Lost Art Mysteries explores the greatest unsolved stories in art history — stolen masterpieces, vanished paintings, and the secrets left behind by the world’s most legendary artists. From Van Gogh’s missing Sunflowers to Vermeer’s lost treasures, this documentary uncovers the mysteries that continue to baffle historians, collectors, and investigators.
00:00 Stealing The Scream
21:56 Gustave Klim’t Gold
43:24 The Many Faces of Rembrandt
01:04:31 El Greco, Lost in Time
01:25:43 The Lessons of Leonardo
01:46:54 The Elusive Van Eyck
02:08:04 Van Gogh’s Seven Sunflowers
02:29:26 Monet First Impressions
02:50:51 Vermeer, Lost Pearl of Deft
03:12:14 Capturing Cézanne
03:33:30 Turner, Leading Light
03:54:54 Raphael the Relentless
Raiders of the Lost Art – Season 1 : https://youtu.be/JRMdUw4Uyg0
Director: Edward Cotterill
It’s an iconic work. It’s an image which everyone knows. It’s one of the most well-known images in art history, second only to the Mona Lisa. Over a century has passed since Edvard Munch painted the Scree. Whether you’re holding it in your hands or you’re looking at it on the wall of a museum, it will tell you straight away it’s a masterpiece. But who was this troubled artist? And how did this image come to represent a lifetime’s work? It was a fantastically important picture to Munch. It was a kind of central figure in his painting at that time. It’s something that has crossed continents, cultures, everyone knows it. So why, in recent years, has it become such an object of desire for enthusiasts and thieves alike? For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art. Edvard Munch was a troubled soul, as can clearly be seen in his paintings. He lived for many years in poverty, and his unusual and often frightening style took a long time to be fully embraced by the artistic community. We now know Edvard Munch as… The creator of some of the most, let’s say, arresting, haunting, expressionistic images of the 20th century. Probably the only well-known Norwegian artist of the late 19th and 20th century. He was an emotional artist. He worked when the inspiration came. Enormously influential on German expressionism. Today, The Scream is the most famous painting, but for him. In his time, when he produced it, it was just one painting. He didn’t thought, OK, now I’m painting my most important work. Munch created his most iconic work, The Scream, early in his career. Little did he know that it would come to define his legacy and that it would be the target of so very many thieves. And just how hard it would be to recover. Edvard Munch was born on 12 December 1863 in the small village of Adelsbrook. His family moved to Oslo, then known as Kristiania, when he was only two. Munch had been born into a Norwegian art scene that had blossomed in recent decades, especially with the paintings of Norway’s landscape by the celebrated Johan Christian Dahl. Just like Munch, Dahl had come from a very modest Norwegian background. However, Munch’s chances of following in Dahl’s footsteps and travelling the world seemed very slim from the outset. I think his childhood was horrible. His mum died when he was four, TB, so he presumably had spent the first four years of his life listening to her. cough, which can’t have been nice. Edvard did have a difficult childhood. There were a number of family tragedies and two deaths. There were quite a lot of diseases in the family, caused by the climate, by the bad house. His father brought the children up on a mixture of Hellfire, Damnation and Edgar Allan Poe, So I think that explains a lot about Munch’s later life. Although he displayed early talent, Munch would only find his artistic calling in his late teenage years. His most influential teacher was Christian Krogh, one of the great realistic and social critic artists in Norway. Munch really got his radical breakthrough in the middle of the 1880s with the painting The Sick Child. How he painted it was totally uncommon. He was like scrapping the color with knives, and there are really a lot of layers in this painting. It really divided the public opinion. There is undoubtedly an edge of darkness from his work, from the very beginning. It’s there all along. He was someone who was living on the borderlines of sanity and insanity. Many of Munch’s paintings from this era in his career are missing. It’s possible that they may have been confiscated by his overtly pious father, who was covering his son’s expenses. Yet disapproved of his new direction. But Edvard had a chance to break out on his own. Munch was actually born into a family where they had several quite well-known artists. One of them was an artist called Fritz Taulo, and he… Had close links to Paris, was quite well known in Paris, and he sponsored Munch to go the first time. And he went into the studio of Léon Bonin, who was a pretty traditional painter, and they quite quickly came to blows. I think he immediately knew that he found it stifling, he found it dull. Léon Bonin’s style of painting may not have been to Munch’s taste, but he did appreciate his tours of the Parisian galleries. Paris. Was right in the middle of the belle epoque, and the work of many of the greatest artists of the era was on show. One of them, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, had also been a student of Leon Bonner. Edvard Munch was stunned by what he saw. Paris, of course, was in this time the mecca, the magnet for all artists. They had to go there, they had to see what is happening here. He made two big trips to Paris. The first time he came back, having seen Impressionism, he’d seen Monet and Manet. But it’s really the second trip when he finds Gauguin and Van Gogh pre-expressionist, if you like. Following the death of Van Gogh in 1890, there was the Big Retrospective in 1891, which undoubtedly he related to as an artist who was projecting emotion through colour, through line, through expression in art. Paris at the time was sort of a marketplace of various painterly styles after Impressionism. And I think, although he experiments with a lot of things from Paris and is indeed keen to show his knowledge of impressionist painting, for instance, we don’t see him really catching on to one truly Parisian way of painting. Munch always wanted to be a kind of Parisian artist because this was the center, But he got a lot of friends and supporters in Berlin and in other German cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, Dresden and so on. So he was more or less 20 years… In Germany, Munch would have his greatest breakthrough in Berlin. He’d tried to model his works on what he’d seen in Paris, trying out the impressionist style, the realist style, even painting in the pointillist style of Georges Seurat. But Berlin was where he found his true voice. Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see, hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness. Munch loved Berlin. I think he really found his place there. He found people who were willing to listen to him, who saw him as a proponent of new ideas. And in 1892, he had been asked to come over with 35 works and do an exhibition for the Association of Berlin Artists. The Berlin Art Association at that time was a very conservative circle of artists, and I don’t think anyone expected what Munch brought to the show. So within a week, the show was closed down. They thought he was an anarchist, I think. So the verein themselves, the club, just thought he was nuts. Critics went wild. And, of course, he loved it. He thought it was fantastic. He said, I’ve never had so much fun, or words to that effect. This made him a real hero for the younger generation, someone to look up to, and someone who was breaking the norm and paving the way for them. Immediately a lot of invitations from other cities in Germany for exhibitions, and Munch hired an own room only some months later in Berlin to make his private exhibition there. So in 1893, this dream was exhibited the first time in Berlin. One evening, I was walking along a path. The city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked over the fjord. The sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature. It seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked. This became the scream. We have these four versions, two paintings, two pastels, but they’re also woodcuts, with also drawings, so we have a kind of family. Orbiting this theme. I think it’s now generally accepted that the Pastel 1893 version was the first, and possibly a study for the painting. Well, the pastel that we have here is executed in what appears to be haste, with crayon onto ungrounded cardboard. So it’s a rather rough expression. 1895, he had a German collector, it was called Otto von Farkit. He did buy despair and tried to buy the… Painted 1893 version, and it was a fantastically important picture to Monk. You know, he didn’t want to sell it, and so he said to him, I’ll sell you despair and I’ll make you a new screen. This one stands out because of its frame. So it has a very special frame in which he had inscribed almost a poem which reflected his vision. The 1910 version, he needed to replace the 1893 version because it had gone, and so he did himself. One in Tempera on card, and, you know… It is a sign of how important it was to him as a kind of central figure in his painting at that time. They’re all sort of quite different in both technique and style, and also to a certain extent, content. The colouring is different in each of them. Some of them are more highly coloured. There’s slight differences in the compositions, and, interestingly, if you look at the eyes, they’re also depicted slightly differently. I think in a certain… Point of his life, he saw that the Scream is a very, very special, very strong composition. But when he painted it, it was just one part of this work in progress, called Freeze of Life. There’s, of course, this famous poem-like text, which is older than the painting where he is writing about walking with the two friends along the sea. And then suddenly the sky is turning red, and he is hearing big scream through nature. I mean, it has been suggested his sister, Laura, was in a lunatic asylum at what has been identified as that point of the fjord. And that he might have been walking to see her, and, you know, that maybe didn’t cheer him up. While it is personal, and he states this haunting moment in his life, it’s also very universal. It’s something that everyone can relate to. It’s not him in the picture. It is just a figure. It may have just been a figure, but it became. An icon, and it would catch the attention of daring thieves, masked gunmen, and the world’s richest art collectors. Edvard Munch’s The Scream would not only become the work he would be most known for, it would become an iconic piece of art. Unfortunately, in 1994, it also became a prime target for a gang of Norwegian thieves. It was the Lillehammer Olympics, all eyes on the country. And at the same time as the Olympics, there’s also a kind of cultural Olympics going on, a focus on the cultural world of Norway. And, of course, the scream would sit at the centre of that, One of their most iconic images, and actually one of the most iconic images in the world. I remember watching the Evening News and that Sunday. The first day of the winter Olympics, there was not so much news about the Olympics as about the theft from the Oslo National Gallery. Literally ran in and within 20 seconds had cut the painting, taken it from the wall, snipped the wire and gone. And they left a note saying Thank you for your terrible security. Charlie Hill is an art detective who, just a year before the scream was stolen, had recovered another stolen masterpiece in Antwerp. For Mia’s Lady writing a letter. An English criminal who had been arrested in Norway in a drugs matter, went into the Norwegian embassy here in London. And said that he could get the picture back for five million because he knew the people who had done it. So the Norwegian chief of detectives came across and interviewed this guy. Charlie Hill would need a perfect cover to pull off a sting to reclaim the scream. The thieves needed to believe that he was willing to cough up some serious dough to get the painting back. And the Big Spending Getty Museum were happy to oblige. One of the detective sergeants flew to California and brought back a massive material to identify me as a member of the Getty Museum. And then I used that to persuade the criminals. When I got to Oslo that I was a kosher Getty Museum employee. And it was part of the pretense, but it worked. And it worked well because the Getty were happy with it. Under a false name of Chris Roberts, Charlie Hill got in contact with the suspects in Oslo. Following a long, drawn-out period of negotiations, Charlie Hill was able to get a hold of the suspects. Tully Hill ventured out to a location 70 miles outside the city to hopefully bring this complicated plan of recovery to a brilliant conclusion. He said to me as we went in, but it’s down there, in the basement. He pulled the carpet back and there was a trap door in the kitchen down. And I just flew at him and told him, no, I’m not going down there to sit down there until next Christmas. You’re going down there. And if it’s there, you bring it back up. And he came up. And there… He had a picture in a blue sheet and he laid it down and flipped it back. And I’ll be damned. It turned out it was the back of the picture, but Munk had started it already. And then I turned it over and I knew straight away it was the right picture. Because the thing about a masterpiece is it will tell you it’s a masterpiece. Whether you’re holding it in your hands, or you’re looking at it on the wall of a museum, or wherever, you know, behind glass. And in a big frame, it will tell you straight away it’s a masterpiece. The scream had been recovered, but legal complications meant that the perpetrators of the theft were able to walk free. Then, ten years after the first theft, another version of the scream was taken, this time in broad daylight. In 2004, the Munch Museum’s version of The Scream was also stolen, on this occasion by armed thieves, who rushed in and forced their way in and took the scream. And another important painting, Madonna. Well, they meant business. They used guns. The picture was missing for over two years. Well, it’s interesting that two separate versions of the Scream were both stolen in Oslo. I mean, they’re both such iconic paintings and also extremely valuable financially. So they were tempting targets for thieves. The very thing that makes it so stealable, of course, stops anybody being able to steal it, which is its fame. I would think bravado and stupidity would be two good reasons why you might try to steal it. Both this version of The Scream and the Madonna painting were recovered in 2006, But we know far less about how this police operation went down. The next time that the scream would make international headlines was in 2012, when the least seen of the versions of the painting sold at auction for an astonishing $120 million. This particular version had been in the family of… A Norwegian businessman, Peter Olsen, for many, many years. And his family had been neighbours of Munch and turned out to be patrons, friends. So it’s not one that had been seen. It had been hidden from view in the same place, which always makes value shoot up. It was the most expensive painting which had ever been sold at that time. But, of course, you only need two people at auction who want a painting for it to push up the value. If you look at what’s happened to… Stock markets over the past 20 years, they’ve gone like that. And if you look at what’s happened to the value of gilt-edged, you know, blue-chip, a-list art, it’s gone like that. Just like with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Munch’s scream has come to symbolise the artist. The two of them share many similarities. They both came to Paris and were inspired by the great artists of the Belle Epoque, especially Paul Gauguin. They were both unstable characters who forged their own artistic style. But whereas Vincent van Gogh died in 1890, Munch lived until old age. The first part of his life, Munch is traveling all the time. He’s really living from his suitcase. A lot of exhibitions, a lot of parties, a lot of relations and so on. And then, after his breakdown in 1908, he’s coming back to his home country. He’s buying a big house, a villa with a huge garden. It’s a little bit above the town, so he’s looking down on the city. It’s a very remote place. My breakthrough came very late in life, only starting when I was 50 years old. But at that time, I felt as though I had the strength for new deeds and ideas. He became more and more isolated and less involved with Oslo society. But most importantly, he continued to paint, and he did a… A magnificent series of self-portraits. He paints himself again and again and again, and what he sees is, you know, is disturbing and chilling, I think. Munch may have wanted to live a reclusive life, but that became impossible with the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, the Germans invaded Norway, and Munch was very concerned that his work would be confiscated by the Nazis. Because the Germans had regarded his paintings as degenerate. All his works in Germany were confiscated from all the museums. They were sold in Norway or in Switzerland. Munch didn’t like it, of course. 82 pictures in German collections that were all taken off walls. Rather sweetly, 71 of them were bought in time by Norwegian collectors and brought back to Norway, which shows his status as the living Norwegian painter, I think. He was very worried and he decided to leave his estate to the municipality of Oslo. And that is the basis of the collection in the Munch Museum, where it is on view today. From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I in them, and that is eternity. After Munch’s death, The Scream’s international reputation would grow and grow. It is an extraordinary work of art, and it represents something in Western, European and worldwide thought. At the turn of the 20th century, there was this… Terrific sort of apocalyptic fear. The picture, I think, spoke very directly to that fear. It was a very new looking picture. It’s crossed continents, it’s crossed cultures, it’s been on the Simpsons to Andy Warhol. It’s an image that we all know. Covers of books and record sleeves, and we see all the accretions of its fame. I think what is really well known is the face of the person in the middle. This person who’s screaming has become a sort of symbol of angst or psychological disturbance. This work really shows the basic fear of the human being. So everyone, every visitor in this museum can put his own feelings in this painting. So it’s timeless. Gustav Klimt lived a colorful life that matched his exuberant paintings, especially his most famous work of all, The Portrait of Adèle Bloch. Adèle Blockbauer was a fascinating lady for her time, really modern, really forward-thinking. Adèle’s husband, Ferdinand, wanted to give it as an anniversary present to Adèle’s parents. Klimt actually spent over three years, an incredible amount of time, working on the portrait. Klimt’s most lasting and iconic work was the pinnacle of his aptly titled Golden Phase. It’s incredibly meticulous and ornate, and must have been very, very difficult to paint. Is completely gleaming. It’s like a jewellery box. Little did he know just how troubled a history this painting would have. The Nazis confiscated his paintings, including the Blotbauer portrait. Klimt would probably have been labelled a degenerate artist if he had lived up until that time. How did this portrait get caught up in an epic legal battle and subsequently become the world’s most expensive artwork? I can paint and draw. I believe this myself. And a few other people say that they believe this, too. But I’m not certain whether it’s true. Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 on the outskirts of Vienna. He was brought up very conventionally. He was born into an Austria that had been incessantly at war and then suddenly wasn’t. And so it was a very comfortable, secure, affluent, boring world. By the time he was 30, that had all changed. And he was living in a city where there was Schoenberg and Mahler, and Freud and Wittgenstein. And it was just the most extraordinary effulgence of brilliance. His father was a craftsman, a gold engraver. And Gustav was brought up in an environment in which art was discussed. And he decided to study at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. And he had a fairly conservative education there. It was a strange time in that there was a real duality between immense progress and a sense of stagnation in society. And a lot of this progress, I think, was driven by a huge surge in the population. There were these two opposing sides of society in Vienna, real wealth juxtaposed with real poverty, and Klimt kind of straddled the two. He was born one of seven children in a small suburb of Vienna, very, very poor. There’s stories of him and his brothers being teased at school because they had going to school in rags. But there was also the mobility that his talent was recognised, and he quite quickly became very famous in Vienna. Vienna was then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, very wealthy, but it was an extremely artistic city. And in the late 19th century and turn of the century, it was very avant-garde, and there was a lot of interesting and exciting things going on in the art field. So it was a great time for an artist to emerge. At this time, the Vienna secession was emerging, meaning a whole new artistic movement was beginning to flourish. The Vienna Secession was set up in 1897. It was a group of art rebels, those artists who wanted to break away from the conventional artistic scene in Vienna. They set up an exhibition venue where they showed avant-garde art. And Klimt was its first president, so he played a crucial role in its founding. He started his career really working with the state, doing various murals, eventually ended up completely turning his back on that and being a leader of the secession. There’d already been a Berlin secession and a Munich secession, so Fianna was rather parochial in that sense. But it was a rejection of the kind of art that Klimt himself had been making. He really represents that move from traditionalism through to something really quite radical. Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist, which alone is significant. They should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want. Gustav Klimt was an unusual character, unlike most of the artists in Vienna. Around the same time, he steered clear of the burgeoning CAF society. He was a very private person, but his reputation did spread quickly and patrons sought him out. He was very reclusive, it seems. His first studio, the one he was in for 20-odd years, was right in the centre of Vienna. And he, in spite of that, he didn’t socialise. He continued to work with artists at the Secession Organisation, but he didn’t mix so much with Viennese society. By this time, he’d begun to make it, and patrons and dealers would knock on his door. So this is actually part, I think, of the legend of Klimt, is that he was quite reclusive. He was in his studio a lot of the time. He had quite an unconventional dress, sort of loose-fitting tunic, robe, and he would be there working away night and day, really. He wasn’t someone who was out and about much. He was really based in the studio, and I think this sort of added to his mystery. I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for painting than I am in other people, above all women. Klimt may not have socialised as much as the other artists of his era, but he certainly didn’t shy away from all human interaction. It’s thought that he fathered at least 14 children in his lifetime. Yet there was always one constant in Klimt’s life. His companion, Emily Flöger. He frequently wrote postcards to her. On my first days here, I did not start work immediately. But as planned, I took it easy for a few days, flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little. Klimt became quite close to one of the Flöge sisters, Emilia Flöge, who had established a dress salon with her two sisters called the Schwestern Flöge, or Flöge Sisters Fashion Salon. Klimt’s brother, Ernst, who died very young, was married to Helene, Emily’s younger sister. And unfortunately, he died, which made Klimt. Really, the guardian of Helene, and he became very close to the Pflugge family. And he had long correspondence with her. She was really in the centre of the avant-garde bohemian circles in Vienna, quite a rebellious lady. She was Klimt’s lifelong companion. They were almost certainly lovers as well, but the relationship is a bit ambiguous. Klimt, actually, he never married and had a string of lovers. It’s Emily Pflugge. Is said to have been the model in The Kiss, which is Klimt’s probably most erotic work. Klimt’s earliest pictures that really incorporated gold were when he was working on a portfolio for this important Viennese art publisher called Gerlach & Schenk. He offered a work called The Kiss, which did have a rather lavish use of gold, and that would have been in the late 1890s. Shortly thereafter, in 1901, he made a painting called Judith One. And many people believe that’s actually a portrait of Adele Bach Bauer herself. And that includes rather lavish use of gold, not only in the frame and the background for the figure, but also the gold choker that she’s wearing, which is rather similar to the choker that we see on the portrait of Adele Bach Bauer herself. In 1903, he went to Ravenna, where there are the… Amazing Byzantine mosaics and frescoes. And he said it was sort of nothing short of a revelation for him, these incredible images, icons surrounded by gold. So I think that’s really where we can see the start of using gold leaf. The golden background has an amazing effect on the portraits, and it’s very, very dramatic. But also, we have to remember that it was in his childhood, it was in his upbringing, His father was a gold engraver, so he had the sort of… The double lead into it, where it was a family career, essentially. It was during this golden phase that Klimt began his first official portrait of Adele Blockbauer. It’s believed that Gustav Klimt met Adele Blockbauer and her husband, most likely through the Vienna secession. Ferdinand Blockbauer was one of the most important art collectors in the city, and we know that Ferdinand approached Gustav Klimt. And asked him to paint a portrait of his young wife, who would have been about 25 years old at that time. Ferdinand wanted to give it as an anniversary present to Adele’s parents. Ferdinand was pretty rich. He was a sugar merchant. But Adele’s father was really rich, and he was a very eminent banker, and he was head of the Eastern Railways and all sorts of things. That occurred certainly by the summer of 1903, and we know that Klimt began work on the portrait in the winter of 1903. Adele blockbubber took at least three years. And when you look at it, you can see why. I mean, it’s incredibly meticulous and ornate and must have been very, very difficult to paint. This portrait of a Viennese society woman would become an object of desire for many, including a Nazi officer. But how did this artwork leave its home in Vienna and end up in the possession of a wealthy U.S. art collector? The portrait of Adele Block Bauer is one of Klimt’s best-known works. Little did he know its turbulent future as he meticulously created this masterpiece. Klimt was a very slow artist. He liked to spend a lot of time with his sitters, making upwards of hundreds of sketches. In fact, he probably made at least 200 sketches just for the first portrait of Adele. Block Bauer. About 125 of which are known to survive, and we have a few of them in the collection of the museum here today. It was very meticulous. Of course, this was very frustrating for his sitters, who would be there for many, many hours. But Dellebach Bauer would have traveled to his studio on the outskirts of Vienna, in one of the outlying districts, spent hours and hours with him at a time in a private chamber where he made these sketches. And certainly, that would have deepened the closeness of their relationship. There’s a lot of speculation surrounding this. Many people have assumed that they were lovers or delved into that. We have absolutely no evidence. Part of that is because of the very sensuous nature of the portraits of Judith I and Judith II, which are believed to be portraits of Adela herself. I’m a painter who paints day in, day out, from morning till evening. Figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits. Klimt may have claimed that there was nothing special about him, but his art was a different story. His portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer would eventually be hailed as a masterpiece and become an iconic work of art. This painting is a really interesting combination of naturalism and decorative symbolism. The two sit side by side. The portrait is incredibly complex. And many people have described it as being something of a secular icon. And I do think that’s a rather apt description. So in the rendition of her flesh, so her face and her arms, which is actually only one twelfth of the painting, you see this quite naturalistic style. You really get a sense of the person, the detail in her face. I think the first thing that you notice are the eye shapes, sort of elliptical shapes. On her gown, there also appear to be amuletic devices, the all-seeing eye of God. Which some people also see as a relation to the Egyptian Ouija eye, which would provide perhaps a form of protection for her. There are theories that this is the eye of Horus, an Egyptian symbol, protecting the vulnerable, an eye of protection, warding off danger. We know that Adela suffered extremely poor health and was very frail her entire life. In fact, she died when she was only 43 years old, in 1925, and rather unexpectedly. She also had tried to raise a family with her husband. And had two miscarriages and lost the only child that she brought to term just a few days after his birth. And this is believed to have occurred while Klimt was working on the painting, so he might have incorporated those amuletic motifs as a sign to try to help her be successful in being a mother. Finally, I would add that he included. Her initials, A and B, are scattered really throughout the gown and other parts of the canvas. And absolutely marvelous. composition. And that’s really the secret of the success of the painting, the way that these different elements are brought together and sort of almost seamlessly merges in a sort of mosaic. At the same time as the portrait of Adèle Bloch-bau was first presented to the world, Gustav Klimt first met the young artist, Egon Schiele. He would take him on as his protégé, and eventually, Schiele would also become a celebrated artist. Egon Schiele was, like many other young artists at that time, a slightly younger generation than Klimt, and they really looked up to him as the leader of the avant-garde, someone who’d broken away, opening up the art world in the city and bringing in something new. He was incredibly generous to Schiele. I think Schiele was 17 and Klimt was 45. He was president of the secession and he was very eminent. And this little Oik turned up and said, I want you to mentor me, and he said, OK. And he found him models and he got him shown. I suppose he recognised something in Sheila’s work. You can really see the belief and goodwill between Klimt and Sheila. They even swapped drawings. Sheila proposed it, and Klimt said to Sheila, You’re a much better drafter than me, why would I ever want to do that? But he still did the swap of the drawings. And also, when Sheila got into a bit of a tricky financial situation, Klimt came to the rescue, introduced him to his most important patron, August Lederer, who then commissioned Sheila to paint his son. So. He was really a big supporter of Schiele in his early career. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele had both benefited from the amazing artistic and cultural flourishing that occurred in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. But World War I was around the corner, And while they were able to steer clear of the conflict, they both perished as a result of the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. After tea, it’s back to painting, a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. Klimt’s work only became more and more highly regarded after he died. He was seen as the greatest painter to come out of the Vienna secession. But another artist, a far less successful one named Adolf Hitler, had also come out of Vienna, And in the 1930s, under his leadership, Nazism was taking over Austria and Germany. With the rise of the Nazis, and really with their invasion of Austria, with the Anschluss of March of 1938, Ferdinand… Realized that this was going to be extremely bad news for him, and he fled the country. And shortly thereafter, he was accused of tax evasion and other crimes, and all of his properties were seized. And he ended up settling in Switzerland, where he lived impoverished. A lawyer was appointed to oversee the Bloch-Bauer collection and homes and all of their assets. He worked with various museums in the city and collectors to organize trades and outright sales of these works. And through that, this particular portrait, as well as the second portrait of Adele of Bunkbauer, ultimately ended up in the collection of what is today the Belvedere Museum. Questions remained whether this was its rightful home, as there appeared to be conflict between Adele’s final wishes and the contents of Ferdinand’s will. He left a will naming all of his property to… Belonged to his family’s heirs. So he mentioned his nephew in particular, and his two nieces, one of which was Maria Alpen. She had to flee Vienna during the war. Her husband got taken to Dachau to the concentration camp, and was used almost as a pawn to bribe his brother. And as soon as he was released, they just completely bolted out of Vienna. Maria Altman and her husband ended up settling in the U.S., In California, in particular, and some family members did perish in the Holocaust in concentration camps. She’d lost everything. She’d lost the country she was born in. She’d lost all of her family, apart from her immediate family, who had gone to gas chambers. Or one way or another had been killed. There was a lawyer in the intervening years, right after World War II, that did attempt to claim some of the family’s property and was successful in reclaiming some things. But the government insisted that they had Adela’s will and her will provided that the Klimt paintings would go to the Austrian government. And when this lawyer asked to see that will, they always said it wasn’t available or they had misplaced it. Adele Blockbauer had said she wanted the pictures and all the Klimts to go to the Austrian state. But what she really meant was because she and her husband couldn’t have children, that when Ferdinand died, they should go to the Austrian state, not that they should be stolen by Nazis seven years before he died. Which I think rather changed the rules a bit, really. She would stop pursuing her claim, but a tragic personal event would spark Maria’s drive to get back what was rightfully hers. If you fast forward quite a few decades, 1998, the law in Austria changes. Any works of art or property that had been seized illegally from families during this period… You know, should be rightfully returned to the heirs and survivors. Around the same time, Maria Altmann’s sister dies, and Maria inherits her papers. And as she begins going through these papers, she begins to suspect that. Perhaps that promise to the museum was nothing more than a promise, and it wasn’t an outright gift. Maria Altmann picked up the phone to a young family friend, Randall. Schoenberg, who was related to the very famous composer in Vienna, had family history in Vienna. And he said, let’s go for it, let’s take this case to court in America, and eventually went up to the Supreme Court. And Maria Altman had several advisers on the case. They said, don’t go with this young lawyer, you need to get someone very experienced with going to Supreme Court, But she stuck with it, and they won the case in 2004, and they were on the right to take it to court in Austria. So the case then moved there, and in 2006, they won the paintings back. One of Maria’s supporters at the time was Ronald Lauder. Heir to the Estee Lauder company, an avid art collector. He had set up the Neuer Gallery in New York five years previously, a gallery dedicated to the art of the Austrian and German avant-garde. In 2006, Ronald Lauder purchased the portrait of Adele Blockbauer from Maria Altman in a private safe. It would have been impossible for her to hang them in her small California bungalow. I mean, insurance costs alone would have been… Quite prohibitive, and that was never her intention. She did want the portraits and the landscapes to be in a museum collection, if possible, where they could remain on display. And so a private sale was engineered so that we were able to acquire this for an undisclosed sum. But reportedly 135 million dollars, which was said to be the most expensive painting sold at that time. Well, in a way, the Belvedere is really the appropriate home for the painting in Vienna, where the artist worked. Fortunately, as it happened, it was bought by an American collector who’s very public spirited and has set up his own museum. So at least the painting will remain on public view in the Neue Galerie in New York. Keeping the painting on public display has been the wish of every custodian of this portrait, And it is testament to the pure creative talent of Gustav Klimt, That people still queue daily to see it. One of the great masters of the 17th century. He was a confident artist, and his brushwork is done with immediacy. Rembrandt was in great demand as an artist for most of his life, but he always found time for self-portraits. There’s a strong tradition of artists painting self-portraits, but certainly Rembrandt is very prolific. In total, we have about 80 self-portraits by the artist, which is an incredible… Incredible number for any artist of any period. Until then, artists who’d done self-portraits might have done one or two, possibly a handful. These incredible paintings capture key moments throughout his life and show just how much his style changed over the years. There’s no other artist who had this biographical sense of, I know this person. He lays it all out. He doesn’t hide who he is. But despite the fame and success that Rembrandt enjoyed during his life, his career ended in bankruptcy. He died in poverty, but his reputation would only grow and grow in the centuries after. He’s never not been a famous artist. Despite his never leaving the Netherlands, his paintings today are spread throughout the globe. If you want to have a collection that is an important collection, you need a Rembrandt. But it’s been a battle to try and. And piece together his true legacy by finding all of his works and separating the real Rembrandts from the many copies. Choose only one master, nature. Rembrandt was born in Leiden, and he actually started going to university there, and then he changed direction. He then went to Amsterdam, where he was an apprentice for the artist Peter Lastman, where he was for a couple of years. Amsterdam in the 17th century was the wealthiest city in the world, as the Dutch golden Age was in full flow. The possibilities were limitless. Peter Lassman was a history painter. He painted stories of the Bible mythology, and that was, in fact, the level of what one wanted to be as an important artist. If you’re going to be an important artist, you had to be a history painter, because a history painter dealt with the imagination. He completed his training when he was 18, at a fairly young age. He comes back to Leiden, and it’s interesting there’s a contemporary of Rembrandt’s who’s very important. To the early Rembrandt, his name is Jan Lievens. They get a slight reputation early on. In the Hague, which is where the court is, the aspirations to build up the importance of the Dutch court. And the person leading that effort is a wonderful individual by the name of Constantine Huygens. He was a courtier, he was poet, musician, secretary or advisor of art. Actually, to the Prince of Orange. So he went to the workshop and was impressed with their output, their work. The Prince of Orange has had Rembrandt’s in his collection, so obviously he commissioned and bought works from Rembrandt. Heugen holds him in high esteem, so that couldn’t have hurt his career, certainly at that point, at a young age. Rembrandt was in an ideal situation. He was painting for the Dutch Royal Court and had the favour of Constantine Haugens, a powerful figure who… Would be knighted by both the English and French royal families, and whose son, Christian, would become one of the greatest scientists of the era. It was in a letter to Constantine that we have the only record from Rembrandt of what he was striving to accomplish in his art, the greatest and most natural movement. In just his early twenties, Rembrandt’s future seemed secure for life, and it’s at this point that he paints his very first self-portrait. He painted his first self-portrait, as far as we know, at the age of 22, quite young. And he probably did this partly as an exercising. He was scurer, looking at the effect of light and shadow in a painting. And when you look at the self-portrait, most of his face is in the dark, but the right side of his cheek and the right ear are in the light, brightly illuminated. Many of Rembrandt’s earlier self-portraits, and especially the ones that he made when he was in his 20s, are much more radical. They’re much more dramatic because in those works, he’s exploring artistic expressions and possibilities. Heads almost in complete shadow. I mean, it’s very dramatic. He’s obviously experimenting with light techniques at the time. He’s very… Deliberately catching himself in a moment of extreme emotion or passion, and trying to give an idea of what an angry expression looks like. This is a very polished, accomplished statement. Rembrandt painted self-portraits for a number of reasons. I think he partly did it as a form of advertisement, if you like, to show potential clients how well he could do portraits. Other self-portraits were done for much more personal reasons, to record how he was feeling or how he felt he looked at a particular point in time. Without atmosphere, a painting is nothing. Rembrandt was an established name in the rapidly expanding city of Amsterdam. He had achieved success so early that he was taking on students while still in his twenties. These included other great artists of the Dutch golden Age, including Gerrit Du and Govert Flink. But this process has made deciphering the works of Rembrandt from those of his disciples very difficult, nearly 400 years later. He has people come study with him. And so that develops a large studio. Then there are a lot of attribution issues that develop as works coming out of the Rembrandt world during the 1630s, particularly. Are they all painted by Rembrandt? Are they painted by Rembrandt and people from the workshop? Are they blocked in by Rembrandt and then filled up by other people? What we do know is that there are a lot of artists whose names are pretty familiar in the Rembrandt world. Flink is Howard, Flink. Ferdinand Boel, Ferdinand Boel, Jakob Bakker, Jakob Bakker. But while they’re with Rembrandt, you can’t really tell. So there is a kind of a working relationship that is very complicated. Try to put well in practice what you already know, And in so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Even the self-portraits sometimes can’t escape the confusion of just who painted them, as Rembrandt’s students copied his self-portraits as part of their training. They had a lot to work from as Rembrandt continued to make new versions of his own likeness throughout the majority of his career. The Painting Behind Me is one of Rembrandt’s most well-known self-portraits. It was painted in 1640 when he was 34 years of age. He was at that moment really nearing the peak of his popular success as a painter in the city of Amsterdam. And I think that moment in his life really dictates how that particular self-portrait works. He is very consciously trying to present himself as an elegant, accomplished artist who’s really at the peak of his game. He’s… Based his pose and details of his costume on very well-known paintings by Raphael, by Titian, and by Lucas van Luyden and Albrecht Durer. So people looking the self-portrait in the 17th century would have recognized that Rembrandt is putting himself on the same level as these great artists of the previous century. The 1640s started off as a glorious time for Rembrandt. He and his wife Saskia, who featured in several of his paintings, had moved into a newly built home that still stands today as the Rembrandt House Museum. Their son, Titus, was born in 1641, and in his studio he had what many people believed to be his greatest student, Carol Fabricius. But Fabricius’s career would be cruelly cut short when he was killed in the huge gunpowder explosion of Delft, and most of his paintings were lost forever. We have only 12 remaining to this day, and just as the story ended, tragically for the student, so too for the master. In the 1640s, all sorts of things happen in Rembrandt’s life. He becomes less active in this broader marketing of his works. The style changes, he becomes less extrovert and more introverted, and goes off on long walks in the countryside, makes these beautiful landscape drawings and landscape paintings. The second half of his career, he goes through a period of trying to identify What? What more he could achieve as an artist? What was most important to him? What goals did he really want to pursue during the second half of his career? By moving away from the style of painting that was popular at the time, Rembrandt’s reputation started to fade, and he was eventually struck down by bankruptcy. His works would have to be sold off, and he would die in poverty. Slowly but surely, though, his amazing outpouring of energy and energy is what makes him. The output, including the self-portraits, would be tracked down and his legacy restored. The second half of Rembrandt’s life was filled with tragedy. His wife, Saskia, died when he was 35, and his only child that survived infancy, Titus, would also die before him. Even his status as an artist had begun to slip as he moved away from the fine, detailed style of painting that was popular at the time. Of course, you will say I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. And that is why I am just a little crazy. Rembrandt’s reputation is a fascinating study, both during his lifetime and after his death. Towards the end of his life, Rembrandt continued painting in a certain style that found favour with a great many patrons, but other people favoured a much more elegant, smoother style. So even during his lifetime, there was a little bit of a mixed reception to his works. Rembrandt painted very quickly. I mean, he was a confident artist. His brushwork is done with immediacy, and this was quite unlike many other Dutch artists at the time, known as fine painters. Who used polished technique to get a very realistic but slightly dull impression. And Rembrandt was much bolder and expressionistic in the way he worked. For a period of roughly seven years, though, Rembrandt seems to have abandoned self-portraits altogether while he worked on a great range of other subjects. But in 1652, he returns to the genre with gusto. And from then on, average, roughly one self-portrait a year, until his death in 1669, with works that captured the ageing process of an artist like no other. Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses, or kindnesses. I think he thought about his self-portraits, and indeed the rest of his artistic production, as a refuge from the realities of everyday existence. In many of his later self-portraits, he looks aged, he looks haggard. The self-portraits were not unflattering, they were realistic. I mean, he was keen to capture the effects of aging that occurs to anyone who survives into old age, so he was being a realist. Rembrandt’s an old gentleman at this time, so he’s being shown with these wrinkles and all, and that gives a sort of immediacy to the painting. I think as you look at, you can relate to it. At that point, Rembrandt’s manner of painting had become very… Rough when he puts the paint down on the canvas. So he has thick paints on his brush. He doesn’t work with a lot of smoothing out those elements. However, it’s interesting that he focuses your attention on the face, and that roughness of execution is really limited to that area. The hat and the body are, you know, much more smoothly rendered. So there’s a selectivity of where he applies that kind of painting technique. Another one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces that he painted in the twilight of his career is the self-portrait with two circles, now at Kenwood House. The painting retains a mystery to this day, as to just what the two circles in the background are meant to represent. There’s lots of theories they possibly relate. To two circles from world maps that you would have found in interiors, and you often see them in other paintings of the period. And it was around this time, early 50s, 53, that a printed world map came out, so it would be the two hemispheres. That’s one possibility. The other, it refers to Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, where Giotto, the Renaissance artist, proves his worth to the pope by drawing a circle freehand in one brushstroke. So that’s also a popular one, although I think less convincing. Because the circles aren’t complete and they’re not done with one sweep of a brushstroke. Rembrandt remains elusive to the very end. In fact, with many of his later self-portraits, we’re not even certain if the paintings are fully finished. The question of what is finished with Rembrandt? is a fascinating question. We have to assume that, yes, at a certain point, all right, this says what I want this painting to say. And when you have a painting that’s as roughly executed as this, and you, one could imagine that somebody, Oh gosh, you’ve got to smooth this out and make it a little bit better. You don’t feel that at all. The case here. It isn’t signed and dated. He might not have considered it complete. Also how he’s treated the hands in the painting, it’s very fast brushwork, very broad, sweeping strokes. But my feeling is that that was his technique. That’s what he was wanting. And when you step back from the painting, all kind of gels and hangs together, well, you’re not meant to view the painting up close. So I would are on the side of that. It is complete. A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished. In these later self-portraits, along with a clear change in Rembrandt’s painting style, we can also clearly notice that his clothes are far humbler than the finery he wore in his earlier works, which is no surprise, given the huge financial difficulties that Rembrandt faced later in his life. In 1656, Rembrandt was declared… bankrupt. He was very bad at organising his financial affairs, and at that point, all his possessions and artworks were sold off. It basically had overspent. He was, you know, spending beyond his means with his own collection. He got this huge house which he just couldn’t afford really, so it, I mean, it basically caught up with him. Thanks to the fact he became bankrupt, we have an inventory from 1656 which recorded his possessions. And they list over 50 paintings, including works by famous artists such as Van Eyck and Howells. And he was quite an eclectic collector, so he had other things as well. He had Japanese armour and Roman antiquities and other pieces. He was actually at a very difficult stage of his career. He had to move out of his house, he had to sell his house, sell his collection, and move into a smaller quarters. When he died… All his pictures had been dispersed, and that would have been to hundreds of owners. So that’s why the paintings are found all over Europe and North America. Rembrandt died in poverty in 1669. Not only had he lost all of his money, but his reputation had dimmed considerably from his heyday. Immediately after his death, Rembrandt was still and consistently very well respected as a printmaker. But as a painter, his sort of rough and almost expressionistic works were not so much in favour until about the mid-19th century. Rembrandt was always seen as one of the great artists of the Dutch golden Age, but it was really in the 19th century that he became increasingly famous and well regarded. With the rise of an interest in contemporary French art and the art of other nations as well. An interest in realism and portraying things as they were, no matter how rough or ugly or plain. That’s when artists started getting interested again in Rembrandt. If you want to have a collection that is an important collection, you need a Rembrandt. Particularly for the collectors that are important to the National Gallery, that was definitely the case. U.S. banker Andrew Mellon helped found the National Gallery in Washington, which opened in 1937. And from the start, Rembrandt was always at its core. Upon his death, Joseph E. Widener, another prominent collector of the time, left his entire collection to the National Gallery. Over a dozen of the works were Rembrandt masterpieces. Rembrandt is an artist which any museum or gallery of old masters want to acquire. Most Rembrandts now are in museums, and they’re scattered all over the world, obviously, particularly in Europe, America and Russia. The reason Rembrandt is so sought after and admired is that, although his technical and artistic ability is greatly revered, it is through his self-portraits that we can appreciate the person that is Rembrandt. In viewing this extensive body of work, it allows us to witness and live out the fascinating, exciting and ultimately tragic story of one man’s life. No artist has ever been more ahead of his time. What does it mean to be ahead of your time? I think that artists are always avant-garde. They are always at the forefront. He was a visionary. I mean, he’d paint these sort of visionary paintings. I think he was just a very clever artist, an extremely talented artist. A visitor to El Greco’s studio once wrote that he’d made smaller versions of his most monumental paintings. But these exuberant pictures were never as popular as his sculpture. And architecture. He was an outsider and he didn’t paint like anybody else, and he was a foreigner. Rejecting everyone else’s opinions, doing what he had to do anyway. But Greco died, and his reputation died with him. After centuries in the wilderness, his reputation would finally be restored as he became a hero to the great artists of the modern era. I was created by the all-powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces. The story of El Greco begins on the island of Crete, where he was born in the year 1541, when it was known as the Kingdom of Candia. Crete had once been home to the mighty Minoan civilization and the oldest city in all Europe, Knossos. But in El Greco’s time, Crete was under the control of Venice. El Greco was born in 1541 on the capital of Crete, presently known as Heracleion. And at the time, it was under the Venetian domination, which means that it was a very cross-cultural environment. Crete was quite unusual at that time. It had a big focus on the post-Pesantian world. Crete had really taken over as a centre of what had been Byzantine painting. Now, I guess you’d call it Greek Orthodox painting. But it was a colony of Venice. This really permeated across all of its culture. So you see it in books, in literature, in poetry, and also in painting. So it was a real mix. And I think this is something that’s really important to his upbringing as an artist. Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is an excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul. For a long time, the details of El Greco’s early career on the island of Crete remained largely elusive. But in 1983, a breakthrough was made when his signature was discovered on a painting called The Dormition of the Virgin. Which helped give us a better understanding of his early period. We knew that he came from Crete. We knew that he would have been trained as an icon painter, Byzantine icon painter on Crete. So, basically, that signature was a verification. He had been a completely traditional Greek iconostatic painter. And, of course, the traditions of Greek painting ran contrary to those of Renaissance painting, which was all about experimentation and things. This was all about everything staying the same and dangerous. Things like perspective were, you know, heretical and probably could get you burnt. There’s a much later painting called The Burial of Count Orgaz, which has a very similar composition. You can see in the structure of the painting some references. So there’s an idea that there’s this lineage from his early work through to his late work, which remains constant. From the Dormition of the Virgin. Crete had been under Venetian rule for over three centuries before El Greco was born. The island had experienced a great artistic flourishing in that time, But in order to further his career, El Greco must have felt he needed to work in Venice itself. Being an ambitious young Cretan artist like he was, Crete did not offer many possibilities. Venice, on the other hand, at the time, it was basically the centre of the world. When he went to Venice, he just went, like a lot of artists. It just opened up and they went, Titian, my goodness, me. So Titian and Tintoretto became huge influences. Tintoretto and the long elongated figures that we start Ciel Greco portraying, and then also the colour of Titian, the sort of darkness and light. Apparently, there’s an anecdote that he was found in a darkened room painting. Because he believed that it was more expressive and he could get more in touch with the… mystical, religious quality of what he was trying to portray in the dark. So he’s picking up all the influences of Venice, but still keeping his post-Byzantine heritage there. Whilst in Venice, El Greco befriended the greatest miniaturist of the Renaissance era, Julio Clovio, who features in his earliest known portrait. And whose influence would help El Greco make his way to Rome. El Greco would later place Clovio next to Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo, in the foreground of his painting. The purification of the Temple. But whilst in Rome, the recently departed Michelangelo would come in for surprising criticism from El Greco. Once in Rome, he had a friend who had introduced him to Cardinal Farnese, who was a huge man of letters, directly linked to the pope and had a… Fantastic array of different people. And actually, El Greco stayed in the Palazzo Farnese, which was designed by Michelangelo. El Greco starts criticising some of the major masters of the Renaissance. He sees them as not being truly religious or truly getting the message across, perhaps quite decadent. So he says, I can do a better Sistine ceiling than Michelangelo, let me paint over it, I can do it better, which obviously ruffles a few feathers. He does have some sort of contretemps with Farnese because, having been in the lap of luxury, he gets thrown out. But he manages to join the guild of Saint Luke. He sets up a studio on his own. He is obviously trying to make a go of being in Rome at the time. While he openly criticizes Michelangelo, we also see him appropriating a lot of his stylistic steps forward. And he’s, he’s definitely referencing his work, but at the same time voicing that he’s breaking away from it. I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head. El Greco had made his way from the outpost of Crete to the artistic capital of Rome, But his career was stalling, especially with his comments about the masters of the High Renaissance. A move to Spain under the rule of Philip II would soon be in order. Where El Greco would create his greatest works. He moved to Spain, potentially for a few reasons. One, he wasn’t getting the big, grand commissions that he had seen himself getting in Rome. He had fallen out with Alessandro Farnese. In Spain, we have Philip II, an incredibly powerful patron and also a collector of Titian, which I think would have appealed to El Greco and he would have seen a window there. He was… Obviously quite a difficult personality. And he obviously thought, well, listen, Philip II’s making the Escorial happen. Let’s go to Madrid. There is also this burgeoning religiosity, I think, that appealed to El Greco, who almost saw this mystical side of religion. So I think there’s a religious reason, there’s a financial reason and opportunity, and also that he had created some waves. In Rome, and perhaps wasn’t the most popular of artists working there. It was in Spain that Dominikos Theotokopoulos would eventually acquire the name of El Greco. It was the moniker that was given to him by the Spanish. Effectively, El Greco, it’s basically Spanish, Italian, and to basically define a Greek working in foreign lands, which is brilliant. When El Greco arrived in Spain, the Palace of El Escorial was under construction, and King Philip II of Spain was in great need of artworks to decorate his enormous new construction. Just north of Madrid. This seemed to be an ideal opportunity for El Greco, but he was unable to seize it, and he settled in Toledo instead. What made him go to Toledo was the fact that he failed to have the patronage of Philip II. Because Philip II rejected the martyrdom of St. Maurice. Unfortunately, when he produced the painting, Philip didn’t like it. But he was not the only artist to be rejected by Philip II. I mean, Benvenuto Cellini also was cut down to size by the monarch. Secondly, it’s because he got a major commission to work in Toledo, which clearly gave him the opportunity to go there. And effectively, he went there and never left. It was just like he found his place in the world, almost, in Toledo. It was in Toledo. That he created his best-known works, including the remarkable view of his new homeland. He’s a great manipulator of paint and surface, and people who think that he was perhaps mad or bad eyesight or whatever, I think this is really not correct. You know, this is somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. I think this is a tremendous painting. It’s like an electric shock, actually. The colour of the grass. It’s just really piercing and acidic. And it’s like the sort of green that you get just after rain, actually. And with all that sort of rainbow colours that you get with a very, very dark sky. When everything is popped up. The language of art is celestial in origin and can be understood only by the chosen. El Greco would die in Toledo in 1614. He had produced an astonishing array of paintings during his near four decades in Spain, but his reputation essentially died with him as the baroque style rose to prominence. 7th of April, 1614, El Greco died, and practically his reputation died with him. It will be years, centuries, in fact, before we hear about this artist again. He had… Been very successful in Toledo and that was that. And that was quite an isolated place. And his reputation just disappeared, and he was only really rediscovered in the 19th century. There again, the Baroque stood for everything that he didn’t. And so you get people like Caravaggio, it’s all got to be out there and realistic. And that just wasn’t El Greco. So his reputation went into catastrophic decline, really, I think, almost immediately after his death. El Greco’s slow rise to the status of one of the Great masters, adored by figures such as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, would be one of the most remarkable stories in the history of art. El Greco died on the 7th of April 1614, leaving behind an incredible collection of artworks, but almost no immediate following. His eccentric style was almost completely at odds with the aesthetics of the new baroque era. It seemed for certain that he would be lost to the annals of time. You must study the masters, but guard the original style that beats within your soul, and put to the sword those who would try to steal it. El Greco’s original style would take centuries to be truly appreciated. In that intervening period, his work would be deemed worthy of scorn. But El Greco’s journey back to the status of a great master really started in 1838, when a gallery of Spanish works was opened in the Louvre, and he was finally seen by a larger audience. Many felt that his bizarre paintings were a sign of madness. You see some Spanish writers in the 18th, 19th century, and they praise him for his techniques, but they find him a sort of mad painter, very eccentric, off the wall, completely different from everyone else. So he’s sort of seen as being quite advanced in the way that he used paint and colour, but also being slightly kind of worrying and out of the norm. There was that great romantic cult for odd people, and so leech gatherers or ancient mariners or whatever. And in France, probably even more so. So because he was an outsider and he didn’t paint like anybody else, and he was a foreigner, they loved him. And also, he was a visionary. I mean, he’d paint these sort of visionary paintings. So to get the full house in your hand, you also had to be bonkers. So they sort of vented him as mad, although I don’t think there’s any indication really that he was. I don’t think people thought he was mad in his time. They thought he was an extremely talented person. And I think they were just wowed by the paintings and by his own… Religious attitude. We see in 19th century France that El Greco starts to be this real… Hero for the romantics. And the writer Théophile Gaultier sees him as a sort of wonder child of the romantic sentiment, rejecting everyone else’s opinions, doing what he had to do anyway. So, really, he becomes from a character that everyone looked at with a bit of disdain, suddenly to becoming a real hero. More and more individuals were finding themselves captivated by the recently rediscovered El Greco. They included two of the greatest French artists of the 19th century, Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cézanne. And in England, the art critic Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Would also have a major impact on re-establishing El Greco’s reputation in the 20th century. We see Roger Fry writing largely in the Burlington magazine, writing a lot about post-impressionism, and seeing El Greco as really an artist who shone the way and provided… A reference point for a lot of artists working in France. People were shocked. We have accounts of people going to see exhibitions where El Greco’s work featured in the National Gallery in the 20th century, and they found it shocking. They couldn’t believe that the National Gallery would acquire a painting by such a modern artist who didn’t belong in the National Gallery, Was not part of the canon. Roger Fry really promoted him as this father. Of modernism. He said that Del Greco had been a modernist avant la lettre. I think at one point he said, oh, yes, he does us a great favour of turning back from in front of us and looking back at us. And you think, oh, come on, Roger, you know, that’s so anachronistic. But he did spot the link between the flattening, planar use of space. Quite often, the paintings look like collages, don’t they? So each individual figure has been sort of cut out and stuck on. And so he recognised the kinship between that and Cézanne. You also see other members of the Bloomsbury group, like Clive Bell, lauding him as lighting the way for them, as being a pioneer, And they can look back to him as someone who was true to what he believed in, stood out from the crowd, and stylistically had elements which appealed to them. One of the most important figures in the El Greco story is a Basque artist named Ignacio Zuluaga. He had been inspired to make copies of El Grecos, held in the Museo del Prado. He even bought an El Greco for himself in 1897, the spectacularly colourful opening of the fifth Seal. One of Zuluaga’s friends who saw the painting was none other than Pablo Picasso. Having witnessed it, he went on to paint one of the most important works in his entire career, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. We believe that Picasso was looking at El Greco’s work from really quite early on. In 1898, he did a series of portraits which were based on El Greco’s work. As he moved to Paris, we know that he had reproductions of El Greco in his studio. He was looking closely at him as an old master. It was fantastic for him because it’s another outsider artist. So there’s Picasso in France as the Spaniard. And there is El Greco, the Greek Venetian, in the middle of Spain. And I think he just thought, my goodness, here’s somebody who’s actually just using bodies, who’s making these bodies. React within that space. And it is an astonishing painting. Picasso paid him the ultimate compliment of saying that he was a cubist. He said his space is cubist space. And you think, well, no, no, your space is El Greco space, but it’s nice to be distressed. You can definitely see a similarity between the figures and the composition. You can tell that he’s looking closely at it. So it’s a really important influence for Picasso and an important moment in the history of modern art. Picasso was so enamoured with the Cretan artist who found his way to Toledo, that he would even do his own interpretation of an El Greco portrait of his son. The figures of Picasso’s blue Period and Rose Period have that same elongated limbs, stretched out, slightly contorted feel that a lot of the El Greco figures have. So I think you can see in the blue and rose period a reference point with El Greco as well. I suffer for my art and despise the witless, moneyed scoundrels who praise it. El Greco’s supreme status was now assured. He had inspired so many of the greatest artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his bold compositions were making him a hero to the burgeoning expressionist movement. People like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc, the Blau writer. Looked at him as a sort of pioneer of not minding what anyone else thought, showing your emotion, being expressive. You get this sort of angularity. You get the angularity because of the stretched figures and of the way that he paints his draperies, which is pretty static. So that the drapes look very crisp rather than soft. You can certainly see that that’s the same sort of thing that the expressionists were trying to get after. Expressionism was meant to be the inverse of Impressionism. So impressionism looked at things from the outside. Expressionism was about kind of vomiting up your psychic insides. And patently, it seemed to the great German critic Julius Meyer Graeff, who was the sort of godfather of Expressionism, that that’s what El Greco had been doing, that he’d been reaching deep into his tormented soul. I think they looked back at him for those reasons and he really reached an… Inner world, or expression of an inner feeling, that’s what they were striving for. He embodied as a character and in his art, something that they really looked up to and wanted to express themselves. El Greco travelled a unique journey as an artist, and along the way, he had absorbed influences from the post-Byzantine Cretan renaissance to the mannerism of Michelangelo. Having finally found his niche in Toledo, it seemed that the works he created there, that expressed his intense inner feelings, were destined to be lost in time. But the modern world reclaimed him as one of their own, and a great master was reborn. Leonardo da Vinci is believed by many to have been the most talented individual who ever lived. It was an absolute experiment, and you can see that across not only his painting, but all areas of his life. Drawings of helicopters and submarines, cannon and anatomy, you name it, he did it. He was a universal man, he was greatly interested in science, though we only devoted part of his time to art. But while his greatest legacy remains in his art, we’re still unearthing the secrets of how he worked. Leonardo really tried to make painting, do everything. He wanted movement, he wanted light, he wanted colour, he wanted psychology. He tried to put so much into a painting. We’re still uncovering the fascinating discoveries he made and the mysteries of what happened to his masterpieces long after he died. Modern scientific methods offer great opportunities to know a lot more about Leonardo’s technique. One always imagined that he was a feverish, constantly changing, rather fretful painter. Leonardo crashes forms together. And that influenced almost everybody. Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom. Leonardo was born at a time when the House of Medici was ruling over Florence. This eminent banking family would eventually produce four popes. But their rise to prominence had occurred when Cosimo de’ Medici came to dominate the region that a young Leonardo was born into. And it was Cosimo’s son, Lorenzo, who would be crucial in establishing Leonardo’s legacy. We don’t know much about how Leonardo began. We know he was born in 1452 in a little Tuscan town not far from Florence. He was actually an illegitimate child and was brought up by his paternal grandfather. But his father was quite a successful lawyer in Florence, and that drew the young Leonardo to Florence. He was apprentice to Andrea Verrocchio. Now, he is the leading artist in Florence, did painting, sculpture, everything, bits of engineering. Presumably, Leonardo’s father, who is well-connected, said, I’ve got a son who’s pretty good at this painting, drawing thing. Would you take him on? In the case of Leonardo, because he was a genius when he was old, it stands to reason he must have been a genius when he was young. So he was obviously recognised as a prodigy. Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. Leonardo’s earliest dated work, made during his time with Verrocchio, is this drawing of the Arno Valley region where he was born. Verrocchio was a terrific source of inspiration, and he set this image of versatility for Leonardo. He also looked at lesser-known artist Antonio Poliolo. Who did wonderful anatomical nude figures, which inspired Leonardo. He looked at the great Florentine tradition of the painter Masaccio, who he mentions, the sculptor Donatello, who he mentions. So he saw himself in that Florentine tradition of anatomy perspective. He was quite a talented student, and he worked with the master on a painting of the baptism of Christ. There’s a story in Vasari that he helps paint one particular. Scene and Verrocchio said It’s so great I’m never going to pick up a paintbrush ever again. It’s possible that a statue made by Verrocchio of the biblical David may have been modelled on the young Leonardo. As well as the angel in the painting, Tobias and the angel attributed to Verrocchio. Leonardo may have even worked on this painting himself, specifically the fish held by Tobias. Verrocchio, obviously, was the prime influence. There were some very talented students working in Verrocchio’s studio, and they actually included Botticelli and Perugino. By the time he reached 20 and he went into the Guild, he was setting up with his own studio, and his father helped him out with that. But he still kept this very close relationship with Verrocchio. So that was really how his artistic life was formed, was in the studio setting with him. Following such an extensive education, Leonardo needed to make a name on his own, but these were difficult times. An attempt had been made on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life in the infamous Pazzi conspiracy. Lorenzo’s brother was killed, but he survived. The conspirators were soon caught and executed. Leonardo would sketch the hanging body of one of the collaborators, Bernardo Di Bandino Barancelli. At around the same time, Leonardo received one of his earliest known commissions in Florence. The adoration of the Magi. But he would leave this painting unfinished. Leonardo was a perfectionist when it came to art, and he sometimes left works unfinished, and in some cases, he abandoned pictures. I think he aimed at finishing pictures, and some of them did get finished. But the problem is, along the way, he can always see another way of doing it. He can see a different bit of the composition, a different emotional context, a different landscape. So it’s very difficult in that circumstance to say, yeah, I’ve really finished with this picture. He was always on the move, you know, to Venice and then to Rome, and then back to Florence, and then back to Rome. And then he himself put about this idea that he didn’t finish things because he could then say, boy, imagine what it’d been like if it’d been finished. And that was, I think, common, and probably still is a bit. He did have a clear sense of finished pictures. The last supper was finished. Mona Lisa is pretty much finished, I think, and quite a number of paintings are finished. But it was a difficult job getting to that point. Leonardo was now a part of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court, and after surviving the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo’s power in Florence only grew. But he needed to secure a peace with the powerful Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo would travel to Milan to help achieve this goal. Leonardo was working at the court in Milan, and his employment gave him the time and money to pursue his very wide interest, both in the arts and sciences. So, it was a very important time for his work. Somebody like the Duke of Milan rang you up and said, You know, hey, why don’t you come and work for me? Then, you know, you said, OK. Didn’t say no to people like that. He probably lived a very various life. We don’t have eyewitness descriptions, but he was doing this and that within the court. He complained often that the court duties were getting in the way of his quest for fame to do immortal works, as it were. So. He’d be diverted from project to project, ranging from military engineering, civil engineering, architecture, stage design, very varied. I think it suited him quite well because we know he’s got this restless intellect and restless creativity. Ludovico Sforza was obviously impressed, and Leonardo would work in the city for almost two decades. It would be Sforza who would commission the last Supper. Ludovico employed Leonardo for 19 years, not without signs of frustration. In the last Supper, he writes to a secretary, saying, Get Leonardo going and get him onto the next wall. So there was that element of frustration. But I think all patrons, including Ludovico, knew they got someone amazing. That was a great virtuoso. Whilst in Milan, Leonardo would create one of his most enigmatic portraits, The Lady with an Ermine. The subject of the painting is Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludvico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. She came from a bourgeois family in Siena, but obviously had a very nice dad, I think, because she was taught all the things that her brothers were taught. She was taught maths and Latin and all that sort of stuff. Da Vinci started painting her portrait in 1489, and she was quite an unusual character for the time. She hosted almost what we could now describe as a salon, so all the intellects of the day. From Milan would meet with her, and she would invite Da Vinci to join. The animal in the painting is an ermine, and I say that firmly because it doesn’t make sense as anything else. The ermine was a symbol of purity. It wouldn’t go across a bog, it would rather be captured by a hunter. It was also a symbol of moderation. You may think for Duke’s Mistress, the symbol of purity is slightly anomalous, but that’s how it worked in the Renaissance. Must be an ermine. Ludviko was awarded the Order of the Ermine. Ermine became also his nickname. So that’s how art historians connected the subject of the painting to his mistress. Leonardo is only believed to have completed four oil paintings of women throughout his career. After his death, two of them, La Belfaronie and the Mona Lisa, would end up in the Louvre. But we’re not completely certain who were the sitters for these portraits. A third, the Ginevra di Benci, took a long time to finally be accepted as a Leonardo. But it was the portrait of Cecilia Gallarani, the lady with an ermine, that would have the most eventful history, and thanks to modern science, would continue to give us insight into the workings of a genius. There are three classes of people. Those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see. Leonardo da Vinci died in Amboise, in the Kingdom of France, on the 2nd of May 1519. The paintings that he had taken with him there now reside in the Louvre in Paris, But he left behind a whole plethora of works, both finished and unfinished, that would eventually be scattered all across the world. You’re just beginning the late 15th century to get artists recognised as kind of intellectual ornaments of the court. You’re beginning to get what I call the super artists, the Raphael considerably younger, Michelangelo a bit younger, who were becoming huge figures in their own right. And some of the Italian courts were beginning to accommodate this new brand of rising artists. The three titans of the Renaissance era, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, had such a profound impact that their works became treasured in a way unlike artists before them. And Cecilia Gallerani, the woman captured as the lady with an Ermine, owned a rare portrait completed by Leonardo, which would endure the most perilous journey of all before finding its new home in Poland. What happened to the portrait was it obviously was in the hands of Cecilia Gallerani. We know she had it in 1498. It was Isabella D’Este, from Mantua, who was avid to get the best artists working for her, said, Would you send the portrait? I’d like to compare it, one, with Giovanni Bellini, the great Phoenician artist. Cecilia wrote back and said, I can lend it to you, but it’s not a good likeness. But this is not the painter’s fault. I have changed a great deal in the intervening years. So we can be pretty sure that it was with the family, with Cecilia herself. Until her death. What happens to it then, we simply don’t know. For the first 300 years, we don’t know anything about it. But it was bought in about 1800 by a Polish prince, Adam Czartoryski, who purchased it in Italy. The young princess, Adam Jerzy, goes on a tour with his brother to Sicily. The brothers spend their time acquiring artworks. Among them, the famous Raphael and the Leonardo da Vinci painting. They knew that it was a Leonardo, but they didn’t know who the painting was of. When the picture was in the collection of Isabella Sartoryschi, they put an inscription on it, almost certainly at that time, saying La belle Franiere Leonardo da Vinci. So she got the right artist, but the wrong girl. It’s incredibly innovatory how that painting works. We think of Mona Lisa as very novel, but this is very novel as well. She’s there and she’s looking sideways and smiling. Now, who is she smiling at? What has drawn her attention? I think it’s almost certainly the Duke. So there’s a kind of triangular relationship. There’s us looking at her. She’s looking at the Duke. So we can imagine, almost certainly, that the person who she’s glancing at and smiling slightly is the Duke. And that is incredibly novel to build in this other presence in the painting, which is implied. The painting had arrived in Poland, where it resides today, but in the intervening years it travelled all across Europe as its owners attempted to protect it. The November uprising of 1830 meant that Isabella Czartoryska had to flee Warsaw, taking the lady with an ermine with her. The next time it was seen was in Paris, at the home of Adam Czartoryski. However, it had to be hidden in the basement as the Franco-Prussian war commenced. It returned to Warsaw in 1876, where it remained until the outbreak of the First World War, when the Czartoryski family took the painting, along with the rest of their collection, to Dresden. When Hitler invaded Poland, the Leonardo was seized from the Czartoryski estate. And it was taken back to Berlin. In 1939, just before the war, the atmosphere was quite jolly. Things weren’t looking very good, but nobody was expecting what was about to happen. From the west, Germans come, from the east, Russians come. The collection was moved to Ksieniawa, which is 16 kilometers from here. The palace in Ksieniawa gets plundered by the German army, but before that, the collection is moved here. To Paukinia. We’re not exactly sure where it was hidden, but I suspect it might be the secret room behind the library. TSs come in and steal the collection. The Gestapo moves in and takes over one wing of the palace. And as war continues, the village of Paukinia is witness to horrific things. It went to Berlin, to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. But then a very unpleasant Gauleiter of Poland, Hans Frank, decided that he wanted it. He then goes on the wall of his office. And in 1945, at the end of the war, he goes almost on the run with it, takes it to Silesia, to his country house, But the monuments men find it and bring it back to the Czarskowski Museum. Lady of the Ermine has an amazing status within Polish culture. We know that, Isabella… Greatly admired the Renaissance and saw herself as a kind of new Renaissance figure around about 1800. I think it’s got a huge totemic value in Poland, partly because not many countries have, you know, it’s one of six places where you can find a Leonardo, but also because it’s been through so much, as indeed has Poland, so I can see why they would identify very strongly with the sufferings of that picture. It’s been on postage stamps and so on, so this particular picture and Leonardo has sort of been absorbed within Polish culture. It’s become a Polish picture in a very profound sense. The lady with an ermine now takes pride of place in the Czartoryski collection. And recently, it’s given up some more of its secrets, thanks to some revolutionary technology, which has shed new light on Leonardo’s way of working. Modern scientific techniques offer great opportunities to look under the surface of paintings. So we know a lot more about Leonardo’s technique and what the paintings originally must have looked like. The layer amplification method, pioneered by Pascal Cotte, has shown us lots of things from the lower layers. Now we knew that Leonardo was a manic fiddler with paintings, he kept altering them and so on. And what this has shown is that the alterations are even more extensive than we suspected. It’s been shown recently that the background of the painting, which is now black, was originally a bluish grey. With a darker area of bluish grey, where there would have been shadow. The ermine has almost certainly been adjusted, though I think it’s more difficult to see than Pascale, Cotte claims. One of the most striking things that the layer method has come up with is the interlace pattern. We know that Leonardo loved these interlace patterns, these knots. He did them independently. You can see a whole lot of interlace on her costume we couldn’t previously see. What that method has done is to confirm or extend something which… We could already see in other paintings. Over the centuries, experts have had to piece together Leonardo’s body of work. In total, he only left behind around 20 or so paintings, many of them unfinished. He’s believed to have approached every single work differently, and as more paintings become accepted in his canon, we’ve learnt more about the amazing techniques he used. And his incredible manuscripts show the artistic breakthroughs that he made throughout his career. Leonardo looked at how light behaved in nature, and he was able to think about two aspects of it. One is tone, that’s to say, where does it exist on a scale of black to white, in a grey tone as it were. And he also thought about colours and how they related to that scale. He had this theory called the simple colours, or six colour theory, which was effectively that you could paint anything using… What we would now call the primary colours, plus black, white and, oddly enough, green, which she thought of as a primary colour. For reasons that elude me. You look at Cecilia Gallerani, Lady with the Ermine, You can see both. The individual colours are singing out in their proper notes, but they’re also part of a unified pattern of light and shade. Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake? One of the most notable features of the painting is the way the light behaves. Leonardo talked about light hitting things. He talked about percussione. So where the light hits at different angles, it makes different effects. And the percussione then rebounds. So if you look under her chin, you’ve got this rebound of light back into the shadow and under her hand as well. Leonardo was a great pioneer of this technique. But despite all his remarkable insights and achievements, even the great Leonardo doubted his own ability at times. I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have. In a sense, his ambition for painting and his sheer inventiveness made it very difficult for him to finish paintings. But at the end of the day, he finished the world’s most famous painting. Perhaps the second most famous painting, The Last Supper, and did the most famous drawing, The Vitruvian Man, so that’s not bad. Jan van Eyck left behind a remarkable legacy of works, including the spectacular Ghent Altarpiece, but very little evidence of who he exactly was. It’s one of the great mysteries of the history of art. He’s an interesting person who’s come out of that tradition of looking at stained glass and the whole sort of gothic uplift. Van Eyck was a key figure in the early Northern Renaissance. That would produce further great masters, such as Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer. After he died, his reputation would only grow and grow, and his paintings would become highly sought after by buyers and thieves alike. And in the process, the mysterious tale of the Van Eyck family would slowly be revealed. He’s one of the most skilled artists who ever painted, and I think he epitomises the reason that… Northern oil painting was admired all over Europe. He also got much more texture and more depth to his work. There’s a real technical achievement by Van Eyck. What we can be absolutely certain of is that Van Eyck was an extraordinary, skillful painter. The story of Jan van Eyck begins in the era of the Burgundian Netherlands, where the low countries came under the rule of the powerful dukes of Burgundy. We don’t know a lot about Van Eyck’s early life, and that’s fairly standard for Renaissance artists. We have a few archival documents that suggest that he lived in the area of Bruges. That’s where he made his home. He came to bruges in the low Countries, which was really important. Trading center and a center for the Dukes of Burgundy by the mid-1420s. He probably began as an apprentice, painting miniatures or painting illuminated manuscripts. We know that he had other members of his family who were also artists. The person particularly notable is Hubert. Who is mentioned on the inscription of the Ghent altarpiece. It’s presumed that Jan van Eyck was born in the early 1390s, likely in the town of Massaic in present-day Belgium. As for his elder brother, Hubert, he remains the biggest enigma of all. A lot of people guess that from his name, Van Eyck, gives us a big clue that he was from Massaic, which was an area near Liège. And his daughter actually ended up in a nunnery there after he died, which is kind of another clue that perhaps he was from there. And we also have some notes written by him about a painting written in the local dialect from there. So things would suggest that’s where he grew up, but we don’t know for sure. There’s a big question mark about the mysterious older brother of Jan Van Eyck. Was Hubert van Eyck in fact a great artist? The reason that it’s tricky to answer is there’s not a single extant work that we know was by Hubert. But in the 19th century, during a cleaning of the Ghent Altarpiece, a mysterious inscription was uncovered. And this inscription suggested that Hubert van Eyck was actually the great artist, and Jan was second in art. Imagine that Larry Michelangelo’s brother was suddenly revealed as the author or co-author of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It was that big a deal. Hubert would die in 1426, most likely only still in his 30s. His younger brother would be the one who would establish the Van Eyck legacy forever. But in order to do that, he would need a powerful patron. Early in his career, that came in the form of the authoritarian John III of Bavaria, who was known as John the Pitiless because of his cruelty. Pitiless John would be poisoned, though, whereas Jan van Eyck would see his status rise considerably. When he was appointed to the Court of Philip the Good, the powerful Duke of Burgundy. Philip the Good was the Duke of Burgundy during the central part of Jan van Eyck’s life. They seem to have been friends as well as collaborators. Van Eyck worked for Philip the Good for 16 years. So that was a long time to work for somebody and to be in court that amount of time. Jan enjoyed a close proximity in his entourage as a courtier. Someone was active in the social and political aspects of court life. He was the official court painter. He was in charge of portraits for posterity of the family of the Duke of Burgundy. He became almost a diplomatic aide, as well as an artist. And, it seems, had quite a central… Role within that court. And that’s really where his career flourished. Whilst in the employment of Philip the Good, Jan van Eyck painted his earliest known portrait. But this work would only be attributed to him in the 19th century and in the intervening years. It even had the monogram of Albrecht Durer and a date of 1492 added to it somewhere along the way. This particular work may have been lost in the shuffle, but during his lifetime, Van Eyck did become highly sought after for the quality of his portraits. He may have even made one of himself. Well, we think it’s very likely to be a self-portrait. It’s referred to as a self-portrait, and it looks like a self-portrait. It’s the glance in his eyes that’s very similar to other self-portraits. But I think the thing that makes it seem most likely… Is the very clever inscription on the frame at the top. Jan van Eyck was clearly very pleased with his own ability, as he should be. In fact, in the frame for the portrait of a man in a red turban, which everyone thinks is a self-portrait, the frame says, which translates roughly as, it’s as well as I can do. And everybody knows it’s a perfectly miraculous portrait, so it’s false humility. It’s also Eyck, a pun on Van Eyck’s name. That headdress that people often call a turban wasn’t really a turban. It was actually a style of headgear called a chaperon, and it had a long piece of fabric that was often wound around the head, and then the whole thing was placed on a sort of fabric roll. Later in his career, Van Eyck would paint a portrait of his wife, Margarita, in a work that may have been intended as a pair to his own self-portrait. He was credited with inventing oral painting, which is not true really, because that had all been around beforehand. But if we look at that fantastic self-portrait, one can see how cleverly he paints. He’s also somebody who’s come out of that tradition of looking at stained glass and also is using a sort of a white background to the laying. Layering of his paints and is obviously really, really smart on using glazes and overlays and letting paint dry in layers. Unfortunately, the most important portrait that Van Eyck was tasked to work on is now lost and is only known from copies. Philip the Good had been widowed twice and was considering marrying Isabella, the Portuguese Infanta, or daughter of the king. Van Eyck was sent to Portugal as part of an envoy to capture Isabella’s likeness. The mission was a success, and Isabella married Philip to become the next Duchess of Burgundy. One of the most important tasks that he had to carry out for Philip at Burgundy was to go to Portugal to paint the portrait of Isabella of Portugal, which was a very important function of a court painter in those times, days, long before photography, so Philip wanted to see what she looked like. He had a sort of dual purpose there, doing the portrait and also almost making links with the Portuguese royal family. That’s not just being a painter. That’s actually being allowed to go and intercede in politics, really. I think you can’t isolate it as, you know, this is an artist doing this. This is somebody who could do a lot of other things. Sadly, the portrait of Isabella that Van Eyck made as part of the royal wedding process has been lost at some point in time. But we do have another remarkable and mysterious painting called the Arnolfini Portrait, that may also have been connected to an important marriage. We assume the person who commissioned it is the man represented in the painting with his wife. We think he’s a member of the Arnolfini merchant family called Niccolo. We don’t know exactly why this portrait was made. Whether it commemorates a specific occasion, we simply don’t know. Depending on which art historian you ask, there are various interpretations of that painting. What I had always learned, and which sounds reasonable to me, is that painting actually meant to stand in for a wedding contract. Rather than having a piece of paper that is signed by eyewitnesses, the painting itself shows the couple getting married. And back at that time, you needed two eyewitnesses in order to have a marriage be legitimate. And inside a convex mirror that’s painted at the back of the room, there are two people who you can dimly see reflected in that convex mirror. One man in a red turban, who is almost certainly Jan van Eyck, and a second witness in a blue turban. The mirror itself has a frame which is full of really tiny representations of the passion of Christ, each one under what seems to be a tiny piece of glass, and you get the reflections. I think one of the things that Van Eyck really wants to show off in this painting is his skill of representing objects, textures, lighting, reflections. Van Eyck would die on the 9th of July 1441, at an age of roughly 50 years old. He’d had a very successful career working under the Duke of Burgundy, but we still have little information on the precise details of his life. We do know his reputation had sent him to foreign lands, and he may even have visited Jerusalem, judging by his accurate depiction of the city. In the painting, The Three Marys at the Tomb. But after his death, his name would not endure in the same way as the masters of the Italian Renaissance, And it would take many centuries for his true legacy to be pieced together. And in that time, his greatest work of all, the Ghent Altarpiece, would become the most stolen work of art in history. Jan van Eyck died in 1441, leaving behind many unfinished projects that were completed by his workshop. Over the centuries, some of his paintings went missing, including his portrait of Isabella of Portugal, now only known from the copies, and a painting of a woman bathing, which can be seen in a 17th-century work by William van Eyck. But while some of his works are now lost, his legacy and his influence on the Northern Renaissance remained. Van Eyck is often presented in histories as the inventor of oil painting. Well, we don’t actually think that’s the case now. But what we can be absolutely certain of is that Van Eyck was an extraordinary skillful painter with oil paint. He really showed the possibilities of oil paint, particularly in the depiction of light and reflections. What’s important is this real rendition of naturalism and realism, real characters. You’re looking at real people that almost have an interaction with the viewer. They’re sort of stepping out of the flat picture plane. And this realism really is the most important thing in the Northern Renaissance. It’s not the kind of classical element that comes in in the Italian Renaissance. Jan van Eyck is the symbol of the Northern Renaissance. And we tend to forget about the Northern Renaissance because we in the anglophone world have an obsession with the Italian Renaissance and Florence in particular. But running in parallel with it, and in many ways more advanced than the Italian Renaissance, was the Renaissance in Northern Europe, and Van Eyck was the centre of it. Jan Van Eyck had become known during his career for his remarkable and innovative portraits and his paintings of the Virgin Mary. But his most enduring work was the Ghent Altarpiece, which had initially been commissioned by his most elusive brother, Hubert van Eyck. A couple, two stitched. And his wife, Elizabeth Borland, commissioned Hubert initially. And then Jan, really, is the one who finished it off. So it’s a sort of collective piece. It’s very easy, as an art historian, to argue that the Ghent altarpiece is the single most important painting ever made, for a number of different reasons. The primary one is it was the first monumental oil painting. It was the first one on a grand scale, the first internationally famous oil painting. A real landmark in its naturalism, in its realism. I think people were completely taken aback by, if you look at the figures of Adam and Eve, they are so real. They are presenting someone that could be standing right in front of you. They almost pop out of the panels. It was in a chapel in what’s now the cathedral of St. Barvo, but was then the church of St. John, which was, he was, the protector of Ghent, So an important place to be based, an important place for it to be hung. That are thoughts that perhaps it was even mechanized, so parts of it would move, doors would open, the back panels would maybe be shown, and then the front. And even perhaps set to music. So it was potentially this all singing, all dancing, completely different artistic rendition of this very mystical Catholic story of the Lamb of Christ. The Ghent altarpiece quickly garnered an outstanding reputation that helped to establish the Van Eyck legacy. But it would have to endure a series of trials that could easily have seen it lost forever. It had to survive the Protestant Reformation, in particular the Beeldenstorm, where Catholic art was being destroyed across Europe. But that was just the start of its ordeals. The Ghent altarpiece is the most frequently stolen artwork in history. Everything bad that could possibly happen to a work of art has happened to this painting. There are 13 criminal incidents in its 600-year history, And it’s the subject of a whole lot of different mysteries, including several that are still enduring. Napoleon was the first to get his hands on the altarpiece by force during his occupation of Flanders. Napoleon is the first general that had a dedicated art theft unit. They had dedicated officers whose job it was to steal art, to appropriate art after an armistice, and to ship it back to Paris. To the new Louvre Museum, which was essentially a looted art storehouse for the Napoleonic Wars. Nobody knows exactly why, but the Napoleonic soldiers stole only the central panels, not the wing panels. Deneau, who was the first director of the Louvre, was very upset that they had only taken the central panels. This is like taking the Mona Lisa with her head missing. It was only a portion of this great masterpiece. The stolen panels were returned from the Louvre, but they were split apart once again, being pawned off and sold to a host of different owners, from the English art collector Edward Solly to the King of Prussia. The altarpiece then fell prey to another major conflict when German forces seized it during World War I. In the First World War, it took on a very political role within the Treaty of Assai, I think, because it became such a symbol of Belgium and of Ghent. And so it became this kind of symbolic thing that had to be returned to them. So in the Treaty of Assai, It was then returned. And it went on a train and people kind of went mad for it, waving flags, following the train. It had its own special carriage and was taken home and returned, as it were. The altarpiece was finally back home in Ghent. But it wouldn’t be long before it returned to Germany once again. It was a prize target for Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. The Ghent altarpiece was the most wanted work of art by the Nazis during the Second World War. It was the number one target of the ERR, which was the Nazi art theft Unit. I think it’s important to remember with this work that because it has taken on such an incredible stature in the history of art, It’s something that everyone wants to get their hands on. And that was no different for Hitler. For him, it was the ultimate prize. And he wanted it in the hands of the Nazis. He wanted it for his Führermuseum in Linz. The people in Ghent thought, during the Second World War, we’d better just send it off to the Vatican. And it was stopped en route in a place called Poole. And it was then that Hitler took that painting to Bavaria. It got… Put in the Neuschwanstein Palace for safety. Then it got moved to the salt mines in the Alta See. Then it got rescued by the monuments Men. They discovered it there in pretty poor shape, having been in a sort of damp salt mine for a long time. But then it was taken home and looked after. Before the Nazis got their hands on the Ghent Altarpiece, though, one panel, the Just Judges panel in the bottom left, had already been stolen. It still hasn’t been recovered to this day. On an April morning in 1934, Ghent was shocked to realise that one of the 12 panels of the Ghent altarpiece had disappeared in the night. Well, it’s thought that there may be self-portraits in there, so they may well have been one of Jan Van Eyck, there may well have been Hubert Van Eyck, And it’s also thought that Philip the Good was portrayed in it. So I guess it’s the one where the Van Eycks were showing themselves, taking ownership of the altarpiece. Conspiracy theorists say that the righteous judges panel was chosen for removal. Because it contains some key aspect of this coded treasure map that’s built into the Ghent Altarpiece. For more practical reasons, it was one of the panels that was most easily accessible to thieves. It’s thought that it has been destroyed, but there are all sorts of clues and comments that it’s still remaining in the cathedral. It is implausible that it was intentionally destroyed. It’s like setting fire to a briefcase full of money. It just doesn’t make sense. They’ve done huge x-rays of the cathedral walls underneath and still never found anything. But the case is still open. So who knows? It may still be out there. Every year, there are dozens of anonymous… Tips that come in to the Ghent Police or to the Bishopric of St. Bavo with a hot tip as to where the lost panel can be found. And sometimes they sound totally crazy. Sometimes they sound plausible enough that the police investigate. Once, an anonymous tip came in that they would find the painting under the floorboards of the Ghent house, and the floorboards were taken up, but nothing was there. But the investigations continue. And whenever there’s a new piece of news, it makes big headlines here. Never say never is what people say, but who knows? But things do surface. Things surface in the most unlikely places. So it’s always possible. A replica of the Just Judges panel was painted in 1945 as a replacement, but the original remains tantalisingly out of reach, much like the man behind it, Jan Van Eyck. From a biographer’s perspective, we don’t know much. The sort of things that last best are usually related to court cases. Jan Van Eyck managed to never get arrested, which is one of the reasons why we don’t know quite as much about him as, for instance, Caravaggio. He was so frequently in trouble with the law that we have a very accurate summary of his life. We may never learn much more about the lives of Jan Van Eyck and his brother Hubert than we know now, but we can appreciate the remarkable legacy that they left behind. Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers are some of the most iconic works of art in the world. They are considered nowadays indeed a symbol of the artist himself. They’ve just caught people’s imagination. Simple images, but the more you look at them, the more there is to see. These remarkable paintings are tied to one of the most legendary periods in art history, when Vincent lived and worked with Paul Gauguin in Arles, in the south of France. He saw the south of France as this promised land. It’d be bright, it’d be vivid, it would be a whole new world for him. His interests were in colour, and he felt there’d be a different palette. He got a yellow house and he got fields full of sunflowers and very inky blue nights with very starry skies. He said, I’m going to cover the house with sunflower paintings and I’m going to put them all over Gauguin’s room. The sunflowers would become a central part of Van Gogh’s enduring legacy. But one of them would sadly be lost forever. And another remains hidden away, somewhere in the world. One was destroyed during the Second World War. The other was last displayed in 1948, and it’s never been seen publicly since. The other five paintings have become so popular that they’ve reached record prices and travelled to all corners of the globe. Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word, I can only call yellow. Pale, salty yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is. Vincent van Gogh had only started a career as an artist in his late twenties. He moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer, in 1886. The Paris art scene had recently been swept away by the work of the Impressionists, but Vincent found little success or enjoyment in the city. His brother found him unbearable to be around at times, and it was agreed he should move down to the relative calm of Provence in the south. He had been in Paris, he spent his time in London, and before that he was in Northern Europe. Young artists quite often rebel against old artists and establish new things, and in the case of the impressionists, that was what had happened against them. academics. But then the new artists themselves become the establishment, thus leaving even younger artists to feel annoyed with them. And I think that Van Gogh felt trapped in Paris, to an extent. We know for sure that he actually wanted to go to Marseille, so it was probably meant as simply an in-between. He wanted to go and set up a little artist colony somewhere. They were very in vogue in those days. And he thought, Oh good, I’ll go to Arles and set up a little post-impressionist commune. You do see a difference of when he moved to the South. And this amazing colour, this vivid colour, which was something that he was really seeking out. Whilst in Arles, Vincent hoped he would eventually be joined by Paul Gauguin, whom he’d befriended whilst they were both living in Paris. I realise already that Gauguin hopes for success. He couldn’t do without Paris. He doesn’t foresee the infinity of poverty. Well, we do not know exactly how good they knew each other. I mean, they met at 87, they exchanged works of art. Van Gogh had to give two pictures for one of Gauguin. So that was the relationship between the two. It was obviously that Gauguin was considered higher in the hierarchy of artists at the time. Gauguin had the bigger reputation, so he gave one little picture of Martinique and got two sunflowers back. Gauguin gave Van Gogh landscape that he’d done in Martinique in the West Indies. And in return, Van Gogh gave him two still lifes of sunflowers. They were cut sunflowers lying on the table. And in a way, those were precursors to the much greater works that Van Gogh did when he went south to Arles. Van Gogh saw him as a like-minded artist. And in that period of early 1888, Gauguin was looking to take himself into a more primitive world. He wanted to get away from, almost get away from culture and the restraint that put on his painting. Vincent would have to be persistent in order to convince Gauguin to join him down in Arles. Van Gogh rented the Yellow House in Arles, which was the building where he was living, in May. And there was a spare bedroom, So he immediately wanted to share it with a fellow artist from Paris, because he thought it would be nice to work together. Life would be cheaper and it would be stimulating working with another contemporary artist. So he invited Gauguin to come south. We know that Gauguin was a bit resistant and there was quite a few letters passing between them. So they’re detailing how they’re working, what they’re up to. And I think Van Gogh was just desperate to get him to come there, to be the start of his studio of the South. Gauguin was a bit worried that Van Gogh might turn out to be rather a difficult housemate. And he varricated for a while, but in the end he came down to Arles. His ever attentive younger brother, Theo, who’s an art dealer, actually bribed, I think, Gauguin to go and really be his companion. As much as anything else. By buying a work a month from him for 250 francs. So there were all sorts of reasons for Gauguin to go. But I believe that Gauguin will never give up the battle of Paris. He has too much at heart and believes in a… Lasting success more than I do. It was while Vincent sat in hope of Gauguin’s arrival, that he began work on a series of sunflower paintings. He may have received the flowers themselves from a local gardener, Patience Escalier, whose portrait he’d recently completed. Van Gogh was looking for something to do in August. The weather was wet, so he couldn’t do the landscapes, which he loved to do. And he was hoping to do a portrait, but the sitter he had asked to come didn’t show up. So he thought flower store lives would be the nice thing to do. And sunflowers were at their height. The sunflower is something that, from quite early on, was almost a little emblem for him. So when he first arrived in Paris, you see these renderings of Montmarche, which was then much more of a village with countryside around. And you see the sunflowers, they’re not the main subject matter, but they’re dotted around. There’s a big difference between the sunflowers in Paris and the sunflowers in Arles. Namely, that the sunflowers in Arles are dying. And, of course, if you want to make pictures that sell, you have to show flowers that are blossoming. He liked especially worn out subjects. So whether this means cottages or old women, or worn out, so to say, sunflowers, that’s the same kind of category. There’s one theory that the sunflower symbolized devotion and loyalty. So it had this kind of symbolic nature already. But I think it really morphed into something that almost became like an extension of himself or a representation of him as an artist. Van Gogh would paint a fourth version against a yellow background that would become the most iconic painting of them all. For him, the sun and Provence and yellow all sort of came together in his mind. They are huge, dramatic flowers. I mean, they’re large and they grow very, very tall, so they’re very unusual and striking. They were also an interesting flower for him because of the interesting cycles that they have. They, first of all… Turn towards the sun. They turn towards where the sun rises in the east, so fields of sunflowers all face the same direction. And then when they get older, they get brown and the seeds dry up and they go to seed. So in the still life paintings, if you look closely, you’ll see the flowers are at different stages. Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance. I’m going like a painting locomotive. Paul Gauguin would finally arrive in Arles on 23rd October 1888. He was impressed with the sunflower paintings that Van Gogh had made to decorate his room, saying that he preferred them to another painting of sunflowers by Claude Monet, done seven years earlier. But this attempt to create an artist’s colony would not last long. We know that they were both quite inspired, and there were portraits painted, Gauguin painted, Van Gogh’s. There’s a picture of Van Gogh’s chair and Gauguin’s chair. And they visited local museums, they referenced other art together, so they were working quite closely together. They were quite different in their techniques and their approaches, but they both found it stimulating to work side by side and to talk about art. And they spent a lot of hours in the bars and cafes in the evenings, discussing the artists they liked and disliked. But they were both rather awkward characters, and after a few weeks, tensions really developed. I think their differences in approach quickly came to the fore. Tremendously, stratospherically bad, yes, and culminating in the famous story of going up for a walk, just thinking, I’ve got to get out of here, And hearing running feet and looking around and seeing Vincent sort of coming towards him with a strop for Eta, and just thinking, Oh, no, what have I done? Dear Theo. Paul Gauguin’s stay in Arles would come to a sudden and shocking end when Vincent mutilated his own ear during a psychotic episode. Well, we have Gauguin’s story. He says that they had a disagreement and Gauguin said he was going to leave. And this upset Van Gogh a great deal. Van Gogh supposedly charged at him with a knife, at which point, Gauguin made a hasty retreat to Paris and got out. And that evening, there’s the famous story of a Van Gogh cutting off part of his ear. He walked up the stairs to the bedroom and he pulled out his razor and he mutilated the lower part of his ear. Somehow, he saw the blood coming out and he put on his hat and walked across the square to the street that he called the Street of the Kind Girls, where the brothels were. He presented the fragment of flesh wrapped up in paper. To one of the girls. Of course, this was a terrible scandal, I mean, everyone talked about it, it was very unusual. It happened in one of the main squares in Arles. His neighbours all knew him as an artist, and, of course, he then became the mad artist. Although his stay in Arles ended in such tragic fashion. Van Gogh had finally achieved his artistic breakthrough and through his remarkable paintings, had claimed the sunflower as his own. After Van Gogh’s death, this series of seven paintings would scatter across the world, with each one having a remarkable story of its own. In time, they would be at the epicenter of a truly remarkable legacy. The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing. Brilliant color, well-arranged, resplendent. Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, seemingly destined to be a long-forgotten artist. His brother Theo, his greatest supporter, died just six months later. It would be Theo’s widow, Johanna Bonger, who made certain that Van Gogh and the Sunflowers would become the icons they are today. There was a small circle of connoisseurs, you could say, in modern art, who really thought that he could become something. And Johanna van Gogh-Bongen, the wife of Theo, decided to take all the works with her to Paris. Johanna had started off a project of her own, namely presenting for Gogh in Holland and afterwards to Germany. And then very quickly, he became really, really famous. The main thing about Johanna was that she was tenacious. She stuck in there and money that she got from sales, she used to finance and underwrite exhibitions. Then she published, I mean, a big moment in Van Gogh’s reputation was when his letters were published in 1914, and then his letters to Theo, and vice versa. The letters in 1914, that meant really the beginning of the popularity of Van Gogh abroad as well. The sunflower soon became a symbol of Van Gogh himself. One of the earliest exhibitions of his works featured a sunflower on the catalogue cover, created by another Dutch artist called Richard Roland Holst. Paul Gauguin would also paint a series of sunflower paintings himself, having left France and travelled to Tahiti. Gauguin loved Van Gogh’s sunflowers and asked if he could have copies, and Van Gogh, rather generously, made two copies for Gauguin, But they were never delivered. And we don’t know why. They have become an emblem of him. There’s something that he felt, and he said it himself, particularly drawn to. They were a manifestation of the way that he was feeling. So I think that’s why they have taken on this kind of emblematic, almost signature status in his work. And why they’ve become so famous, why you see them on fridge magnets and tea towels, and they are, you know, very life-giving, bright image, But at the same time, they’re a reflection of someone who has had a lot of torment and struggling. It’s quite an interesting duality. A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue backgrounds, from the palest veronese to royal blue, framed with thin lathes painted in orange lead, sort of effect of stained glass windows of a gothic church. Van Gogh had painted a series of cut sunflowers when he was living in Paris, and the flowers had featured in several other paintings. But it was the series of four sunflower works painted in Arles that would capture the hearts and minds of so many. Van Gogh would later paint three repetitions of the two versions that he had placed in Gauguin’s Rue Minard. As Van Gogh’s reputation began to take off, these seven paintings would travel all across the world. It’s an astonishing rise to fame. Van Gogh was unable to sell paintings during his lifetime. He began to be appreciated gradually to avant-garde art lovers, in Paris in particular. It spread to England, it spread to Denmark already, Norway even, and then gradually it crossed the ocean to America. And then, gradually, throughout the 20th century, he’s become more and more famous. It just seems it’s endless. Also, Japan followed quite early on, simply because there were a lot of Japanese artists studying in Paris. It would be one of the Sunflower series. That would be the very first Van Gogh painting to make its way to Japan. This version of Six Sunflowers was purchased by Koyato Yamamoto, a Japanese businessman from the town of Ashiya. But sadly, it would be lost forever, and for many decades, it was thought that any full-colour reproductions of the painting simply didn’t exist. That painting, unfortunately, was destroyed during the Second World War. On the day that Hiroshima was bombed, there was another bombing attack on the Shia, where this painting was hanging and it was burnt. Whilst I was working on my book on the Sunflowers, I tracked down a 1920s reproduction of the painting. It was published in Japan, and it’s a very rare reproduction. It’s probably the only copy that survives in a museum dedicated to a Japanese writer. And I asked if they could send a copy of the image. And when it arrived, I was astonished that the image had a red border around the sunflowers. And the museum had assumed that it was just added by the printer. But I looked at Van Gogh’s letters, and he describes how he made a wooden frame. Painted orange to contrast with the blue background. So we now have a good image of what the painting actually looked like, and, more importantly, we have an image of the way that Van Gogh wanted it presented, this wonderful blue, rich background with an orange border around it. One of the four original Arles Sunflowers paintings was acquired by the National Gallery in London from Johanna Bonger herself. Another original would make its way to Germany. Where it resides today in Munich. It had first travelled to Berlin, though, when it caught the eye of Paul Kassirer. Paul Kassirer, who was this big dealer in Berlin, really introduced Vincent to a German audience. And I think the notion of the troubled genius was quite ingrained in the German soul, you know what I mean? And they recognised something that was perhaps not entirely true. That was really the beginning of the Van Gogh liftoff. I think it’s one of those things where they became perhaps one of the most iconic. Images collectively, ever in the history of art. So they’ve become extremely coveted, and they’ve ended up in different public collections all over the world. The very first of the Arles series, the Three Sunflowers painting, remains elusive. It’s the only one of the surviving versions that’s not located in a museum. It was first purchased by Octave Mirbeau in 1891 and may have been the very first painting of Van Gogh’s purchased after his death. Since then, though, its movements and whereabouts have remained mysterious. The three sunflowers has only been shown once in the Second World War, in 1948, in Cleveland, Ohio, Just for six weeks, and it’s never been seen publicly since then. It now belongs to an extremely private individual collector who actually owns a handful of very important Van Gogh paintings. The three repetitions of the sunflowers that Van Gogh painted have their own remarkable story to tell. One was eventually purchased by Carol Tyson, an American artist and businessman from Philadelphia, and after his death, it would soon enter the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Another always stayed in the Van Gogh family and is now a centrepiece of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The third was acquired in 1894 by a friend of Paul Gauguin’s, Emile Schuffenecker. One of the earliest collectors of Van Gogh’s. Nearly a century later, the painting completely changed the art market when it sold for £25 million to a Japanese insurance company. It now takes pride of place at the Sompō Museum of Art in Tokyo. If Jeannine has the peony, quoste the hollyhock, I indeed, before others have taken the sunflower. Van Gogh’s remarkable reputation and his fascinating period in Arles with another of the great post-impressionists, Paul Gauguin, remains completely intertwined with his series of sunflower paintings. Their iconic status is assured. I think his works are completely unique. They are so emotionally arresting. They are so vivid and coupling that with what we know of his life through his writings and letters. He’s incredibly intriguing and exposing. It’s really getting down to the depths of a person. So he’s sort of become this mythic artist. And I think it’s quite rare that you have the depth of understanding of how someone was feeling, especially in someone with such extreme mental ill health and imbalance. It is just fascinating to look at the correspondence between what was happening in his life. And really, a lot of his most famous works come out of the times when he was suffering the most. Although he was a rebel, he subverted art from within. So although he tried to be anti-traditionalist, he painted landscapes, he painted flower paintings, but all the good flowers have been taken. You know, people have done sort of roses and peonies and that sort of stuff. And I think he thought he could claim the sunflowers. He said The sunflower is mine. Now they’re so iconic, they’re probably the most well-known works of art anywhere in the world. Capturing the changing nature of light was the lifelong obsession of Claude Monet, the father of Impressionism. He was looking at different light on the same subject matter. A fleeting art was meant to capture fleeting moments. We see Monet trying to use art as a kind of survey of his environment. The movement would have its roots in Paris, but would draw on diverse inspiration to achieve its artistic vision. There was already this bubbling faction that wanted to show something different, do something different. As Turner had actually been to France to look at French work, so Monet comes to London and sees Turner’s work. In London, they saw different conditions of light and atmosphere than they had seen in Paris. It would be a single painting, however, that would lend its name to this new movement, which would be pivotal in the story of modern art. It does look exactly like an impression. It’s like he’s gone out there, he’s rendered exactly what it feels like to be in that space and what’s before him. A landscape is only an impression, instantaneous. Hence the label they’ve given us. All because of me, for that matter. Monet was born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris in 1840. At the age of five, Monet with his family moved to the coastal town of Le Havre in Normandy. His father had aspirations for him to go into the family grocery business. But from a young age, Monet knew his future would be in art. We know from early on that he was drawing caricatures at school. He was doing little charcoal drawings. So he always had this kind of budding interest in art. As a young person, he was showing and selling work, which sort of means two things. It means that, you know, he’s rather good at art, but also… With a keen eye for making a bit of money. In love. He trained with somebody called Auchard, who I think I’d never heard of particularly, but turns out to have been a pupil of David. Jacques-Louis David was a near-classical French painter who was known for his austere and moral history paintings. One of his students, Jacques-François Auchard, was in turn the teacher of Monet. However, it would be an encounter with the landscape artist Eugène Boudin in Enfleur. That would set Monet on the course, which would determine the rest of his artistic output. I love that in art history, you get somebody who painted these really static, sort of pompier paintings, being the kind of grandfather of a man who paints blurry water. He was very much influenced by a chap called Boudin, who was actually a brilliant seaside artist. He really got monet into en plein air painting, you know, painting art. Doors instead of in a studio. And that’s one of the big, sort of dividing moments in French art history, I suppose, really. Boudin was one of the first people in French painting to be very interested in capturing weather conditions. And this is what he first began to teach Monet to do himself. It was a move by Monet to the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil, an area popular at the time. With artists which would see him take the idea of en plein air painting and elevate it to another level. He would also hone his style and develop his lifelong obsession of capturing the changes of light and colour. It was there that he really began to develop his art. Painting outdoors from life, being in nature and really representing the changing seasons, the changing atmosphere, really reflecting what it felt like to be in that landscape. They kind of coalesced as a gang, really, the Impressionists. So he’s there with Manet and Renoir, and they’re all, you know, painting each other wildly. And also, he buys a little flat-bottomed boat, which I think is so sweet, and starts painting. .Manoir. Out there, Manet, and Manet actually painted a couple of pictures of Monet at work. So we see him working in his boat, which was his sort of studio boat, specially crafted so that he could cruise around on the water, capturing the effects of light on water, the changing ripples, the reflections. That was something that he was continually fascinated with. Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more. Impressionists. Before moving to Argenteuil, however, Monet would find himself in London. The Franco-Prussian war had started. And in order to avoid conscription, Monet, along with fellow artist Pissarro, fled to England, where they would find inspiration from an older generation of British artists. We don’t think of London as a hotbed of avant-garde painting, But he and Pissarro came here and they saw Constable, and then, of course, you saw Turner. We know that Monet and Pissarro came to the National Gallery to see the paintings, but in particular to see the paintings of Turner. So he was looking at those amazing seascapes, landscapes, changing weather, quite dramatic, very free. He’s almost the impressionist before impressionism. As a city, London would also leave a lasting impression on Monet and his developing technique. Monet had already… Begun to paint in a very experimental, brightly coloured manner in the very late 1860s, 1869 in London. They saw different conditions of light and atmosphere than they had seen in Paris. Of course, we’re familiar with illustrations of Dickens London, which is pretty dire. All the business of coal going into the atmosphere, that type of fog was actually filtering the… Colours and the sort of thing that he was seeing. So that he could actually see or not see certain things and could actually record the impression of these tenuous forms. In 1871, Monet left London after being refused inclusion in the Royal Academy exhibition. He moved to Zaandam in the Netherlands, where he lived until the autumn of that year, when he moved to Argenteuil. In 1876, Monet, along with his two children and his wife, Camille, moved to Vétheuil, a small village to the northwest of Paris. They shared a house with Ernest Oschte, a patron and collector of the impressionist movement, alongside his wife, Alice, and their six children. In 1878, however, Oshday filed for bankruptcy and fled to Belgium. And later that year, Monet’s wife, Camille, was diagnosed with cancer. The following year, on the 5th of September, Camille passed away, which would prompt Monet to create one of his most haunting paintings. Camille, as she’s known in French, is featured quite a lot in his paintings from Women in the Garden quite early on. She was sort of this figure that embraced a lot of the modern fashions, and she was… A modern woman as conceived by Monet. He does this rather wonderful painting of her on her deathbed, which is a sort of flurry of whiteness. It’s a very strange and touching image. He watched her die and then painted, and he wrote about the process of death, and he was fascinated by it. actually, the transmutation of her face from presumably pink to white to grey to blue to green, he said. But it seemed to prove something that he was getting at in Impression Sunrise, which was that idea of life as evanescent and its evanescence expressed by changes in colour. He said of that that he was quite shocked because he found that he was actually just doing the painting and not really concentrating on his grief. And I think he was a bit surprised at himself. I mean, so surprised that actually he recorded that emotion. I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting. After the death of Camille, Monet would continue to live in Vétheuil with Alice Ochte. The death of Ernest in 1891 would give Monet and Alice the opportunity to marry. By this time, the two of them and their sizable families had moved to Giverny, a small village in Normandy. It would be here that Monet would create the perfect habitat to continue his life work of painting and documenting the changing nature of light. Right from the time he moved to Argentory, when he began to paint the whole area in canvas after canvas, we see Monet trying to use art as a kind of survey of his environment. But when he decided to build his own garden at Giverny, it was here he was creating his own world that he could go back to over and over and over again. That’d be all the plants that he wanted to paint. There were nasturtiums where he wanted them tumbling across the path, so it was quite heavily curated. He extended it and changed it. He added a water garden, which the nymphia and the water lilies came from. He really invested in it. He put in his Japanese bridge. He did a lot of planting of willows and lilies. His garden is an artwork. I can’t think of anybody who did that. I mean, Dali obviously sculpted his garden, but that was a work all of its own. It wasn’t so that he could then reproduce it in Endless. paintings. Monet would spend the remaining 40 years of his life in Giverny, studying the same things in ever-changing conditions. On December 5th, 1926, Monet passed away, leaving behind some of the most famous and arresting images in art history. But how did Monet first establish such a reputation? We can trace the origins of his fame back to a single painting, a painting which would unintentionally lend its name to an entire movement. For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment. Claude Monet is considered a master of his time, and his work is revered throughout the world. In 1874, however, Monet and his contemporaries were considered outsiders to the staid Parisian Salon. Working under the name of the Anonymous Society, this group of young artists decided to take action and exhibit their work themselves. I think it’s important to understand the time the system was the salon. These huge salons, multiple works stacked, hung one upon another, and they would be judged by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. And it was a pretty rigid system, which didn’t have a lot of room for anything avant-garde change. The art establishment was still very much committed to a kind of academic painting, and here were young painters carrying out their works in an entirely new, and what many thought, slapdash way. So there was already this bubbling faction that wanted to show something different, do something different, and there was no place to do it. So I think that’s essentially what brought them together. They were constantly turned down by the Salon. So they had to, you know, as a sort of salon des Refusés, as they say, salon of the Refused, they put on a show of their own. They found a space in the studio of a quite famous photographer, Nadar, on the Boulevard de Capucine. And at the beginning, it was 30 artists. Not necessarily all working in the same way, just all wanting to do something a little bit different and maybe challenge the status quo. One of the paintings Monet submitted to the exhibition was Impression Sunrise, a landscape depicting the port of Le Havre. It was part of a series of paintings Monet made of his hometown, one of which, the Museum at Le Havre, hangs in the National Gallery in London. Impression Sunrise, however, would be the most experimental. Impression Sunrise was probably painted in 1873, and our painting of the museum at Le Havre was probably painted at more or less the same time. In fact, if you look out to see, what you see is impression Sunrise. If you turn around and look into the city, what you see is our view of the museum at Le Havre. To compare it to the kind of works that were winning awards and being given accolades in the salon, I mean, it’s very instantly clear, quite how different this was. I mean, it looks like a sketch. It’s got quite an interesting range of colour. It’s just very free. You have a sense that it was painted at white heat very, very quickly, to capture a very transient change of atmosphere right at the beginning of the day. What we can see in that. painting. We see the beginnings of what would be called now his practice. Our picture of the museum is much calmer, is much more structured. Perhaps one of the reasons it’s much more structured is that it centers on a big piece of architecture. But if you look at the water in particular, the minute touches of flickering paint that depict it, you see that it is the same. Imagination at work. The efforts of Monet and the young group of artists, like many artists of avant-garde movements, were not met with critical praise. The Parisian artistic establishment could not seem to comprehend the exhibition’s artistic merit. Some critics were excited by it, saw it as a sort of a sea change and new ideas filtering in. And the excitement of that. There was also a lot of backlash, people finding it ridiculous, looking at the works and thinking, what is this? I’ve never seen anything like it, so unpolished. It was pretty badly reviewed, and, of course, famously, Impression Sunrise was, you know, roundly derided. It would be a review by the critic Louis Leroy, which would have lasting effects on the history of art. Louis Leroy was, he was actually a painter and a printmaker and a playwright. So he was quite an interesting kind of polymath in himself. But he was best known now as the journalist who coined the term impressionism. He was a very bad painter and, as a result, was a rather bitter critic. I think the two things often go together. He was a critic for a newspaper called The Chariot of the Week, which… Was the precursor a punch? In fact, if you look at old copies of Punch, you see that it’s called Punch, or the London Chauvery. He was kind of utterly shocked by what he saw, went in there and said that. That particular painting, that was the one that he honed in on, was as rushed as it would be to create a wallpaper design. People seem to think that it was a very negative review where he used this. It wasn’t particularly negative. He was, Leroy was… Clearly searching for a word to describe that sense of fleetingness in the picture. And he came and said it was an impression, and somehow it just stuck. That word was then adopted by what we now know as the Impressionist group. I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint. The painting Impression Sunrise, along with the rest of the exhibition, had garnered much attention, yet it still remained unsold. Monet would eventually sell the work to Ernest Ochte for 800 francs. Two years later, when Ochte declared bankruptcy and was forced to sell his assets, the painting would only fetch 210 francs. The collector who purchased it was Georges De Belliot. It would then be inherited by his only daughter, Victorie. Who bequeathed it to the Musée Marmottin in 1938. This is where the painting resides to this day. Although the term impressionism had been used before, it was from this moment onwards that the impressionist movement was born. Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne were all contemporaries of Monet and would be the prominent figures in the impressionist movement. The painters we now think of as the impressionists were very close in the late 1860s, throughout the 70s and into the 80s. They all seem to have painted each other and respected each other’s work. You know, certainly, Renoir, Manet and him were this sort of little unholy trinity. I think quite often seem to have slept with each other’s wives, as far as I can gather. Into the 80s, they began to diverge, they began to take up different interests, They began not to spend as much time with one another, but to develop their careers independently. After the impressionists, came the Post-Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists. All these movements would come and go and push art forwards into the modern era. The work of Monet, however, would never disappear from the public consciousness. It would be the 1980s, however, which would see two events… That would place Monet firmly in the centre of the art world once again. In 1980, after much restoration, Monet’s house and gardens in Giverny would be opened to the public. But it was 1985, which would see Monet’s masterpiece, Impression Sunrise, stolen from the Musée Marmottin in Paris. The theft in 1985 was actually, as art thefts go, pretty dramatic. It wasn’t a stealthy thing where someone came in and quickly cut the canvas out. It was almost like a bank robbery. Five masked men on a quiet Sunday morning, apparently under the instructions of a Japanese Yakuza gangster. He apparently said, you know, go and steal that picture. And they sold seven, I think, altogether. People were told to get down on the floor and they took the work from there and ran off and disappeared. So it was a sort of dramatic crime. Five years later, after 1985, there was a tip-off to the police that it could be in Corsica. They were found there because of a tip-off that one of the police commissars… Received when she was out in Japan, in Tokyo, I think, collecting some other stolen paintings. They did indeed find it in Corsica, where it had been kept for the five years, and it was returned. The theft and its subsequent return certainly raised awareness of this masterpiece. Monet, however, will always be more keenly associated with his later works from his garden in Giverny. But it was his unique view of his hometown of Le Havre, Impression Sunrise, which would give its name to the Impressionist movement, the movement for which Claude Monet will forever be the pioneer. Somebody said, what should we call it for the catalogue? He was going to call it Marina. Presumably, it would have been called Marinerism if it had stuck. And he just said, oh, I don’t know, you can’t call it view of Le Havre because it’s not a finished work. It’s just an impression. So let’s call it impression Sunrise. And it stuck. Monet professed not to like having his work being reduced to the term impressionism. On the other hand, he was perfectly aware. It was he who had given the name to this movement that they all shared and that that would go down in history. The girl with the pearl earring disappeared for hundreds of years, but it came back with a bang. The broad pearl earring has become an icon of Dutch 17th century art. It’s very expressive, it’s a mysterious painting, you want to know more, you want to know her story. Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate as to who the girl with the Pearl earring really is. This small portrait has captivated people the world over and draws them into the even greater mystery of the man who painted it, Johannes Vermeer. I believe Vermeer is one of the most mysterious artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Vermeer himself dropped off the radar for 200 years, and then you see him in the 19th century coming back. He wasn’t an artist who was particularly well known. Discoveries are still being made about the life of the elusive Vermeer, and other works from his era are starting to capture the public’s imagination. Every discovery around Vermeer is quite amazing. We’re talking about this tiny little oeuvre. And it’s very hard to come up with new facts and new figures. And the obsession with Vermeer will remain as the fame of the girl with a pearl earring continues to grow. There is a purity about that gaze. Some private, personal engagement with the viewer. It’s beauty, it’s enigmatic nature. It’s intriguing to look at. And then the book, and then the film, I think it made her famous all over the world. Thank you. Johannes Vermeer is now considered one of the greatest artists of the Dutch golden age of painting. But in his lifetime, he never reached the lofty status of his brilliant contemporaries. Rembrandt was the most important Dutch artist of the Golden Age. Rembrandt, of course, is known for his… Broad brushstrokes and his very inventive artistic mind. There were many others, and they include Franz Hau, who did fantastic portraits, and Jan Steyn, who owned an inn and who did rather bawdy pub scenes. Then you have painters like Jacob von Riesdell, who was doing new things with landscapes. So you really had a lot of different artists working in different genres across painting at that time. There was an explosion of artists, which was quite… Extraordinary, actually. Vermeer’s hometown of Delft was producing numerous great artists as it became a focal point in the blossoming Dutch Republic. And although a range of different artistic styles was emerging, there was a clear hierarchy in terms of the subject matter of paintings. History pieces, paintings that are portraying stories from antiquity, mythology or the Bible were the most important. Important paintings. Portraits probably came next, and then genre paintings of everyday life. Then you have the landscape genre, which is also ruins, seascapes, they all fit into there, and then still life. These kind of paintings were maybe not as high as seen by the theorists of the time, but collectors really wanted them. From the little evidence we have, it seems that Vermeer experimented with different styles, and at first, he attempted works that sat at the top of the established hierarchy. We have a religious scene of Christ in the house with Mary and Martha, and a painting of the Goddess Diana and her companions. But just as he began his career as an artist, his hometown of Delft was about to change drastically. Delft was one of the main towns. The western part of the Dutch Republic. Quite an interesting town when you think about developments in scientific and scholarly professions. So there was quite a lot going on. Delft today is not a particularly large city, but in Vermeer’s time, it was one of the major towns in the Netherlands. And it was comparatively wealthy, which made it a very good place for artists to be based. It had to do with trades. There were chambers of the Dutch East India Company and the West India Company. So there was trade with Asia and America. But more importantly, it was also an industrial city. There was beer being made, different kinds of fabrics and, of course, ceramics. Along with Vermeer, another great artist to be based in Delft was Carol Fabritius. But he would be killed when the city was devastated. On October 12th, 1654, in an event that came to be known as the Delft Thunderclap. The nation’s gunpowder artillery was all being kept in the city centre. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true. There was this huge gunpowder explosion. A quarter of the town was destroyed. Fabricius died in the studio collapse while he was working on a painting. For that reason, we only know a few of his paintings, about a dozen of paintings. He was only in his early 30s. He was really in the prime of his life. I’m pretty sure that Fabricius was so talented, or even the most talented student of Rembrandt, who made this fantastic goldfinch, which is also in the Mauritshuis, That he would have been much more known nowadays. I think he would have been world famous. Of course, because I think he’s a really excellent painter. Some scholars have suggested that Fabricius was the master who trained Vermeer, but that’s not at all certain. Their styles are quite different. It’s probably because of a poem that was published some years after Fabricius’s death, when it was suggested that Vermeer had risen from the flames like a phoenix to take over Fabricius’s role as the leading artist in Delft. After the shock of the Delft Thunderclap, Vermeer seems to have changed his direction as an artist and veered away from history and mythological painting. He first moved on to a genre scene called The Procurus, which may include a self-portrait. But with the maid asleep and a girl reading a letter by an open Window, he found his now quintessential style. Many of his paintings from then on featured a single woman, often wearing jewellery made from pearls. Almost all women Vermeer painters are wearing pearl earrings or pearl necklaces. And for that reason, of course, Vermeer is highly associated with pearls. Pearls were a luxury item, and he tended to paint well-to-do ladies. And, of course, visually, it adds interest. And you have an area of light and reflection, a little dot, which adds… Interest to a portrait. I think it’s really just showing this exotic, travelling, trading, pioneering aspect to society. That was really pervading then, with this merchant class that took on new powers and were art collectors. And it was a time when people started hanging art in their homes, normal people, merchants, the bourgeois classes who had really come to the fore in the Dutch Republic, started using paintings really as decoration, and there became a secondary market. Rather than buying direct from the artist. Trade was enormous, so people had money to spend, and the fact that they had money to spend and were from different stratas of society meant that they were also wanting different types of decoration for their homes. While Vermeer became known for his calm domestic interiors, he did also paint some exterior works, including a landscape of his hometown of Delft. And a couple of small paintings of little streets within Delft. One of this pair of paintings has gone missing, and the other has confused researchers for decades as to its exact location. Until now. Well, it’s something people have wondered about for many, many years, and there have been some very, very detailed studies, people looking at brickwork, people looking at maps, and where gardens used to lie. And now, all of a sudden, well, we’re here with what we believe is quite a conclusive answer. An Amsterdam art historian and professor made a very important discovery about where the little street was painted. The professor found a ledger from the 1860s with tax records about how much house owners on the Canals in Delft had paid. Professor Grijzenkraut went into a part of the archives that no one had ever consulted, registers about the maintenance of the canals in Delft. And the great thing is that these are very, very detailed. So they mention not only the houses and the width of the houses, but also the gates in between houses. And apparently there was just one location in Delft where you could find two gates next to each other. He then looked at the houses in the back of Vermeer’s painting, and they matched up with what was at the back of this street. So it does identify for the first time where the painting was done. Vermeer knew this place. His mother lived across the canal. His sister was in the neighbourhood. His aunt lived in that particular house. We know that the aunt worked in the Tripe trade in the local market, and they call it the Tripe gate, where the house was. It’s where she cut up and organised the tripe, ready for market. So, yeah, it was really quite a sort of poverty-stricken area. Perhaps he was there, sort of analysing where he came from and his roots. I think when you look at the oeuvre of Vermeer, I mean, you see that he made lots of interiors. But he only made three townscapes, a big few on Delft, two depictions of houses. And this is one of them, and the other one is gone. I mean, we do not know where it is. Looking at this and a new discovery, it makes clear that Vermeer really looked for places that he knew, which were important to him. So it would be interesting to go back to his interior scenes again and try to figure out if we can tell a little bit more about the significance of these locations for him. Aswad. Vermeer would die suddenly in Delft, at the age of 43, not far from the location of his little street. He would quickly fade into obscurity, unlike many other artists of his era. But nearly 200 years after his death, his name started to re-emerge from the shadows. But it would take even longer for his most iconic painting, The Girl with a pearl Earring, to be reclaimed by the world. In the same year that Johannes Vermeer was born, Delft welcomed another of the Netherlands’ most famous sons, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology. He likely knew Vermeer and may have even featured in two of his paintings. What we know for certain is that upon Vermeer’s sudden death, Van Leeuwenhoek would become executor of his estate. But that estate was not worth much at the time, And it would be nearly two centuries before the art world began to take another look at Vermeer. I think a lot of this is because Vermeer himself. He was fairly well known, he was well respected in his lifetime, But he really just dropped off the map. He was only discovered or rediscovered in the late 19th century. And especially in the beginning of the 20th century, people really tried to reconstruct his earth. There’s still this hunger for new information about Vermeer, what he did, who he was and what he made. The Girl with a pearl earring is now Vermeer’s most iconic work. But it actually was one of the very last of his paintings to be rediscovered. The existence of the painting was unknown for quite a long while. In 1881, it was found at an auction in the Aigues by a collector, Arnoldus Andries de Tombe. And before that time, nobody knew of the existence of the painting. It was sold as an anonymous painting. And Tore Berger, who was the art historian who rediscovered. Vermeer had done so 10 or 20 years earlier, and he was dead by this time, so he never saw the painting. Interesting that he didn’t see it, because actually he was a marvellous, marvellous man, I think. And he was tracking all over the place looking for Vermeers, and was just so delighted when he discovered Vermeer for himself. And he was astounded that people hadn’t really recognised this artist? It was seen at the auction, auction, or sale by two people who thought it might be a Vermeer. Nobody was interested. So the collector could buy the painting for just two guilders and 30 cents. That’s like a euro nowadays. So that’s nothing, even at those times. The painting was then cleaned, and when they cleaned it, the restorer noticed the Vermeer signature and it was later accepted by Bredius. Who was regarded as the most important Dutch art historian in the late 19th century. So it was then added to Vermeer’s oeuvre. Ever since the now iconic painting was unearthed, people have been developing theories as to her identity. Over the years, there’s been a lot of… Debate as to who the girl with the pearl earring really is. And some people have suggested that it could be Vermeer’s eldest daughter, who would have been around 12. Vermeer had 11 children and the house was full of people, it seems. It is possible that he would have been looking at his offspring and being able to recycle things that he saw in their young faces. It would make sense that it was a family member, someone that he didn’t have to pay for their time. They would sit down in front of him and he would have as long as he wanted. But it’s impossible to tell. We don’t know. That’s the thing with these kind of paintings. The girl with the pearl earring isn’t a true portrait. It’s what they called in the 17th century a so-called tronie. It’s a Dutch word. It just simply means a face or a head. It’s a representation of a character. Quite often, they have quite sort of vivid characteristics in their face, or they’re dressed in costume. So you might have an elderly woman, or a fisherman, or someone who is representing something. They weren’t meant as actual, identifiable likenesses of individuals, but more like character studies, just a face. The girl with the pearl earring maintains an enigmatic quality to it even now, especially in terms of the clothing that she’s wearing. Everybody thinks that it’s just a typical 17th century Dutch girl, but Dutch girls didn’t wear the kind of headscarves or Turban-like headscarf the girl is wearing. Artists love painting something like a turban. There were folds that you can really show your full artistic genius in showing this item. And also it shows a bit of exoticism. There was a lot of trade going in and out of Holland. In the Dutch Republic, you can see that items like this were coming back from afar. The Dutch ruled the waves, you know, and they were bringing stuff like beautiful baroque pearl earrings back to their cities. The painting is similar to another work by Vermeer of a young girl that resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But this painting hasn’t captured the modern public’s imagination in the same way. The study of a young girl at the Metropolitan is very similar to the girl with the pearl earring. Vermeer probably made that painting some years later than the girl at Mauritshuis. The young woman at the Metropolitan is simply not as good at painting. If you look at her, her face is rather flat, as is the dress that she’s wearing. It’s a different face. The girl with the pearl earring has a much more idolized face, which is still very appealing to most people. I think people all over the world like to look at her. I think she’s beautiful. A lot of people who visit the Mauritshuis have never heard of the painting in the Metropolitan, and they are mostly quite amazed that Vermeer did more of these Troney kind of paintings. It just doesn’t leap out with you at the same way. It’s a Vermeer. But it’s not of the same quality. The girl with a pearl earring has travelled extensively around the world for over a century as it became more and more famous, just like its creator. But it’s too fragile to continue travelling and will now remain permanently at its home in the newly refurbished Moritz House in the Hague. Moritz House has a small but fantastic collection of Dutch golden age art. The girl with the pearly Earring was probably among the half dozen most important pictures in the 20th century. But it’s really only in the last few years that it’s become the icon. It has to do with the impacts the painting has when you look at it. It’s beauty, it’s enigmatic nature, it’s intriguing to look at. And death, of course, is the most important reason for her pain. It is a wonderful image. I mean, it is very appealing. The girl looking out against the dark, almost black background. We’re not quite sure how old she is, what she’s thinking. She was used as the poster girl for a Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. I also saw her used as a sort of poster outside the Moritzhus. So it’s an image that we’re used to seeing. Of course, it was Tracy Chevalier’s novel and later film. Which has really made it even more well-known. It’s just taking the painting and illuminating it and bringing it to life with a completely fictional story. But I think that’s really caught people’s imagination and made them wonder more about the works themselves. Movies, books do attract a lot of extra visitors to the museum. People want to see this famous face in reality, like she is some kind of a superstar from a movie. Johannes Vermeer’s legacy reflects that of his most beloved painting, lost in the wilderness for centuries, but now renowned the world over. His paintings have gone from obscure curiosities to some of the most popular works of art in the world. And it seems as if this process may also be happening right now. To another of Delft’s artists, the tragically short-lived Carol Fabricius, and in particular, his painting of a goldfinch. It was used on the cover of this Donna Tartt book. That book was a bestseller. And the painting is implicated in the story. Words like that in culture, when people read about it, they want to see it. It’s good for the painting because it’s a very interesting portrait of just a gold finch. It’s painted, quite simply. If you look closely, the brushstrokes are quite rough in a way. And yet Fabricius has managed to capture the atmosphere and you really feel it’s a real bird that could almost fly off. It has another life, in the same way that the Girl with the Pearl Earring had their life. In books and film as well, you know, and I’m sure that the Tartt novel will end up as a film. The goldfinch has a way to go, but the girl with the pearl earring has risen so far. It’s now referred to by some as the Mona Lisa of the North. There are similarities, of course, between a girl with a pearl earring and a Mona Lisa in the Louvre. It has to do with the effects on people nowadays looking at those paintings and getting completely intrigued by this mysterious face that’s looking at them. And with the Mona Lisa, of course, it’s this smile. And with the girl with the pearl earring, she looks at you. But but why you want to know what’s inside her head? So it’s this intriguing part that that really connects those paintings to each other, but also to the public. Paul. Cézanne inspired the most lauded artists of the 20th century, but he struggled for years to achieve anywhere near their levels of success. Cézanne is now, I think, heralded as the father of modernism. The young Matisse and the young Picasso fell in love with Cézanne’s style. Today, one of Cézanne’s paintings is rumoured to have sold for the highest price in history. A painting is worth… What someone will pay for it? £158.4 million, which is astonishing. Another was stolen in a daring raid, only to be recovered in Serbia in 2012. Three men stormed into the gallery. One man had a gun and threatened the staff and the visitors, and the two others rushed upstairs and seized pictures from the wall. They just took the first things they could see and they were lucky to run off with something that was such a tremendously important work. Cézanne isolated himself in later life, having been shunned by many critics, but adored by young, up-and-coming artists. He was really working in an experimental manner, particularly in landscape painting. And back in Paris, other artists like Renoir, like Monet, were… Becoming fascinated to hear about what their once unruly friend was doing back alone, down south. His work would have an important and very profound influence on the younger generation of artists. However, it was only after his death that his true legacy would finally be established. So fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas. Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on the 19th of January 1839. Like most artists, Cézanne would soon be drawn to the bright lights of Paris, But it would be in Provence that he would create his greatest works. Cézanne’s father was a banker, so he was relatively well off, and they had a fairly comfortable home and existence in Aix-en-Provence, where Paul was brought up. His father wanted him to study law, but he decided to be an artist. Nonetheless, his father supported him for many, many years. Unusually for a painter, I think Cézanne came from immense privilege. He was a rich boy, not the typical background for most post-impressionist artists. Whilst growing up in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne was close friends with Baptiste Ambeil, who had become a well-known physicist in Paris. Émile Zola, one of France’s major literary figures, was also a school friend. The three of them became so close that they were known as the Three Inseparables. Amazingly, Émile Zola, one of the great writers of the second half of the 19th century in France, was… Cézanne’s closest boyhood friend. They grew up side by side, spent every day together, exploring in and around Aix, and had an extremely close friendship. It’s astonishing to have three such important people together in this provincial school. Well, they were sort of like the three musketeers, really. They were just all really good buds together and they were young and I think they just had a ball. They were very close to begin with when they were in their 20s, but they did fall out later. Cézanne made his way to Paris in 1861, having been encouraged to do so by Émile Zola. His work was often mocked by other artists of the era, but he found encouragement throughout his artistic struggles with the support of Camille Pissarro. I, too, was an Impressionist. I don’t conceal the fact. Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. But I wanted to make out of Impressionism… Something solid and lasting, like the art of the museums. He and Camille Pissarro met in the very early 1860s, both students of painting in Paris. They seem to have hit it off right away. They seem to have very quickly made friends with other artists who would become the Impressionists. Pissarro was a few years older than him and initially played a rather fatherly role. And Cézanne was very much influenced by Pissarro’s Impressionism. Cézanne famously didn’t really kind of get on with Impressionism, but he did get on very well with Pissarro. And I think when he was young, Cézanne had decided to follow Delacroix. And he painted these very kind of miserable, dark, tormented, dislikable paintings, really. Rapes and murders and blood and gore. And Pissarro, a painter of nature, took Cezanne under his wing and calmed him right down, got him to observe nature and to paint nature with a steady eye. I think really, Pissarro said, you know what, Paul, lighten up. I mean, literally, because he lightened up his palette. They went and painted en plein air, things that would remain in his practice for the rest of his life. I think they both really admired. What the other was trying to do, and both of them acknowledged the other as a master, which is actually sort of poignant and impressive. The rise of the impressionist painters was just beginning when Cézanne entered the art scene in Paris, but he was always on the periphery of the movement. Cézanne met all of the artists whom we now think of as the Impressionists. He was one of them in terms of being a friend. Stylistically, they didn’t at first think they had much in common. Though, in 1874, when they organized the first impressionist exhibition, they certainly invited Cézanne to join them. He was very much influenced by their style and the way that they were trying to capture the effects of light, capture the atmosphere of landscape, rather than the meticulous detail which painters traditionally use. He got the opportunity to show in a couple of their exhibitions. But he wasn’t really part of that band of brothers. He took things from it, but he felt that it was insubstantial. And so he tried to make it, as he said, more solid. He introduced sort of architecture to it, really. And if he’d started off looking back to Delacroix, By the end of his life, he was looking very much at Poussin and about the geometric structure of Poussin’s paintings, and became very important with Cézanne. Everybody’s going crazy over the Impressionists. What art needs is a poussin made over according to nature. There you have it, in a nutshell. Cézanne’s submissions to the Paris Salon were continually rejected for years, and he found himself drawn back to the warmer climates of Provence, where he’d grown up. It was here that he found his quintessential style. Paris never really suited. Cézanne, he was a bit of a loner, he was not very sociable, kind of gauche. Going home again to the landscape that he knew and loved, and now was free to spend all the time he wanted. Painting allowed him to get rid of worries about impressing other artists or impressing collectors, and just focus on what he wanted to do as a painter. He was much more independent in Provence, he wasn’t surrounded. By the Paris art scene and the Impressionists. And Cézanne forged his own path, if you like, and developed his own style, which is his contribution. I think it becomes more refined, the palette gets lighter. He becomes completely wedded really to this idea of using red, yellow and blue, using this method of painting in parallel. Dabs of paint that are structured on the canvas to reveal the shapes of the things that he’s trying to depict. Brushstrokes, areas of colour, really gave an atmosphere to his pictures, which is what makes him special. His father had died. He was living openly with his wife. It was a marriage the father never approved of. He had inherited money, inherited a house, and could really devote himself to nothing but painting. He says earlier he wants to make paintings that are going to be in museums, you know, so this is a high ambition. Cézanne’s painting of a hillside in Provence, now in the National Gallery in London, encapsulates the style that Cézanne was capturing with his many landscapes of the area. It would also become a highly influential work. The painting depicts either a hillside that may be… Be a quarry. We don’t know exactly where. But what’s special about it is the way that Cézanne painted it. Lots of small areas of colour, some of them reflecting on the stones of the rocks in the foreground and the fields in the background. This gives a sort of marvellous rhythm to the painting. So it’s really Cézanne at his best. Hillside in Provence is one of those pictures. Where art historians, when they look at it in the faceting of the rock, in the way in which the composition is built up. All on the surface, can begin to see the cubism that would come along 20 years later, the cubism of Picasso and Braque. This fragmenting of nature into brief moments of experience would prove enormously influential. World doesn’t understand me. And I don’t understand the world. And that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it. In his later life, Cézanne had become ever more isolated as he was beset by breakdowns of his personal relationships and his own health. But he was wrong about the world failing to understand him. Young artists who would define the artistic landscape of the next century were determined to seek out and learn from this reclusive genius. Paul Cézanne spent most of his life in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. The local community never really warmed to his artistic ambitions. But in 1895, Cézanne’s reputation would gain a significant boost when the Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave him his first ever solo exhibition. Ambroise Vollard was a very interesting, complicated man who set himself up as an art dealer. Around 1890. He spotted that the impressionists and the post-impressionists were doing something really important, and that also that he could make money by selling their work. He genuinely seems to have wanted to make a mark and show work. That was really breaking the mould, being different and being quite shocking. He gave Cézanne his first one-man exhibition in 1895. Cézanne was 56 or 57, you know, he really plugged away. I mean, you’ve got to give him full marks. Later on, he sold many of Cézanne’s works, and in 1914, he published one of the first books on Cézanne. Vollard played a major role in bringing Cézanne before the art-loving public. At the same time as Cézanne’s name was starting to grow in stature, the man himself was keen to remain as undisturbed as possible. He’d even broken off contact with his lifelong friend, Emile Zola, who had also made quite a name for himself in Paris. Zola published a novel called Bleu, which contained a character called Claude, who was obviously Cézanne, and also a hopelessly inadequate painter who ended up hanging himself in front of one of his own paintings. There’s a letter to Zola that Cézanne writes that’s saying, you know, I’m in receipt of the book, thank you very much. And that was the last time, really, that they had anything to do with each other. I think he was just terribly indiscreet, actually. I mean, I think he saw it as rather a sympathetic thing that Cézanne wasn’t understood. It was just that it caught Cézanne. I think he was probably feeling that the world didn’t love him anyway. And here it was being underlined by Zola. He didn’t need it. Although, when Zola died in 1902, Cézanne’s gardener said that Cézanne locked himself in his room and howled with grief. So, you know, typical friendship. Despite his deliberate attempts to isolate himself from most of the world, many artists were drawn to the works he was creating in Provence. His renown is an interesting thing. Already by 1881, 82, Renoir was going down to paint side by side with him in the South. Monet was inviting him to come up. They all seemed to realize that he was moving in an extraordinary direction. Towards the end of his life, he did increasingly have an influence on the younger generation of artists, artists such as Matisse and Picasso. He came to the attention of the young, and they made pilgrimages down to the, you know, Jeu de Buffon. He became an icon, really, of rebellion and youth, the James Dean of post-impressionism. Day’s coming with a single carrot freshly abs- will set off a revolution. Cézanne died in 1906 at the age of 67, having succumbed to pneumonia after being caught in a downpour whilst working in the countryside. A year after his passing, his works were exhibited in a retrospective in Paris at the Salon d’Automne. The art world would never be the same. At that show, he had over 50 paintings and they would have an important and very profound influence on the younger generation of artists who first saw his work in such quantities. It was seen as one of those moments where everything changes and it did. I think he then was brought to the wider attention of the general public, but specifically to other artists. It actually, I think did completely surprise. People because they saw all the work gathered together in the same place at the same time. And there are contemporary accounts of it, of people being astonished. That small core of people who had admired him for a decade or more, now, as it were, showed him to the wider world. And it’s at that point that you see Cézanne’s fame begin to spread beyond Paris, around the world. Cézanne would soon be considered one of the key figures of post-impressionism. All the major galleries of the world started to acquire his paintings. We bought the painting in 1926, relatively late, but using funds that Samuel Courtauld, the great industrialist, had given the National Gallery early in the 20s. Specifically to buy modern paintings. He felt we’d lagged behind in that area. Here was a very nice sum of money, and we started to buy all the major… Figures of French modernism beginning in the early 20s, finally coming around to Cézanne in 1925-26. Pablo Picasso was one of the new breed of artists that were particularly enamoured with Cézanne. And it’s thought that he referred to him as the father of us all. There’s that rather kind of sterile thing about where does modernism begin in painting? One of the places it begins certainly is with Cézanne. Because he changes a contract about really what a painting is. It no longer has a duty, so much to portray or recapture an image or a feeling, or a sensation, or impression. It really kind of owns up to the fact that it’s a painting. It says, well, you know, I could do it like this. They’re all quite openly experimental. So it becomes painting about painting, rather than painting about landscape. Picasso would go on to say that it was the difficulty. Looking at Cezanne’s pictures. You saw an artist working through problems of picture making, and you could follow that process. Picasso found that absolutely fascinating. Cézanne became such a sought-after artist that it’s thought that one of his paintings may have sold for the highest price ever, when the Qatari Royal Family purchased the card players in a private sale in 2012. These things are always very secret. It’s not been confirmed. And it was said that the price was $250 million or of that order, which might well make it the most expensive painting which has ever been sold. The reason that it was so expensive was that. The card players are seen as a sort of pivotal point in the canon of Western art history. Therefore, it’s something that actually is priceless in a way, and so much has been written about it. Some individuals were able to get their hands on a Cézanne by even more secretive means when the boy in the red vest was stolen in Switzerland in 2008. It would be four years before the painting was recovered in Serbia. Cézanne’s Boy with a red Vest was one of four important paintings which were stolen from the Berla Foundation in Zurich in 2008. This was a private collection which is open to the public. One Sunday afternoon, just before closure, three men stormed into the gallery. One man had a gun and threatened the staff and the visitors, and the two others rushed upstairs and seized four important impressionist and post-impressionist pictures from the wall, including the Cézanne. Well, it seems to be completely amateur. And stole the first four pictures they could lay their hands on, which, unfortunately for the Burle collection, happened to be a Cézanne, a Monet, a Degas and a Van Gogh. Boy with a red vest was recovered in Serbia in Belgrade, four years later. There were plain clothes policemen who were pretending to buy the picture and then they seized it. Although they say it was found in the boot of a car, the painting was slid between the lining of the top of the roof of the car and the car roof, so in a small bit. And it was sort of like pulled out, as if by magic it was found. I loved it that the man who’d stolen it was the man they caught was called Ivan. I mean, he’d have to be. It was a real B-movie stuff. And the car was stuffed with dollar notes and guns. Perfect. It was a huge relief for everyone that one of Cézanne’s greatest paintings was recovered undamaged. From his hideaway in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne produced works that have exerted a remarkable power over the artists that followed him. And despite his attempt at isolation, he still left a blueprint for modern art. Monet and Renoir were fervent admirers. And then a new generation, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, discovered him and… Renewed the fascination within the avant-garde. He wanted to make paintings. He was very happy to be on his own doing that. He just excluded everything else. Artists fell in love with Cézanne’s style, and it had a great influence on the art of the early 20th century. Although Cézanne initially inspired the avant-garde, he is now firmly established as one of the great masters of all time. Joseph Mallard William Turner was hailed as a prodigy from an early age, and he went on to have a remarkably successful painting career. He was incredibly well known during his lifetime and enjoyed a huge amount of success, But even some of his patrons were quite confused by what came up later. These experimental works would prove highly controversial amongst his contemporaries. Turner’s work changed a lot during his lifetime. He wasn’t just content to keep doing the same thing. He was derided for making terrible work with all sorts of unknown mixtures. His work started off rather realistic and then became more and more expressionist, almost abstract. To many critics, this was a step backwards. They couldn’t understand what he was doing. However, Turner’s later dramatic… Paintings would be adored by the impressionists and people who see them today. The impressionists really looked back at his works as being pioneering. Turner probably was the most revolutionary British artist of the 19th century. He becomes this extraordinary figure, revered, if you like, by those who understood his work, damned and dismissed by others. There are still many mysteries about Turner’s life. And even the fate of some of his works. Two of his paintings were stolen in Frankfurt in 1994, and only a strange sequence of events managed to bring them back where they belong. In 1843, when Turner was 68 years old, he exhibited a painting called Light and Colour, along with its companion piece, Shade and Darkness. They encapsulated the much more radical style that Turner had embraced in the latter stages of his career, and showed the inspiration he had taken from the theory of colours by Goethe. But a century and a half after these revolutionary works were first seen, they would vanish from a temporary exhibition in Frankfurt. There was an exhibition in Frankfurt on Goethe’s interest in colour and art, and the Tate Gallery lent two paintings by Turner, major works, which reflected Goethe’s colour theory. These are two late Turner paintings from the period in his life when he was making these rather amazing kind of proto-impressionist pieces. But they’re also allegorical, biblical themes, but they’re also an argument about Goethe. And because of that, they’d been chosen to be part of an exhibition in Frankfurt. These two wonderful paintings were stolen, along with one Caspar David Friedrich painting, which I think is sort of quite interesting. The robbers stayed behind and took the paintings during the night. I was director of programmes at the Tate, and my boss was the director, Nicholas Sirota, and he rang me early in the morning. Woke up and took this call and it was very hard to take in what he was saying, which was that a message had come through that these two Turner paintings had been stolen in the night. And it was really hard to know almost what Nick was saying. It was such an appalling message. But he finished that call by saying, you better bring your passport to work. It would be years before these turners would be seen by the public again. Tremendous efforts would be made to try and reclaim these key elements of Turner’s artistic legacy, a legacy that took a long time to be fully appreciated. To select, combine and concentrate. That which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape. Painter in his line as in the other departments of art. Turner was born in Covent Garden, London, in 1775. The exact date is still unknown, but there’s a record of his baptism on the 14th of May. Although he had the first name of Joseph, he went by his middle name of William throughout his life. Hannah is born in very, very… In modest circumstances, you know, it’s the son of a barber, grows up in Covent Garden. Turner started drawing at a really young age. We know that in 1786, he went to Margate and he made some sketches of the town. He was really from a very small boy, out and about making drawings from life. And later on, he went to go and visit an uncle in Berkshire in a place called Sunningwell. And we have a whole sketchbook that exists from that time and a watercolour of Oxford. So his father was immensely proud of him from a very early age. When Turner was 12 years old, his father put some of his drawings in the window of his barber’s shop and they sold. We know that. He bragged to an artist friend, saying, You know, my son is going to be an amazing painter, he’s going to be an incredible painter. So he was drawing and sketching from childhood, really, and then went on into the academy from 1789. The Royal Academy had only recently been established and was still headed by its very first president. Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of Turner’s artistic heroes. Reynolds himself would head the panel that admitted the precocious young turner to the school. Turner entered the school of the Royal Academy at the age of 14, which was very young, and he was a very good student. His education now would have been rather traditional, a lot of drawing of the human body, either from live models or from plaster casts. What we do know is that he did a lot of topographical drawing on the side, so he was to sort of support himself financially. He recognised this need for topographical drawings and then was in the academy. He first of all started working in the plaster galleries and then moved on. There’s one extant self-portrait from his period, I was a young man there, and he was very able. He was just a star pupil, I think, from the beginning. Turner exhibited his first oil painting whilst at the Royal Academy, Fisherman at Sea, which shows a nocturnal scene on the English South coast. But Turner had high ambitions and travelled across Europe to learn from the great masters at the best collections, including the Louvre. He was able to achieve his dreams, thanks in part to the support of Walter Fawkes. Walter Fawkes was a Yorkshire landowner. Who lived near Leeds in Wharfdale. And he spotted Turner’s abilities early. And when Turner was 22, he commissioned him to do a series of watercolours of his estate. Fawkes was an early patron, somebody who believed in his talent and who was giving him money and buying things off him, which, if you’re a young student just out of college, is enormously exciting. Walter Fawkes’ home became almost a second home for Turner. He spent a huge amount of time there. Fawkes became really a strong patron and supporter, but also just a really good friend. It made somewhere for him to go outside of London. Turner’s career went from strength to strength, and he became one of the most celebrated artists of his era. But despite his fame, we know little about his personal life. He never married, but he may have had two daughters with a widow named Sarah Danby. I hate married men. They never make any sacrifices to the arts, but are always thinking of their duties to their wives or families. Or some rubbish of that sort. Later in his career, Turner started to lose the critical praise he’d become accustomed to with works such as The Fighting Temeraire, first exhibited in 1839. His paintings began to lose a focus on specific details, and his mature style, seen in snowstorm and Rain, steam and Speed, would instead highlight dramatic scenes of shimmering light. Critics were not impressed. His work started off rather realistic, and then became more and more expressionist, or some of them, in the later years, almost abstract. And, of course, to many critics, this was a step backwards. They couldn’t understand what he was doing. When they were first exhibited, they were regarded… Absolutely as sort of strange and very, very odd by some of the critics. I mean, they were sort of really dismissed by some as far too experimental. He took a lot of flack. And these are people who maybe supported him in his earlier career. He was incredibly well known during his lifetime and enjoyed a huge amount of success. But even some of his patrons were quite confused by what came up later. The critics were incredibly rude. There are some criticisms saying that they look like lobster salad, mustard, whitewash, soap suds. So I think they were just quite bemused. By these seemingly unfinished, quite mad, riotous paintings that were very different from what they’re used to. I mean, they’ve got wonderful kind of swirls of colour, but, of course, those things that were dismissed in Turner’s time have later been reappraised as great masterpieces. Turner would persevere with his radical style and made the pioneering decision to leave his works to the British nation. But this remarkable collection… Would suddenly be incomplete thanks to a theft in Frankfurt in 1994, but efforts were being made to make the collection whole once again. It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create. Joseph Mallard William Turner died on the nineteenth of December, Eighteen Fifty One. He was buried, as he had requested, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, next to his hero, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in an unconventional move. For the time, his large collection of finished paintings still in his possession were bequeathed to the British nation. He left his paintings and drawings to the state, which was an unusual thing to do, and it was a huge amount of material. There were 300 oil paintings and 30,000 drawings and watercolours. Turner left a lot of money, a small fortune, really. He left some money to the Royal Academy, who have since given the Turner Medal, and also to the National Gallery, which took the large bulk of his paintings, which we now know in the Tate, in the claw wing. There have been occasions through 18th, 19th and certainly in… 20th century, when artists have done wonderful things of donating works. But Turner was determined not just to kind of leave a few paintings, but to really leave the very best. We were lucky to have this bequest. But he also wanted to make sure that his life’s work was going to be looked after, was going to be kept together. And that people could learn from it and see what a great artist he was. I mean, I think he was very interested in that whole idea of being somebody who had been breaking new ground. I think to leave that body of work, his entirety of his career, to this day was really something special, was unique and something that was unprecedented. Indistinctness is my forte. Only two decades after Turner’s death, his paintings found a whole new group of devotees on the continent, the Impressionists, who were particularly taken with his later works. That had once proved so controversial. In terms of mindset, we can definitely see that Turner was a real precursor to the Impressionists. He was looking at natural effects, atmosphere, light effects, changing feelings during the day. shadow, darkness, light, how colour affects the renderings of what you’re seeing. So it was really a similar approach, and it was definitely a precursor. And we know that some of the impressionists would have seen his work. It was Monet, in particular, who discovered Turner. Monet fled to London in 1870 because of the Franco-Prussian War. And during this period, he became interested in British artists, not surprisingly, and above all, we know that he was heavily influenced by Turner. As well as Whistler, another artist, again, who was looking at the effect of light and colour and atmosphere at different times of the day. And this, obviously, with his series, became completely intrinsic to Monet’s work. Monet seemed to have really knuckled down and done quite a lot of work. I mean, there are a number of paintings that show London at the time, which are very exciting. The direct influence on the emerging impressionist movement is clear. However, some art historians have speculated that part of Turner’s output could even be seen as Expressionist. He was capturing a moment, capturing the weather, capturing the feel of how it was to be in something. How much that was in his mind and expressing his own feelings, it’s hard to tell, but he was definitely an expressionist in the terms of… Capturing what it felt like to be in that very moment. There’s quite a lot of angst and turmoil in there, literally. And he’s obviously very, very interesting in replicating huge storms and big seas. That sort of clashing nature, those are very expressive things. Whether he was expressing a sort of internal world, it’s hard to know. What we do know is that he was trying to express what it felt like to be there. He did work from his preparatory sketches onto larger canvases, But he was really trying to recall the atmosphere, the effects, everything that he was looking at around him when he was drawing. In time. Turner attained the status of Britain’s greatest ever painter. But in 1994, there was great fear that his full collection of works would forever remain incomplete, when light and Colour, as well as its companion piece, Shade and Darkness, were stolen from the Kunsthalle Schoen in Frankfurt. The two missing paintings were especially important, as they illustrated Turner’s fascination with the writing of Goethe on the theory of colours. Goethe’s colour theory, which was quite new, was that he was looking at the physiological effects of colour, how they affected your mood, how colour was perceived from the individual. Rather than the way that every eye sees colour. So he was challenging Newton, he was challenging theories that had gone before and really looking at colour through a different perspective. Turner became increasingly interested in the effects of light on the landscape and the challenge of depicting it in paint. And, interestingly enough, he titles some of his paintings after expressions that Goethe used. The two paintings that were stolen from the Goethe Exhibition in Frankfurt had been on loan from the Tate Gallery, London. They’re very important because they were part of the Turner bequest. So they’re part of those paintings that Turner himself decided should be donated by him to the nation. So they were of the highest importance within Turner’s work. They were actually on loan to the gallery from the Tate, and the thieves broke in. And they found themselves almost entrapped in the museum and ended up clambering over the guards. Essentially, and getting out. One of them was on the poster for the exhibition. So at one point, I thought, did the thieves take it because it was publicised? It was just on the poster. It was very hard to know. And initially, we at the Tate were very much waiting. Was this going to be a political thing? Was somebody going to be coming up for a ransom demand in a very immediate sense, or using this as some kind of almost hostage-taking? You don’t know. One was thrown so completely, so far outside my experience, or actually any of our experience of those of us working at the Tate, One just didn’t know what was going to happen next. It would be five years since Sandy Nairn received his initial early morning phone call, and with the painting still no closer to being found, it was feared that they might be lost forever. I think in the first five years, it’s fair to say that there certainly wasn’t a day that went by without thinking about the Turner paintings, But I wasn’t dealing with it all the time because there was nothing to deal with. And it was really only after five years that an opportunity came about. There was a lot of false leads, a lot of stuff came through. German lawyers would ring up, saying, oh, I think I’ve got somebody who might know something. That person might need a small fee to begin to start a conversation. None of it led to anything. But, of course, you kept hoping. The Frankfurt authorities had actually caught the thieves, but those thieves, once charged and convicted, had no information about the location of the paintings. And then, once the authorities knew that the paintings had seemed to have been handed on to others, they allowed us to work. They gave a kind of special status to a particular German lawyer, Herr Liebrucks, And it was through him that there was a just the possibility of. If a fee for information leading to recovery could be paid, then there was the possibility that the paintings might come back. The paintings were insured for 24 million pounds, which was paid to the Tate as a result of the disappearance. The Tate, however, decided that they would buy back the titles of the paintings from the insurance company. In order for them to remain in their possession if they were ever recovered. This would prove pivotal as Sandy would receive information which would take him back to Frankfurt in the hope of recovering one of the paintings. I had with me the head of Paintings Conservation from the Tate. And actually, we’d been about to leave, we were so fed up with nothing happening after days of waiting. And then eventually we got this call from Leighbrooke saying you should come, come now. And we went back into Frankfurt, went back to his office. There was the painting on the table and it was fantastic. I mean, it was a… Completely joyous moment of thinking after years, here was one of them. But, of course, it was only one. And then we had to work on the second. The first painting to be recovered was Shade and Darkness in… July 2000. But it would be another two years before Sandy would recapture the second. I presumed that it would be another six months, that we’d get the second one, the same people. We had to keep it quiet. Eventually, we got new information. So then we set up another operation, December 2002. And we had the same amazing moment of being there again with head of Painting Conservation to check it. And there it was, without a scratch, out of the frame. They’re longer in the frame, but still on its stretcher without a scratch. For me, there was huge relief to have spent eight and a half years and to know that these could go back on show. As parts of the national turn of the quest, be available again to a proper public. That was what was so exciting. The immediate feeling in the art world was great relief that the paintings had come back. They belonged to a public collection, they were a very important part of Turner’s bequest. Art, very quickly, people realized that it could cause a dangerous precedent and might encourage thieves to steal from galleries, so there is that concern. It’s a question of saying, what was the Tate’s duty? And in my view, and it was confirmed in law, that was the duty. To get them back and to pay a fee for recovery. The two paintings now reside back in their rightful home as property of the nation, just as Turner had wished. Despite their turbulent past, both works continue to be shared with other institutions around the world, allowing millions to enjoy the output of a true modern master. Rafael forms the trinity of Great Masters of the Italian High Renaissance, alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo. All three of these artists were working in Rome at the same time. What an exciting lot, really. They were multi-skilled, highly intelligent. Raphael was very, very admiring of Leonardo. He did work in all these different media and styles, and he was good at all of them. You know, no wonder Michelangelo hated him. While Michelangelo and Leonardo reached old age, Raphael would die suddenly at just 37. But in that time, he still produced a staggering array of works. Raphael was highly prolific. This was helped by the fact that he had a large studio. It’s said that he employed up to 50 assistants in his workshop. It was actually the largest workshop team that we know of for any renaissance artist, so it was really quite unprecedented in its scale. He was producing enormous amounts of drawings and paintings and commissions. Astonishing, actually, to have produced that amount of work during so little time. Many of Raphael’s paintings have been on truly remarkable journeys ever since his passing. One is even rumoured to have survived a shipwreck on its way to Sicily. Apparently, all of the cargo was lost and the Raphael painting was washed up in Genoa in its case. The painting was in a box, all nailed up and locked up, and it was open to reveal this kind of unbelievable masterpiece. It apparently had been saved by the gods. Because Raphael was such a perfect artist. There are all these sort of biblical parallels in the story that are trying to depict Raphael as a Christ figure in Renaissance painting. But despite his enormous fame and enduring reputation, some of Raphael’s works, including The Madonna of the Pinks, lost their attribution to the master. As the centuries went by. And ever since, it’s been a battle to reclaim his remarkable canon. Rafael was born Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino in the year 1483, but we know little about his early life. However, an early self-portrait that could very well be the Young Rafael demonstrates the talents of a tremendously gifted young artist. His father was court painter to Federico de Montefeltro and the Duke of Urbino, so he obviously came from an artistic background. We know that he was a very well-spoken man, according to Vasari, that he was educated, and that’s because he grew up in this court setting. And after his father’s death, it has been suggested that he carried on looking after the workshop and the studio. So he had a very early introduction into the world of painting and patronage. At some point in the late 15th century, Raphael left his hometown of Urbino and made his way to Umbria, where he was able to learn… From Pietro, Perugino. Perugino was another Renaissance painter from the Umbrian school. There’s some debate as to at what age Raphael got sent into his patronage, but we do know that he had worked. And he spent a few years in the workshop of Perugino. Perugino painted serene figures with beautiful landscapes in the background of his altarpieces. And this initially had quite an influence on Raphael’s style. Perugino was famous for painting pictures that were sweet. Raphael turned it into something else, he turned it into something sort of refined and fine. We know that they both worked in this very similar technique of applying the paint quite heavily, and we definitely know that. Raphael found this a very formative time in his career. Later in life, people could hardly distinguish Raphael’s work from Erudino’s work, which means that he was very adept at imitating his master and also very talented. Raphael completed his training around the age of 17. And his first known commission was the Baronchi Altarpiece, which was sadly damaged in an earthquake in the 18th century. Only a few fragments remain. He worked on several other altarpieces soon after for various churches as he lived the life of a nomadic artist. Inevitably, he would soon spend time in the blossoming city of Florence, where he came into contact with the other two legendary figures of of the era. There were three great masters of the Italian Renaissance. So there was first of all Leonardo, then Michelangelo, and then Raphael. Raphael was the younger of the trio. Leonardo was 30 years older and Michelangelo was eight years older. These two artists had a great influence on his own work. They’re the three greats of the High Renaissance. And what an exciting lot, really, is the first thing to say. And all very different. Raphael was very admiring of Leonardo. We can instantly see that he’s gleaning inspiration, technique, really looking at what was new, what was special about Da Vinci and taking it into his own work, but without losing his own sort of sense of colour and drama, which were really intrinsic to Raphael. Leonardo’s influence on Raphael was primarily about the movement and the position of bodies in the paintings. And when it comes to the Mona Lisa, the pose was one which Raphael also adopted in some of his own paintings. In terms of the work of Michelangelo, there’s a real sense of him, sort of looking at that monumental, sculptural aspect of the figures that you see with Michelangelo. And somehow, I think Raphael sort of softens those and makes them more classical, if you like. Way of revealing the body. There was no greater honour than to have the patronage of the Pope, and Raphael was in luck with the election of Julius II. The new pontiff was impressed with the talents of the young artist, and Raphael would be assigned to work at the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel. Pope Julius had a major influence. On Raphael, because in 1508, he invited Raphael to Rome, which was a major centre of the art world, and that’s really where Raphael made his career. He had, you know, all these commissions to give out, and one of them was for his library, the so-called Stanze, And those went to Raphael, who was relatively young and relatively little known. The Stanze della Signatura is now seen as one of his greatest masterpieces. It’s got the School of Athens. It’s got the Parnassus and the Disputar, now incredibly famous works. So he was straight away working in the Vatican, taking on these kind of ultimate commissions alongside Michelangelo’s work. In the Vatican. Michelangelo, of course, was a bitter old pig. So he seems to have hated Raphael from before he met him and was always going on about Raphael. Sort of stealing his work and stealing his ideas. Michelangelo loathed him, saw him as a copycat artist, said everything he knows he learned from me. So there was an instant dislike on the part of Michelangelo for the younger artist. I think he saw him as a threat. For all that… I must say Raphael included a portrait of Michelangelo in the School of Athens stanza, so, you know, it seems to be rather nicer than Michelangelo was. One of Raphael’s greatest paintings is the portrait of Pope Julius II, the man who was so taken with his work. The portrait inspired many copies, and for centuries it was thought that the Uffizi in Florence housed the original by Raphael, but recent scientific tests indicated otherwise. The portrait of Julius II is actually quite an unusual portrait for the time. Hopes tend to be rendered front on or completely in profile. And also it really captures a moment and he’s really thinking. You can see that he’s sort of lost in thought. It was said to frighten people at the time. There was a kind of living humanism in it. That bothered people in the Renaissance, because up until then, painters had tended to deal in ideals. Suddenly, here was this man who looks a bit sort of sad and beaten up, actually, he doesn’t look like a triumphant pope. There are several versions of Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius. It’s a wonderful portrait showing the very pensive pope. A lot of research has been done and the National Gallery have established that their version, dating from about 1511, is the original. We know that the original hangings in the background behind Pope Julius were blue and gold textiles. And there were symbols within that of the cross keys, the Papal keys. He then painted over this with the current background, and so this was masked. But we can see beneath it lie all these Papal clues. It was cleaned or x-rayed, I think in 1970. And they found an invoice mark on it that showed it had been in a collection that clearly meant it was the original. With X-Ray, we found a small number in the corner of this work, which directly corresponds with the references and records of the Borghese paintings. So this really validated it as the true original. Pope Julius II would die in 1513 to be succeeded by Pope Leo X. Raphael would be commissioned for his portrait as well. He was incredibly busy working on different projects at the Vatican and had an enormous workshop to help satisfy the demands of being such a successful artist. But at the height of his powers, it would all come to a tragic end. Raphael died suddenly in 1520 at the age of 37. And Vasari, the important early Italian art historian, said that it was the result of a night of passion. With his mysteries. He became increasingly ill over about 15 days, and it was really a sort of slow decline over those days. And he had the last rites and then he had this incredibly grand funeral. It all comes from Vasari. I desperately want to believe it. That said, the way that history was written in the Renaissance is very kind of different from now. You tried to write in a way that mimicked authoritative sources. The most authoritative source was the Bible. If Vasari is telling the truth, then… Raphael died on Good Friday, which is, of course, the day that our Lord ascended into heaven. There’s a definite tendency to depict Raphael as a kind of Christ figure in Vasari’s historiography. Raphael’s remarkable talents, especially in portraiture, would have a lasting impact on the artists that followed him. After his sudden death, his paintings would scatter across the globe as people clambered for works by one of the greats of the High Renaissance. And in that process, incredible events would unfold. Raphael died on the 6th of April 1520. He was buried in one of Rome’s most famous landmarks, the Pantheon. On his tomb was inscribed, Here lies that famous Raphael, by whom nature feared to be conquered while he lived. And when he was dying, feared herself to die. From that point on, many of Raphael’s most important works, including his portrait of his friend Baldassare Castiglione, would inspire future generations, and others would begin their incredibly eventful journey. Journeys to their homes today. The portrait of Baldassare Castiglione was very modern at the time. It’s very simple, it’s very naturalistic, it’s very pared back, it’s almost monochromatic. And we know that he’s wearing a winter dress, so it was painted around 1514. And we also know as a character, he probably would have wanted this kind of rendition of something that was very pared back, simple. This is what’s made it a completely timeless portrait, and why. So many other artists over the years have copied the pose. It’s had an astonishing influence, this painting. Titian saw it and did his own version based on it. Rembrandt saw it when it was auctioned in Amsterdam, and he did several self-portraits which were in a similar pose. And other artists have done copies of it, and they include such varied characters as Rubens and Matisse. So it’s had an enormous influence. It seems to crystallise something, and I’m sure, actually, that portraits of people that are not straight commissions, these are the portraits that actually really have a real intensity about them. Because the artist knows the sitter. And so that, I think, can be transferred through the business of painting. Other works to have an immediate and profound impact on the art world were the Raphael cartoons, which became a symbol… Of the achievements of the Renaissance. He was commissioned to make these enormously expensive tapestries for the lower walls. So you’ve got the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, and then lower down, I suppose, to protect the cardinals from the cold, you’ve got these rather luscious tapestries. Raphael did these full-size distemper on paper, so-called cartoons, I mean, fully worked-up paintings that Weavers could copy. We know that they’re focused on the axe. Of Peter and Paul. And really, he’s looking at the drama of the composition here, not so much detail. Because they’ll then be rendered by the tapestry factories in wool. So he wanted a dramatic composition that would really do it justice once they’d gone through to their new vision and tapestry. Raphael sent the tapestry, cartoons or drawings to Brussels where they were going to be woven, and they stayed in Brussels for some time. And were later bought by a collector in Genoa. And then Charles I of England, bought the cartoons and they came to the UK. Many years ago, they were put on long-term loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Just like the Raphael cartoons, many of his works have had to survive extensive travel across the world, passing through various royal and state collections. One of Raphael’s paintings of Christ falling on the way to Calvary has even developed its own mythology. Raphael had created the work for a Sicilian monastery called Lo Spasimo, but its journey there was fraught with peril. Vasari wrote a story about the painting to talk about the way. It was taken to Sicily, where it was due to go to a monastery. And there was a shipwreck. The boat that was going from Rome to Sicily was obviously blown far off course and went up to Genoa. The ship was completely destroyed and everything was turned to matchwood, apart from, miraculously, the picture, which floated its happy way to Genoa. And the Genoese looked at it and thought, Oh, look, that’s miraculous, we’re going to keep it. It was said that the waves and the wind respected Raphael’s work and wanted to save it. And then the monks at the monastery got word that it had been found. It had been rescued, and they then petitioned the pope to return the painting to them. In the 1660s, the painting was bought by Philip II of Spain, and it went to Madrid. And then, when Napoleon invaded Spain in the early 19th century, it was seized and taken by his troops to Paris and later returned. And it ended up in the Prado Museum, where it still is today, one of the most important paintings there. Christ falling on the way to Calvary is not the only work by Raphael to be seized by invading forces. The Nazis stole his portrait of a young man, which may very well be Raphael himself, and it’s potentially the most valuable missing work of art in the world. The portrait of a young man, or assumed self-portrait of Raphael, was taken by the Nazis from Poland during the Second World War. Most art historians, or many art historians, are in agreement that it’s probably the most valuable painting ever to go missing. In January 1945, when the allies were pushing forward into Poland, the painting just disappeared. We can recognise Raphael from his own self-portrait in the School of Athens. Similarities were drawn between the portrait of the young man and his own self-rendering in the School of Athens that point towards it being a self-portrait. It represents one of the very most important paintings that was lost during the Second World War. Leonardo’s masterpiece, The Lady with an Ermine, was also stolen, alongside the Raphael portrait. The monuments men would heroically rescue the Leonardo at the end of World War II. Sadly, the Raphael would not share the same luck. Not all of Raphael’s works have vanished in quite so dramatic a fashion. His Madonna of the Pinks has only recently been re-attributed to him. The painting was highly influenced by Leonardo’s own Benoît Madonna, a work that was lost for centuries before making a sensational reappearance. Not only did Raphael take inspiration from Leonardo during his lifetime, it would seem his paintings would also follow a similar journey. Twenty or so years ago, Nicholas Penny, who later became director of the National Gallery, was visiting Annick Castle, which belongs to the Duke of Northumberland. Nicholas Penny saw this painting in a corridor up there and thought that that was a very good… Painting. And he looked at it closely and he saw this pentimenti and was surprised and said, Well, you know, if this is a copy, this shouldn’t have this. He saw the painting and got interested in it and asked whether it could be examined. It wasn’t their painting, so they couldn’t take any paint samples as such. But they could really look very, very closely and look at the surface. It’s a completely beautiful painting. There’s a charming piece of transparent, veiled fabric that is just sort of lightly over the Madonna’s ear, which is just exquisite painting. There are literally dozens of copies of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, which shows the importance of the painting. And it was very difficult to establish which was the original. The test the National Gallery undertook would establish the painting as an original Raphael. They subsequently purchased the painting for £22 million in 2004. Although Raphael has always been considered a master, it would seem that even his great works could get lost in the shuffle of time. I think you just have to remember these are centuries-old paintings that are moved between collections. Records get lost, destroyed, changed, so it’s difficult to really match up. An exact record of what the artist’s inventory was, with an exact painting. They’ve become victims of their own success, so they get copied. So if you paint something that becomes an iconic picture, then everybody else is going to paint it as well. And not paint like it, they’re going to try and paint it. Not necessarily dishonestly, but just as a sort of testimony to its greatness. So I think a lot of works sat under a cloud of Is it by him, is it not by him, And also found themselves geographically scattered all over the world. In different hands, and just over time, some of them shrunk away from the public view. Raphael’s paintings have entranced people all over the world. And we can only be grateful that so many of them have managed to survive the trials and tribulations that they’ve been put through. And we can only hope that his missing portrait will also return to us one day.
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I paint paintings on an application using watercolors and oils. I am self-taught. Is it possible to sell them online?
……finger-painting gone wild.
wow
I love art. Study art . The Scream is ugly to me. Sorry.
Gli artisti in fondo sono tutti dei Pazzi. Nelle loro opere esprimono le loro ansie i loro drammi, le loro tragedie esistenziali. Gia' ne abbiamo tante X Cazzi nostri……😮 🍒
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