The Great British Art Tour quiz: a 17th-century selfie, a scallop and a small dog

The Great British Art Tour … from Lady Montagu to Mick Jagger via ancient warriors and the Underworld Composite: GBAT

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.

1. 

   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 ?

   1. Election to England’s Royal Academy

   2. The position of official portrait painter at the court of King William and Queen Mary

   3. Marriage to heiress Lady Caroline Symmington, 23 years his junior

   4. The top prize in a Europe-wide competition judging skill in mastery of chiaroscuro

2. 

   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?

   1. The book’s title is misspelt as the Rites of Man

   2. 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

   3. The book is held upside down

   4. The year of his death on the plinth is wrong, by a year

3. 

   Lady Montagu's portrait can be seen in Sheffield’s Museum. A remarkable woman, she is celebrated today as a medical pioneer. Why?

   1. She was the first person to make the connection between sugar and obesity

   2. Disguised as a man, she trained to be a surgeon at a time when women were not allowed to study medicine

   3. She helped introduce vaccination in England, having encountered the practice in Turkey

   4. Her oldest son was born deaf and she invented the world’s first wearable hearing aid

4. 

   Maggi Hambling’s controversial sculpture on Aldeburgh beach pays tribute to which British composer?

   1. Henry Purcell

   2. Michael Tippett

   3. Ethyl Smyth

   4. Benjamin Britten

5. 

   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?

   1. At the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, where she was an actor

   2. She was a parlourmaid working for John’s mother and stepfather in Streatlam Castle

   3. They were both visiting London’s National Gallery and struck up conversation in front of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage

   4. She was employed to create a series of portraits of John’s thoroughbred racehorses

6. 

   Lubaina Himid’s Le Rodeur: The Pulley, is part of the government’s art collection. Where does it currently hang?

   1. In the British Embassy in Washington

   2. In Boris Johnson’s newly refurbished guest WC

   3. In the Speaker’s receiving room at the House of Lords

   4. In Oliver Dowden’s Whitehall office

7. 

   This is Mrs Sage. Why was she famous?

   1. She was one of London’s most celebrated actresses, especially feted for her Cleopatra

   2. She was one of the first English female aerial travellers – taking a trip in Vincenzo Lunardi’s hot air balloon in 1785

   3. The mistress of William Pitt the Younger, the scandal of their association helped bring down a government

   4. She campaigned for equal access to education, and was the first headmistress of Greater Manchester’s first girls-only school

8. 

   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?

   1. On suspicion of being in charge of a vehicle while above the legal limit or unfit through drink

   2. 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

   3. For trespass – the two had scaled an eight-foot wall to get into the grounds of Buckingham Palace

   4. On suspicion of possessing drugs after a party at Keith Richards’s farmhouse

9. 

   This Oxford college’s portrait of Queen Charlotte Sophia, wife of George III, became a focus of interest earlier this year. Why?

   1. 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

   2. Restoration work revealed that the lace shawl was only added to the painting in the 1830s to preserve the Queen’s modesty

   3. 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

   4. Taylor Swift – who had seen the work while visiting the alma mater of her then boyfriend Tom Hiddleston – wrote a song about it

10. 

    “[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?

    1. Fidelio (Beethoven)

    2. Turandot (Puccini)

    3. Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)

    4. Rinaldo (Handel)

11. 

    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?

    1. The central panel features her mother, pregnant, with the future Lady Anne

    2. She died before its completion so the artist depicted her surviving family in the central panel

    3. 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

    4. As a child her parents dressed her in boys’ clothes – the smaller of the children is in fact Lady Anne

12. 

    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?

    1. In a basement store room of a Sicilian museum, where they had been forgotten about for over a century

    2. A young man snorkelling off the south-east coast of Italy noticed an arm of one of them emerging from the sea bed

    3. 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

    4. They guarded the temple of Artemis in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus on modern-day Turkey’s west coast

13. 

    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?

    1. Actor Ellen Terry

    2. Painter Vanessa Bell

    3. Novelist Radclyffe Hall

    4. Playwright Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall)

14. 

    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?

    1. A children’s comic

    2. Wallpaper

    3. Furnishing fabric

    4. Serialised for a cartoon strip in the Manchester Guardian

15. 

    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?

    1. 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

    2. 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

    3. 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

    4. 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

Solutions

1:B - Schalcken’s self-portrait didn’t achieve his desired results. Although he was commissioned to paint the portrait of King William III in his signature candlelit style, the artist never became the official royal portraitist. Possibly because, according to Horace Walpole, the King held the candle until “the tallow (wax) ran down upon his fingers”. Schalcken returned to the Dutch Republic in 1698, while Sir Godfrey Kneller remained in the esteemed position and was created a baronet by George I in 1715. , 2:C - In his left hand, Paine holds an upside-down copy of the Rights of Man, which had controversially supported the French Revolution. In the mid-1770s, Paine became famous for his sensational political pamphlet Common Sense, which supported American independence, rendering him a traitor against the British. Nevertheless, posthumously he has been remembered favourably; this Norfolk statue was erected in homage to the revolutionary in 1964. , 3:C - Although Edward Jenner is credited with the smallpox vaccine, it was Montagu who introduced the idea to Britain. While her husband served as British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, she witnessed the healthy-looking locals using the practice of inoculation. Montagu had almost died from the disease as a young woman, so had both her children inoculated (neither contracted the disease). Back in Britain, she advocated the practice and persuaded Caroline, Princess of Wales to receive the treatment. , 4:D - Created in 2003, Hambling’s monumental Scallop: A Conversation with the Sea pays homage to Benjamin Britten, who lived in Aldeburgh with his partner Peter Pears from the late 1940s until Britten’s death in 1976. Bearing the words, “I hear those voices that will not be drowned”, the sculpture references Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, and its beach location commemorates Britten’s daily afternoon walks along the Suffolk coast. The statue remains as loved as it is detested., 5:A - Before she captured the heart of John Bowes, Joséphine had been a celebrated French actor with the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. The couple married in 1852, and John gifted her the Château du Barry, which they later sold to fund the creation of the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. A woman of many talents, Joséphine was also a landscape and still life painter and the creator of this work (she possibly featured herself as the solitary female figure). , 6:D - This work hangs in the office of Oliver Dowden and was acquired by the Government Art Collection in 2017, the same year Himid won the Turner prize. The work forms part of a series titled "Le Rodeur", referencing the tragic 1819 journey of a French slave ship. Due to an outbreak of illness, 36 enslaved west Africans were thrown overboard so that their "owners" could claim the insurance money. This series reinserts black narratives into both history and contemporary culture., 7:B - Letitia Ann Sage became a celebrity after becoming “the first English female aerial traveller”. Lunardi invited her to join his balloon ascent from St George’s Fields in London, and she later recorded she had been “infinitely better pleased with my excursion, than I ever was at any former event of my life”. , 8:D - In February 1967, Jagger and Fraser were given heavy sentences for drug possession after a party at Richard’s farmhouse in Sussex. Hamilton’s pop art-inspired portrayal of the pair in a police van reflected the artist’s disdain for the punitive legal stance that had failed to acknowledge “self-abuse with drugs”. Hamilton’s screenprints appropriated paparazzi photographs from the Daily Mail to comment on sensationalist reports in the media. , 9:A - It has long been speculated that Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, had black ancestry. The theory can be traced back to JA Roger’s text of 1940, claiming that the Queen’s Portugese lineage also came from black Africans. , 10:A - Hammick’s work was inspired by Beethoven’s ​opera Fidelio​, which premiered in 1805 in Vienna. The female protagonist, Leonore, disguises herself as a man to take a job at a prison and rescue her husband Florestan, a political prisoner held in the deepest dungeon. Inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints and Renaissance predella panels, Hammick’s visual rendition brings the story to life. As Glyndebourne’s associate artist, Hammick will exhibit his dreamlike works inspired by music later this year. , 11:A - To the left is Anne aged 15, surrounded by objects illustrating her education and vast accomplishments. The right-hand canvas is a celebration of her finally taking possession of her long-awaited inheritance at the age of 56, when this work was made., 12:B - In 1972, Stefano Mariottini discovered two life-size Greek bronzes in the sea off the Italian coast near Riace, hence the name "Riace Warriors". The standing figures dated to 500BC sparked the imagination of sculptor Elisabeth Frink, who had long been preoccupied with the male figure in her art. In her recreation of the statues, she painted the faces – a new departure for her – as a way of merging the past with the present. , 13:D - The theatre director Craig – the daughter of Ellen Terry, painter Atwood and playwright Christabel Marshall (who used the pseudonym Christopher St John) lived together in a ménage à trois at Priest’s House, in the grounds of the 16th-century property Smallhythe Place in Kent. The three women hosted lively creative and theatrical events, attracting notable intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Radclyffe Hall., 14:B - The wallpaper was made by the firm Heywood, Higginbottom, Smith and Company and printed in Manchester circa 1853. Wallpapers like this were printed cheaply and intended for display in public spaces such as inns or clubs where the contents could be discussed. This roll, capturing fragments of the story found in Uncle Tom's Cabin, was once owned by Edna Greenwood, a prolific collector of American folk art from the 18th and 19th centuries. , 15:D - The 1985 sculpture by Nicola Hicks is a memorial to a former statue of a dog by Joseph Whitehead, which sparked the “Brown Dog affair” (1903–1910), in which clashes between anti-vivisectionists, medical students and others resulted in a famous libel trial that divided the country. The original statue was ultimately removed by police to quell the civil unrest; over seven decades later, Hicks’ statue reminds us of this moment in history and the original statue’s message against animal cruelty.

Scores

1. 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.

2. 9 and above.

   Impressive... your UK art knowledge carries you from Land's End to Londonderry

3. 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

4. 5 and above.

   Room for improvement ...your UK art knowledge takes you from Land's End to Leicester

Image credits

1. Self Portrait by Candlelight, 1695, Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706)Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, photo: Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum
2. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), 1964, gilded bronze statue by Charles Thomas Wheeler (1892–1974) photo: Robert H Taylor / Art UK
3. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), c.1718, Jonathan Richardson the elder (1667–1745), photo: Museums Sheffield
4. Scallop: A Conversation with the Sea, 2003, heat treated stainless steel sculpture, Sam and Dennis Pegg and Maggi Hambling (b.1945) © the artist / Bridgeman Images. Photo: Tony Wooderson / Art UK
5. The Château du Barry at Louveciennes, France, c.1860–1862, Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), photo: The Bowes Museum
6. Le Rodeur: The Pulley,Lubaina Himid (b.1954), Government Art Collection © the artist. Photo: Government Art Collection
7. Mrs Sage (active 1773–1817), 1785, unknown artist, Science Museum photo: Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library
8. Swingeing London ‘67, 1967–1968, oil & relief silkscreen on photo & board, Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), © estate of Richard Hamilton. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
9. Queen Charlotte Sophia, c.1784, oil on canvas, Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), Photo: St John’s College, University of Oxford
10. Underworld (An Escape) (edition of 9), 2020,Tom Hammick (b.1963), Glyndebourne Archive Collection © Tom Hammick. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: Tom Hammick
11. The Great Picture, 1646, Jan van Belcamp (c.1610–1653) (attributed to) Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Photo: Lakeland Arts Trust
12. Riace III, 1986, Elisabeth Frink (1930–1993), The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art © The Executors of the Frink Estate and Archive. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art
13. Edith Ailsa Craig (1869–1947), 1943 Clare Atwood (1866–1962), National Trust, Smallhythe Place © the artist’s estate. Photo: National Trust Images
14. Uncle Tom’s Cabin wallpaper, c.1853, Heywood, Higginbottom, Smith and Company Purchased with Art Fund support
15. Brown Dog, 1985, Nicola Hicks (b.1960) and Gilbert & Turnbull Ltd., London © Nicola Hicks, Flowers Gallery, London. Photo: Vincenzo Albano / Art UK

• The Great British Art Tour was brought to you in collaboration with Art UK, which brings the nation’s art together on one digital platform and tells the stories behind the art. The website shows works by 50,000 artists from more than 3,000 venues including museums, universities and hospitals as well as thousands of public sculptures. Discover the art you own here.