Gifted Children

Essay on Chinatown Essays

Essay on Chinatown Essays Essay on Chinatown Paper Essay on Chinatown Paper Essay Topic: Chinatown After many years of famine and poverty plaguing the land of Chinahundreds of thousands of Chinese in seek of opportunity began immigrating to the United States.Many motivated by the discovery of gold in California others came to the United States to seek better economic opportunity. Yet there were others that were compelled to leave China either as contract laborers or refugees. The Chinese brought with them their language, culture, social institutions, and customs. Over time they made lasting contributions to their adopted country and tried to become an integral part of the United States population. In the eighteenth century, Chinese green tea became very popular among Europeans and Americans. Chinese silk and porcelain were also in great demand. The Chinese, on the other hand, needed almost nothing the west had to offer. This created an imbalance of trade, especially bad for the British, who were weary of sending shiploads of silver to Hong Kong. Their solution was to develop a third-party trade,exchanging their merchandise in India and Southeast Asia for cotton and opium, which became welcomed in China as currency, in spite of the Imperial Chinese prohibition on opium. During the early 1800s opium addiction reached epidemic proportions in China. It became so popular the British began using itinstead of money. Nevertheless In 1839 the Qing government, after a decade of unsuccessful anti-opium campaigns, enacted drastic laws against the opium trade. Their commissioner, Lin Zexu, seized and destroyed some 20,000 chests of opium and detained the entire foreign community. The British retaliated violently attacking and soundly defeating the unprepared Chinese, forcing them to sign thefirst of what the Chinese dubbed the unequal treaties.As a result Hong Kong became a British territory. England was given most-favored-nation status, and British nationals were exempt from Chinese law.

The Great Pablo Picasso Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Great Pablo Picasso - Research Paper Example The paper "The Great Pablo Picasso" discovers his incredible art and shows some facts from life of the famous artist. His mother was Doà ±a Maria Picasso y Lopez and his father was Don Jose Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher. He was obviously influenced and basically trained by his father and he was known to have entered the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona when his family moved there when he was just fourteen years old. Although he was way too young, he was accepted in the school because of an evidence of a real talent however, he proved to be a genius who easily gets bored with the norms so that he rather became infamous in school, skipping classes only to go out to his neighborhood and delve into the real thing. The same happened when he transferred to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid two years later so that in 1899, as he went around finding the satisfaction he was looking for in expressing himself, he was introduced to El Quatro Gats, The Four Cats, a group of ar tists which became his inspiration for change. Probably one of the reasons that count Picasso among the greats is his experimentation and adaptation of different and thriving types of art throughout his lifetime. As he was trained by his artist father, his first unpublished works were of Renaissance quality to which he referred to in one of his comments when he was passing by children during his old age, â€Å"When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them†.... Most of Picasso’s subjects during this period are about poverty, isolation and anguish, strengthened probably by his feelings when he lost a dear friend to death (bio.com). This probably explains also the use of the color as blue represents a gloomy mood. Another painting known during this period is ‘The Old Guitarist’ which pictures an old man playing with his guitar. What is eye-catching in this portrait is the loneliness that is expressed by the man, with his head bent, seemingly more concentrated on his feelings than his guitar. The man could be said to be poor as seen by his clothe which is a one piece, long, worn and torn shirt. This depicts poverty and the hardships that go with it. Perhaps the most talked about work during the Blue Period is ‘La Vie’ because it spurred rumors that the subject is Picasso’s friend who committed suicide when he was rejected by his lover (de Kooning). ‘La Vie’ pictures three adults and a baby. The two figures on the left are obviously lovers, naked and holding each other as they seem to be confronted by a fully dressed woman holding a baby. Behind them are portraits of nude images that probably help to tell the story more clearly. Although several interpretations were suggested by art critiques, Picasso himself never offered his own interpretations so that the painter’s reactions add to the mystery and popularity of the painting. As expected, blue is the dominant color, ranging from very light hues to darker ones where the darkest color almost reveals a black tint seen especially on the clothes of the woman holding the baby. When Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model to whom he fell in love with, Picasso’s