The Great British Art Tour quiz: a 17th-century selfie, a scallop and a small dog
As museums and galleries finally reopen, our Great British Art Tour comes to an end with a quiz to celebrate some of our favourite discoveries from the series. Have you been paying attention?
Each of these works, and the answers to our questions, has featured in our series that explored highlights from public collections across the country while art galleries and museums were closed. You can read the four-month series here, produced in collaboration with Art UK, which brings the nation’s art together on one digital platform and tells the stories behind the art. If you spot any mistakes, or want to give us feedback – good or bad – please get in touch.
Filters and flattering angles for selfies are not a 21st-century invention. What was Godfried Schalcken hoping to achieve with this large work of self-promotion that can be seen in Leamington Spa’s Art Gallery ?
Election to England’s Royal Academy
The position of official portrait painter at the court of King William and Queen Mary
Marriage to heiress Lady Caroline Symmington, 23 years his junior
The top prize in a Europe-wide competition judging skill in mastery of chiaroscuro
Thomas Paine, writer and political activist, is immortalised in bronze in Thetford, the town of his birth, holding his 1791 book, the Rights of Man. What is wrong with the statue?
The book’s title is misspelt as the Rites of Man
Paine lost two fingers from his right hand in an accident as a child but the sculptor has given him a full set of digits
The book is held upside down
The year of his death on the plinth is wrong, by a year
Lady Montagu's portrait can be seen in Sheffield’s Museum. A remarkable woman, she is celebrated today as a medical pioneer. Why?
She was the first person to make the connection between sugar and obesity
Disguised as a man, she trained to be a surgeon at a time when women were not allowed to study medicine
She helped introduce vaccination in England, having encountered the practice in Turkey
Her oldest son was born deaf and she invented the world’s first wearable hearing aid
Maggi Hambling’s controversial sculpture on Aldeburgh beach pays tribute to which British composer?
Henry Purcell
Michael Tippett
Ethyl Smyth
Benjamin Britten
Barnard Castle might have found itself the innocent butt of many jokes last summer, but here’s a real reason to visit it – the Bowes Museum, named after its founders, John and Josephine (who painted this work). Where did the two meet?
At the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, where she was an actor
She was a parlourmaid working for John’s mother and stepfather in Streatlam Castle
They were both visiting London’s National Gallery and struck up conversation in front of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage
She was employed to create a series of portraits of John’s thoroughbred racehorses
Lubaina Himid’s Le Rodeur: The Pulley, is part of the government’s art collection. Where does it currently hang?
In the British Embassy in Washington
In Boris Johnson’s newly refurbished guest WC
In the Speaker’s receiving room at the House of Lords
In Oliver Dowden’s Whitehall office
This is Mrs Sage. Why was she famous?
She was one of London’s most celebrated actresses, especially feted for her Cleopatra
She was one of the first English female aerial travellers – taking a trip in Vincenzo Lunardi’s hot air balloon in 1785
The mistress of William Pitt the Younger, the scandal of their association helped bring down a government
She campaigned for equal access to education, and was the first headmistress of Greater Manchester’s first girls-only school
Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London ’67 captures the moment Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser were in police custody on their way to court. Why had they been arrested?
On suspicion of being in charge of a vehicle while above the legal limit or unfit through drink
On suspicion of bringing an illegal firearm into the country – Fraser had bought an antique 19th-century rifle at an auction in Paris as a present for Jagger
For trespass – the two had scaled an eight-foot wall to get into the grounds of Buckingham Palace
On suspicion of possessing drugs after a party at Keith Richards’s farmhouse
This Oxford college’s portrait of Queen Charlotte Sophia, wife of George III, became a focus of interest earlier this year. Why?
Ongoing speculation about the Queen’s black ancestry was fuelled by Netflix’s Bridgerton in which she is played by Guyanese-British actor Golda Rosheuvel
Restoration work revealed that the lace shawl was only added to the painting in the 1830s to preserve the Queen’s modesty
On loan in the US for a touring exhibition, it was stolen from a New York gallery in 2019 but found undamaged in Brooklyn’s Prospect park in January this year
Taylor Swift – who had seen the work while visiting the alma mater of her then boyfriend Tom Hiddleston – wrote a song about it
“[She] is going deep down into the dungeon, like she’s going into the primordial soup of creativity or the cerebral cortex of the brain.” Artist Tom Hammick – resident at Glyndebourne opera house – on his painting Underworld (An Escape), but which opera inspired his work?
Fidelio (Beethoven)
Turandot (Puccini)
Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)
Rinaldo (Handel)
This grand three-panel painting – 3.5m wide and 2.5m high – was commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford to mark her achievements and celebrate her family, particularly its women. But why is Lady Anne only visible in two of the panels?
The central panel features her mother, pregnant, with the future Lady Anne
She died before its completion so the artist depicted her surviving family in the central panel
The work, along with the estate, was inherited by her nephew who had her face in the central panel replaced with that of his own mother
As a child her parents dressed her in boys’ clothes – the smaller of the children is in fact Lady Anne
Elisabeth Frink’s masked male figure (one of a series of four) took inspiration from the Riace Warriors, two life-size Greek bronzes found in 1972 and dated to around 500BC. Where were the bronzes found?
In a basement store room of a Sicilian museum, where they had been forgotten about for over a century
A young man snorkelling off the south-east coast of Italy noticed an arm of one of them emerging from the sea bed
They had been in the garden of a large villa on the outskirts of Pompeii, buried for centuries by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius under a six-metre deep layer of ash and pumice stones
They guarded the temple of Artemis in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus on modern-day Turkey’s west coast
This tender portrait of Edith Ailsa Craig and her cat was painted by her partner Clare Atwood. Who made up the third (human) member of their household?
Actor Ellen Terry
Painter Vanessa Bell
Novelist Radclyffe Hall
Playwright Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall)
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel – the second bestselling book of the 19th century – has been the basis for films, cartoons and stage plays. But what unlikely shape did the story take here, in this work now part of the Whitworth Art Gallery’s collection?
A children’s comic
Wallpaper
Furnishing fabric
Serialised for a cartoon strip in the Manchester Guardian
This terrier in Battersea Park, unveiled in 1985, replaces a previous Edwardian memorial that had at one point to be given 24-hour police protection. Why?
It became widely – and falsely – rumoured that the sculptor had given the dog a heart of pure gold and there were many attempts to steal it
The original terrier statue was put in the park by a local wealthy landlord whose brutal and inhumane treatment of his tenants meant that the sculpture was repeatedly vandalised
The competition to create a piece for the London park that resulted in this work’s commission was open only to men and it became a focus of Suffragette protests
With an inscription “Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death” the original commemorated dogs killed by vivisection, and became the focus of battles between medical students and anti-vivisectionists
13 and above.
Congratulations. You have clearly been an assiduous reader of the Great British Art Tour, for which we thank you. That, or you are a lucky guesser. You get to journey from Lands End to John O'Groats.
9 and above.
Impressive... your UK art knowledge carries you from Land's End to Londonderry
0 and above.
We suspect you haven't been getting your daily lockdown dose of art. Your UK art knowledge takes you only from Land's End to Lynmouth
5 and above.
Room for improvement ...your UK art knowledge takes you from Land's End to Leicester
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