A friend asked me to answer this question: Where was Ruisdael's father born?, using the article: Ruisdael's work from c. 1646 to the early 1650s, when he was living in Haarlem, is characterised by simple motifs and careful and laborious study of nature: dunes, woods, and atmospheric effects. By applying heavier paint than his predecessors, Ruisdael gave his foliage a rich quality, conveying a sense of sap flowing through branches and leaves. His accurate rendering of trees was unprecedented at the time: the genera of his trees are the first to be unequivocally recognisable by modern-day botanists. His early sketches introduce motifs that would return in all his work: a sense of spaciousness and luminosity, and an airy atmosphere achieved through pointillist-like touches of chalk. Most of his thirty black chalk sketches that survive date from this period.An exemplar of Ruisdael's early style is Dune Landscape, one of the earliest works, dated 1646. It breaks with the classic Dutch tradition of depicting broad views of dunes that include houses and trees flanked by distant vistas. Instead, Ruisdael places tree-covered dunes prominently at centre stage, with a cloudscape concentrating strong light on a sandy path. The resulting heroic effect is enhanced by the large size of the canvas, "so unexpected in the work of an inexperienced painter" according to Irina Sokolova, curator at the Hermitage Museum. The art historian Hofstede de Groot said of Dune Landscape: "It is hardly credible that it should be the work of a boy of seventeen". Ruisdael's first panoramic landscape, View of Naarden with the Church at Muiderberg in the Distance, dates from 1647. The theme of an overwhelming sky and a distant town, in this case the birthplace of his father, is one he returned to in his later years.For unknown reasons, Ruisdael almost entirely stopped dating his work from 1653. Only five works from the 1660s have a, partially obscured, year next to his signature; none from the 1670s and 1680s have a date. Dating subsequent work has therefore been largely based on detective work and speculation.All thirteen known Ruisdael..., what would be the answer ?
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Answer: Naarden


A friend asked me to answer this question: What is the full name of the person who flagged down a lorry to ask to borrow a jack?, using the article: Phillip Bellamy, a leading barrister, tells his wife, psychiatrist Anne Dyson, about his most recent case defending a young man, Harry Jukes, who has apparently shot a policeman on a country road and been found by police still holding the gun. Bellamy is convinced of his guilt but Anne is less sure. Much of her practice is with troubled young people and she feels there is more to the story than the police evidence. Anne visits Harry in prison. He is depressed and distrustful but finally agrees to talk to her. Harry's story is that he took a Bentley Continental car to impress a girl but when she went off with another boy decided to take the car for a spin before dumping it. Swerving to avoid another car he burst a tyre but could not find any tools in the boot to change the wheel. He asked the driver of a car parked in the copse nearby for help but he was occupied with his girl and refused. Harry was spotted by a policeman on a bike who stopped to help. He flagged down a lorry to ask to borrow a jack. The lorry stopped but the passenger immediately produced a gun and shot the policeman. Harry managed to grab the gun off the killer as the lorry drove away. Shortly after, a police car arrived and Harry was arrested. Anne believes Harry's story and tries to persuade Bellamy of Harry's innocence. She interviews Harry several times and begins to follow up some aspects of his story. She visits the gang that Harry hung out with in a café in Battersea and they agree to help her by trying to find the couple in the parked car. She also visits Taplow, the man whose car was stolen, several times and finds his account unconvincing. One of the boys from the cafe agrees to take a job at Taplow's frozen food depot to do some investigating there., what would be the answer ?
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Answer: Harry Jukes


A friend asked me to answer this question: What are the two names of the work that was well received in Gothenburg in 1860?, using the article: Dissatisfied with his first large-scale orchestral work, the D major Overture of 1848, Smetana studied passages from Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber and Berlioz before producing his Triumphal Symphony of 1853. Though this is dismissed by Rosa Newmarch as "an epithalamium for a Habsburg Prince", Smetana's biographer Brian Large identifies much in the piece that characterises the composer's more mature works. Despite the symphony's rejection by the Court and the lukewarm reception on its premiere, Smetana did not abandon the work. It was well received in Gothenburg in 1860, and a revised version was performed in Prague in 1882, without the "triumphal" tag, under Adolf Čech. The piece is now sometimes called the Festive Symphony. Smetana's visit to Liszt at Weimar in the summer of 1857, where he heard the latter's Faust Symphony and Die Ideale, caused a material reorientation of Smetana's orchestral music. These works gave Smetana answers to many compositional problems relating to the structure of orchestral music, and suggested a means for expressing literary subjects by a synthesis between music and text, rather than by simple musical illustration. These insights enabled Smetana to write the three Gothenburg symphonic poems, (Richard III, Wallenstein's Camp and Hakon Jarl), works that transformed Smetana from a composer primarily of salon pieces to a modern neo-Romantic, capable of handling large-scale forces and demonstrating the latest musical concepts. From 1862 Smetana was largely occupied with opera and, apart from a few short pieces, did not return to purely orchestral music before beginning Má vlast in 1872. In his introduction to the Collected Edition Score, František Bartol brackets Má vlast with the opera Libuše as "direct symbols of [the] consummating national struggle". Má vlast is the first of Smetana's mature large-scale works that is independent of words, and its musical ideas are bolder than anything he had tried before. To musicologist John Clapham, the cycle presents "a cross-section of Czech..., what would be the answer ?
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Answer:
Festive Symphony