctor Zhivago", as an important influence on his work, as has director Christopher Nolan ("The Dark Knight Rises").


title: David Lean

text: The critical verdict was not unanimous, however. For example, David Thomson, writing about Lean in his "New Biographical Dictionary of Film", comments: "The New York Times" film critic Bosley Crowther dismissed "Lawrence of Arabia" as "a huge, thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit". Writing in "The Village Voice", Andrew Sarris remarked that "Lawrence" was "simply another expensive mirage, dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal ... on the whole I find it hatefully calculating and condescending".


title: Albion

text: Albion is an alternative name for Great Britain. The oldest attestation of the toponym comes from the Greek language. It is sometimes used poetically and generally to refer to the island, but is less common than 'Britain' today. The name for Scotland in most of the Celtic languages is related to Albion: "Alba" in Scottish Gaelic, "Albain" (genitive "Alban") in Irish, "Nalbin" in Manx and "Alban" in Welsh and Cornish. These names were later Latinised as "Albania" and Anglicised as "Albany", which were once alternative names for Scotland.


title: Albion

text: "New Albion" and "Albionoria" ("Albion of the North") were briefly suggested as names of Canada during the period of the Canadian Confederation. Sir Francis Drake gave the name New Albion to what is now California when he landed there in 1579.


title: Albion

text: The toponym is thought to derive from the Greek word , Latinised as (genitive ). It was seen in the Proto-Celtic nasal stem * (oblique *) and survived in Old Irish as (genitive ). The name originally referred to Britain as a whole, but was later restricted to Caledonia (giving the modern Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland: ).


title: Albion

text: The root ' is also found in Gaulish and Galatian 'world' and Welsh (Old Welsh 'earth, world, land, country, district'). It may be related to other European and Mediterranean toponyms such as "Alpes", "Albania" or the river god Alpheus (originally 'whitish'). It has two possible etymologies: either from the Proto-Indo-European word *' 'white' (cf. Ancient Greek , Latin  ), or from *"alb-" 'hill'.


title: Albion

text: The derivation from a word for 'white' is thought to be perhaps in reference to the white southern shores of the island – the white Cliffs of Dover, visible from mainland Europe and a landmark at the narrowest crossing point. On the other hand, Celtic linguist Xavier Delamarre argued that it originally meant 'the world above, the visible world', in opposition to 'the world below', i.e. the underworld.


title: Albion

text: Judging from Avienius' "Ora Maritima", for which it is considered to have served as a source, the "Massaliote Periplus" (originally written in the 6th century BC, translated by Avienus at the end of the 4th century AD), does not use the name "Britannia"; instead it speaks of "nēsos Iernōn kai Albiōnōn" "the islands of the Iernians and the Albiones". Likewise, Pytheas (c. 320 BC), as directly or indirectly quoted in the surviving excerpts of his works in later writers, speaks of "Albiōn and Iernē" (Britain and Ireland). Pytheas's grasp of the ("nēsos Prettanikē", "Prettanic island") is somewhat blurry, and appears to include anything he considers a western island, including "Thule".


title: Albion

text: The name "Albion" was used by Isidore of Charax (1st century BC – 1st century AD) and subsequently by many classical writers. By the 1st century AD, the name refers unequivocally to Great Britain. But this "enigmatic name for Britain, revived much later by Romantic poets like William Blake, did not remain popular among Greek writers. It was soon replaced by ("Prettanía") and ("Brettanía" 'Britain'), ("Brettanós" 'Briton'), and ("Brettanikós", meaning the adjective British). From these words the Romans derived the Latin forms Britannia, Britannus, and Britannicus respectively".


title: Albion

text: In his 2nd century "Geography", Ptolemy uses the name ("Alouiōn", "Albion") instead of the Roman name "Britannia", possibly following the commentaries of Marinus of Tyre. He calls both Albion and Ierne νῆσοι Βρεττανικαὶ ("nēsoi Brettanikai", "British Isles").


title: Albion

text: In 930, the English king Æthelstan used the title "Rex et primicerius totius Albionis regni" ("King and chief of the whole realm of Albion"). His nephew, Edgar the Peaceful, styled himself "Totius Albionis imperator augustus" "Augustus Emperor of all Albion" in 970.


title: Albion

text: A legend exists in various forms that giants were either the original inhabitants, or the founders of the land named Albion.


title: Albion

text: According to the 12th-century "Historia Regum Britanniae" ("The History of The Kings of Britain") by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the exiled Brutus of Troy was told by the goddess Diana:


title: Albion

text: After many adventures, Brutus and his fellow Trojans escape from Gaul and "set sail with a fair wind towards the promised island".


title: Albion

text: "The island was then called Albion, and inhabited by none but a few giants. Notwithstanding this, the pleasant situation of the places, the plenty of rivers abounding with fish, and the engaging prospect of its woods, made Brutus and his company very desirous to fix their habitation in it." After dividing up the island between themselves "at last Brutus called the island after his own name Britain, and his companions Britons; for by these means he desired to perpetuate the memory of his name". Geoffrey goes on to recount how the last of the giants are defeated, the largest one called Goëmagot is flung over a cliff by Corineus.


title: Albion

text: Later, in the 14th century, a more elaborate tale was developed, claiming that Albina and her sisters founded Albion and procreated there a race of giants. The "Albina story" survives in several forms, including the octosyllabic Anglo-Norman poem "Des grantz geanz" dating to 1300–1334. According to the poem, in the 3970th year of the creation of the world, a king of Greece married his thirty daughters into royalty, but the haughty brides colluded to eliminate their husbands so they would be subservient to no one. The youngest would not be party to the crime and divulged the plot, so the other princesses were confined to an unsteerable rudderless ship and set adrift, and after three days reached an uninhabited land later to be known as "Britain". The eldest daughter Albina () was the first to step ashore and lay claim to the land, naming it after herself. At first, the women gathered acorns and fruits, but once they learned to hunt and obtain meat, it aroused their lecherous desires. As no other humans inhabited the land, they mated with evil spirits called "incubi", and subsequently with the sons they begot, engendering a race of giants. These giants are evidenced by huge bones which are unearthed. Brutus arrived 260 years after Albina, 1136 before the birth of Christ, but by then there were only 24 giants left, due to inner strife. As with Geoffrey of Monmouth's version, Brutus's band subsequently overtake the land, defeating Gogmagog in the process.


title: Albion

text: The octosyllabic poem appears as a prologue to 16 out of 26 manuscripts of the Short Version of the Anglo-Norman prose "Brut", which derives from Wace. Octosyllabic is not the only form the Anglo-Norman "Des Grantz Geanz", there are five forms, the others being: the alexandrine, prose, short verse, and short prose versions. The Latin adaptation of the Albina story, "De Origine Gigantum", appeared soon later, in the 1330s. It has been edited by Carey & Crick (1995), and translated by Ruth Evans (1998).


title: Albion

text: A variant tale occurs in the Middle English prose "Brut" (Brie ed., "The Brut or the Chronicles of England" 1906–1908) of the 14th century, an English rendition of the Anglo-Norman "Brut" deriving from Wace. In the Prolog of this chronicle, it was King "Dioclician" of "Surrey" (Syria), who had 33 daughters, the eldest being called "Albyne". The princesses are all banished to Albion after plotting to murder their husbands, where they couple with the local demons; their offspring became a race of giants. The chronicle asserts that during the voyage Albyne entrusted the fate of the sisters to "Appolyn," which was the god of their faith. The Syrian king who was her father sounds much like a Roman emperor, though Diocletian (3rd century) would be anachronistic, and Holinshed explains this as a bungling of the legend of Danaus and his fifty daughters who founded Argos.


title: Albion

text: Because Geoffrey of Monmouth's work was regarded as fact until the late 17th century, the story appears in most early histories of Britain. Wace, Layamon, Raphael Holinshed, William Camden and John Milton repeat the legend and it appears in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene".


title: Albion

text: William Blake's poems "Milton" and "Jerusalem" feature Albion as an archetypal giant representing humanity.


title: Albion

text: In 2010, artist Mark Sheeky donated the 2008 painting "Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone" to the Grosvenor Museum collection.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union—Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. There were also ordinary criminals and sexual "deviants". All prisoners worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,545 deaths at Buchenwald of the 280,000 prisoners who passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps. The camp gained notoriety when it was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945; Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of its subcamps.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: From August 1945 to March 1950, the camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, NKVD special camp Nr. 2, where 28,455 prisoners were held and 7,113 of whom died. Today the remains of Buchenwald serve as a memorial and permanent exhibition and museum.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: The "Schutzstaffel" (SS) established Buchenwald concentration camp at the beginning of July 1937. The camp was to be named , after the hill in Thuringia upon whose north slope the camp was established. The proposed name was deemed inappropriate because it carried associations with several important figures in German culture, especially Enlightenment writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who was living in Weimar. Instead the camp was to be named Buchenwald, in reference to the beech forest in the area. However, Holocaust researcher wrote that SS leaders chose the site of the camp precisely to erase the cultural legacy of the area. After the area of the camp was cleared of trees, only one large oak remained, supposedly one of Goethe's Oaks.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: The camp, designed to hold 8,000 prisoners, was intended to replace several smaller concentration camps nearby, including , Sachsenburg, and Lichtenburg. Compared to these camps, Buchenwald had a greater potential to profit the SS because the nearby clay deposits could be made into bricks by the forced labor of prisoners. The first prisoners arrived on 15 July 1937, and had to clear the area of trees and build the camp's structures. By September, the population had risen to 2,400 following transfers from Bad Sulza, Sachsenburg, and Lichtenburg.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: On the camp's main gate, the motto "Jedem das Seine" (English: "To each his own"), was inscribed. The SS interpreted this to mean the "master race" had a right to humiliate and destroy others. It was designed by Buchenwald prisoner and Bauhaus architect Franz Ehrlich, who used a Bauhaus typeface for it, even though Bauhaus was seen as degenerate art by the National Socialists and was prohibited. This defiance however went unnoticed by the SS.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Buchenwald's first commandant was SS-"Obersturmbannführer" Karl-Otto Koch, who ran the camp from 1 August 1937 to July 1941. His second wife, Ilse Koch, became notorious as "Die Hexe von Buchenwald" ("the witch of Buchenwald") for her cruelty and brutality. In February 1940 Koch had an indoor riding hall built by the prisoners who died by the dozen due to the harsh conditions of the construction site. The hall was built inside the camp, near the canteen, so that oftentimes Ilse Koch could be seen riding in the morning to the beat of the prisoner orchestra. Koch himself was eventually imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Nazi authorities for incitement to murder. The charges were lodged by Prince Waldeck and Dr. Morgen, to which were later added charges of corruption, embezzlement, black market dealings, and exploitation of the camp workers for personal gain. Other camp officials were charged, including Ilse Koch. The trial resulted in Karl Koch being sentenced to death for disgracing both himself and the SS; he was executed by firing squad on 5 April 1945, one week before American troops arrived. Ilse Koch was sentenced to a term of four years' imprisonment after the war. Her sentence was reduced to two years and she was set free. She was subsequently arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment by the post-war German authorities; she committed suicide in Aichach (Bavaria) prison in September 1967. The second commandant of the camp, between 1942 and 1945, was Hermann Pister (1942–1945). He was tried in 1947 (Dachau Trials) and sentenced to death, but on 28 September 1948 he died in Landsberg Prison of a heart attack before the sentence could be carried out.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: The number of women held in Buchenwald was somewhere between 500 and 1,000. The first female inmates were twenty political prisoners who were accompanied by a female SS guard ("Aufseherin"); these women were brought to Buchenwald from Ravensbrück in 1941 and forced into sexual slavery at the camp's brothel. The SS later fired the SS woman on duty in the brothel for corruption; her position was taken over by "brothel mothers" as ordered by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: The majority of women prisoners, however, arrived in 1944 and 1945 from other camps, mainly Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen Belsen. Only one barracks was set aside for them; this was overseen by the female block leader ("Blockführerin") Franziska Hoengesberg, who came from Essen when it was evacuated. All the women prisoners were later shipped out to one of Buchenwald's many female satellite camps in Sömmerda, Buttelstedt, Mühlhausen, Gotha, Gelsenkirchen, Essen, Lippstadt, Weimar, Magdeburg, and Penig, to name a few. No female guards were permanently stationed at Buchenwald.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Ilse Koch served as head supervisor ("Oberaufseherin") of 22 other female guards and hundreds of women prisoners in the main camp. More than 530 women served as guards in the vast Buchenwald system of subcamps and external commands across Germany. Only 22 women served/trained in Buchenwald, compared to over 15,500 men.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: About 136 subcamps and satellite commandos belonged to Buchenwald concentration camp. The first subcamps of Buchenwald were established in 1941 so that the prisoners could work in nearby SS industries.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: In 1942, the SS began to use its forced labor supply for armaments production. Because it was more economical to rent out prisoners to private firms, subcamps were set up near factories which had a demand for prisoner labor. Private firms paid the SS between 4 and 6 Reichsmarks per day per prisoner, resulting in an estimated 95,758,843 Reichsmarks in revenue for the SS between June 1943 and February 1945. So the subcamps of Buchenwald were mainly used for armament production and other fabrications and are considered labour camps. Conditions were worse than at the main camp, with prisoners provided insufficient food and inadequate shelter.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Although it was highly unusual for German authorities to send Western Allied POWs to concentration camps, Buchenwald held a group of 168 aviators for two months. These men were from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica. They all arrived at Buchenwald on 20 August 1944.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: All these airmen were in aircraft that had crashed in occupied France. Two explanations are given for them being sent to a concentration camp: first, that they had managed to make contact with the French Resistance, some were disguised as civilians, and they were carrying false papers when caught; they were therefore categorized by the Germans as spies, which meant their rights under the Geneva Convention were not respected. The second explanation is that they had been categorised as "Terrorflieger" ("terror aviators"). The aviators were initially held in Gestapo prisons and headquarters in France. In April or August 1944, they and other Gestapo prisoners were packed into covered goods wagons (US: boxcars) and sent to Buchenwald. The journey took five days, during which they received very little food or water.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: A primary cause of death was illness due to harsh camp conditions, with starvation—and its consequent illnesses—prevalent. Malnourished and suffering from disease, many were literally "worked to death" under the "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" policy (extermination through labor), as inmates only had the choice between slave labor or inevitable execution. Many inmates died as a result of human experimentation or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS guards. Other prisoners were simply murdered, primarily by shooting and hanging.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was an SS-"Hauptscharführer" who served as a guard at the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. Known as the "Hangman of Buchenwald", he was considered a depraved sadist who reportedly ordered Otto Neururer and Mathias Spanlang, two Austrian priests, to be crucified upside-down. Sommer was especially infamous for hanging prisoners from trees by their wrists, which had been tied behind their backs (a torture technique known as strappado) in the "singing forest", so named because of the screams which emanated from this wooded area.


title: Buchenwald concentration camp

text: Summary executions of Soviet POWs were also carried out at Buchenwald. At least 1,000 men were selected in 1941–42 by a task force of three Dresden Gestapo officers and sent to the camp for immediate liquidation by a gunshot to the back of the neck, the infamous "Genickschuss".