The Night Watch World s Greatest Paintings S01 E08

These are the stories of ten of the greatest paintings in the world. I'm Andrew Marr. Art, not politics, is the great passion of my life. For me, it gets to the heart of what it is to be human. In galleries across the globe, there are great paintings. Works made with almost supernatural skill, fierce passion and extraordinary brain power. Now I want to tell stories behind some of the most iconic images in history. Pictures like Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Turner's Fighting Temeraire. Paintings that represent the pinnacle of what people can do with paint and bristles. He created a brand new way of depicting the world. The colours would fizz and pop on the surface. It was like you could touch these people. It was like the portrait could speak to you. Behind every picture, there is a story. I'm going to peel back the layers to find out more about the lives of their creators and the worlds they came from. There was something about this middle-class Florentine housewife that intrigued him. Why are these the paintings we all know and love? How were they created? And what makes them the greatest paintings in the world? What makes a painting a masterpiece? That is, of course, a subjective judgement. But there are some paintings so important, so iconic, they come to represent an age or a culture or a nation. And it's these kind of pictures which very often form the centrepiece of the great museums and galleries of the world. All around the globe, there are images which speak to a nation in ways that no others can match. And here in Amsterdam, there is a canvas loved by the Dutch like no other. This colossal gallery at the heart of the vast and beautiful Rijksmuseum doesn't just contain the most important painting in Dutch history. It was actually built around it. In what feels like a huge secular chapel dedicated to Dutch art, there hangs Rembrandt's world-famous and utterly stupendous Night Watch. This was an act of risk-taking, almost of arrogance, created by the greatest Dutch artist at the very height of his powers. Now, it's nothing short of a national treasure. So what is it? It's a group portrait of a militia company, what you might call a platoon of Amsterdam's People's Army. There are 16 men visible in all. We know most of their names. Right at the centre, with that magnificent white ruff, is Frans Banning Cock, the commander of the militia, giving the order to advance. And beside him in the canary yellow is Willem van Ruttenberg, his lieutenant. All around the picture, there are different things going on. There's a dog barking, there's a young girl staring into the distance, there's a man cleaning his musket. Somebody else right in the centre has fired his musket by mistake and nearly hit in somebody else's hat. Rembrandt's characters feel so alive, they could almost jump off the canvas. But if they did, they wouldn't get very far. Now, if you've been watching really carefully, you may have noticed there is a strange big glass box around it. Now, why is that? And the answer is, it is being restored, properly for the first time in more than 40 years. For your average masterpiece, any major restoration would be carried out as far away from the prying eyes of the public as possible. But the Night Watch isn't average. It's not allowed to skulk or to take time out. People care about this picture so much that they're prepared to watch it being restored. If they're not prepared literally to watch paint dry, then they're prepared to watch varnish dry, which, you must admit, is kind of unusual. So what is it about this collection of rather chaotic, strutting, striding, would-be, unprofessional soldiers from another age in their impressive collection of strange hats and weird party clothes that gets so many people so emotional, so committed? It's a mystery that spans more than 300 years, takes in an artist's triumphant rise and tragic fall, and almost sees the Night Watch forgotten forever. This painting's story begins in a period of unrivalled creativity in Dutch art, made by new money and cutthroat competition. The Netherlands in the 17th century was a very, very particular environment because it had this growing, flourishing art market. You could buy a painting just for your weekly wage, and paintings were sold at markets, alongside kitchenware, chickens. So these weren't just objects for the extremely wealthy, but anyone could own works of art. This was a world of unequalled artistic production. Make it new, make it fast, make it different, with groundbreaking changes in technique, perspective and subject. Born in July 1606, Rembrandt had arrived into the Dutch Golden Age. Rembrandt was born in the Dutch town of Leiden, which is about half an hour away from Amsterdam, and he was born in a pretty kind of bourgeois family. His father was a miller, big family, lots of children. They managed to afford to send him to the local Latin school, so he learnt languages, he learnt about religion. But there was really only one thing that interested the young Rembrandt. His itch, his instinct, his determination was to be an artist, and at 14, he began his apprenticeship. He entered the workshop of a local artist, and that's where he learnt, as it were, the craft. He would have learnt how to draw, how to use colour, how to mix and make his own paints. It doesn't appear that he just wakes up and is suddenly a brilliant artist, but rather, in his early works, with our own eyes, we can see him progressing. Rembrandt's first canvases are full of mistakes. But each and every one ripples with ambition. They show daring colours, bold textures, and, above all, an unusual approach to lighting. He was a young artist who wanted urgently to be different, to produce a style that was his alone. This was the formative period for the young Rembrandt, and much of the thinking and the skill you can see in the Night Watch goes back to the Leyden years, when he was working on the consistency of his paint and finding new ways to portray light in a more dynamic fashion. His early masterpiece from that period, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, is spectacular because it is all about creating the drama of the scene and emphasising the drama through very dramatic lighting. Also, when you look at his very early self-portraits, there is one where almost his entire face is in shadow. It was this painting, created when Rembrandt was in his early 20s, that put him on the map. No-one had painted themselves in quite the same way before. This was one of the first of more than 80 self-portraits Rembrandt would create across his lifetime. And it brought the young painter to the attention of some of the most influential art brokers in the area. But soon, even his hometown wasn't big enough to contain Rembrandt's ambition. What this single-minded artist had wanted from birth was to stand out. And for that, he'd have to try himself on a far bigger stage. There's so much opportunity in Amsterdam. Those most prestigious commissions, those were to be found in the big city. If you really wanted to get big-time clients, then you had to go to Amsterdam. That's where the riches really were. Rembrandt moved to a studio in Amsterdam in 1631. To put it simply, this aspiring young painter was following the money. During the Golden Age, Amsterdam was already overflowing with talented artists competing for fame and fortune. Joining them, Rembrandt was making a supremely bold move that would put him, step by steady step, on the road to the Night Watch. The Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings in the world, the jewel in the crown of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. And it's easy to see why. This is a canvas bursting with life, brimming with stories and hints of intrigue, one of which is the identity of a half-hidden face only just emerging from the shadows. Now, of the 34 different people in the picture, there is one who technically shouldn't be there at all. He's absolutely dead centre, right up towards the top. A very, very distinctive snub nose, a little round, inquiring, slightly cheeky eye. It is, of course, Rembrandt himself. Like Alfred Hitchcock, he's put himself into the film, as it were. The Night Watch shows a glimpse of an artist at the exhilarating peak of his power and ambition. Just over ten years earlier, he'd arrived in Amsterdam, desperate to make his fortune. Amsterdam would have been very exciting in the 17th century. It's loud, it's busy, it was a real metropolis. And for artists, that represented a huge opportunity. War with the Spanish Empire was over, Dutch ships crisscrossed the world, and now the city was packed with wealthy merchants, eager to spend their fortunes on portraits for their brand-new townhouses. Fresh in from Leiden, which itself had been besieged by the Spanish, here was a painter who could offer something new. Rembrandt kind of burst onto the scene and quite quickly got quite important commissions. He was one of the first artists to capture physical expressions across a face. He painted portraits as though he could penetrate the person and get their personality. He uses highlights so cleverly that you see that wet bit at the bottom of the eyelid and the wrinkles around the eyes and so forth are so acutely observed. These are very impactful pieces. He brings life into his hitters and other artists are just not at that same level at that time. From his very first commission, it was clear that Rembrandt's work was different to everything else around him. He painted faces bathed in light and shadow, used the wrong end of his brush to scratch individual hairs into the paint and became a master of touchably real surfaces. But most important, with a skill that would become vital to the success of the Night Watch, he depicted his sitters with a fresh immediacy. There is a kind of ruddy, earthy realism about the faces. These are actual living, breathing, sweating people that you could have met in the streets of Amsterdam and there is no mistaking that at all. Suddenly, this provincial miller's boy was the most popular portraitist in the city And yet, always hungry for the next advance, Rembrandt needed more. Private commissions were fine, but he really wanted to create work on a bigger scale. He wanted to be properly noticed. I think his first major success was the Anatomy Lesson of Nicholas Talt. That was painted in 1632 and that was a very public commission. It was a way of marketing himself and I think people would have seen that and thought, yes, that's the man who I want to paint my portrait to. Rembrandt's first multi-portrait painting was the taste of the Night Watch to come and it reveals his swelling ego. For the first time, he simply signed himself Rembrandt, audaciously assuming the same one-name celebrity label as Leonardo, Michelangelo or Raphael. He saw himself as the rising hero of the Amsterdam art scene. What Rembrandt wanted now was a lifestyle to match. In 1634, he married the love of his life, Saskia van Uylenburg, and the glamorous young couple threw themselves into enjoying Rembrandt's good fortune. They enjoyed life. They went out, they spent, they lived a very lavish lifestyle. Rembrandt was very confident. He was spending lots of money, he was quite flash, he was very pleased that he was earning this money and saw that this was not going to end, so he could just spend it as it came. He was living the high life. Fancy clothes, luxurious meals, Rembrandt, it seemed, could shell out for anything his heart desired, including this princely three-storey townhouse in the most sought-after area of the city. Now a popular Amsterdam museum, Dr Lidovij de Koekkoek is its director. Rembrandt bought this house in 1639, and by that time he was the most famous artist in Amsterdam, and he was very wealthy. It cost 13,000 guilders, which was a fortune in that time, and this was the most opulent and large house in the whole street. Rembrandt's spending, however, didn't stop here. Every time he finished painting, he'd pick up his wallet and head out shopping. Filling his new house with curious purchases. This room is Rembrandt's art cabinet, kunstkabinet in Dutch, and this is where he shows his ambition, he shows his extreme drive and his fascination for beautiful objects. He was something of a spenderholic, and his tastes were quite eclectic, so he buys things like armour. Venetian glass, seashells, stuffed animals and bits of coral. We don't know how much he spent. It must have been a fortune. And in his new mansion, there was one room that was more important than any other. Now this was, of course, the largest room in the house. This is the grand studio. The light is fantastic, it's northern light, and it would have reflected beautifully into the studio. And, of course, light, dark and light, very important in Rembrandt's work. The high creativity of the master painter needed to be matched with the basic haggling business of funding his lifestyle. To sell himself and win the big commissions, Rembrandt needed to look the part. This is the grand entrance hall. We call it the Voorhuis, the front house. It would have been the grand entrance next to the street. And these were sort of the public areas where visitors were allowed in and where Rembrandt showed the opulence of his household, but also his success as a painter. And it would have been really set to impress. It would have helped close deals on paintings. It's most likely to have been here that in 1640, after almost a decade working in Amsterdam, Rembrandt was approached for his biggest commission yet, the Night Watch. So, the Night Watch was commissioned by the Cloverneers Dolan, which was the headquarter of the Civic Militia, and they commissioned it for their great hall. The Civic Militia were close-knit groups of citizen soldiers, a kind of Dad's Army, standing by to protect their communities from a Spanish attack. And the way their portraits were captured was a tradition unique to the 17th century. For years, they'd been painted by the most established artists of the day in a similar style. The men, dressed up in their finest clothes, arranged in a simple line, like a school photo or a bizarre bus queue. But in 1640, when the group from District 2 decided to commission their portrait, rather than go with a reliable regular, they turned to Amsterdam's edgy celebrity, even though Rembrandt had never tackled anything like this before. Carla Ojas is an expert in art history. They were vain men. They wanted their portraits to be done by a famous portrait painter. Rembrandt, in those days, was really like a superstar. So they were commissioning their group portraits with him because they wanted to have their portrait done by a famous artist. The company leader, brash enough to put his portrait into the hands of the radical young Rembrandt, was pink-faced, red-haired Captain Frans Banninkok. It's a name I think every Dutch person knows because he is the main character in the Night Watch, the head of the Civic Militia group. He was in charge. As tradition decreed, Banninkok would have wanted his expensive commission to capture his men as war heroes, even if the reality was somewhat different. Originally, they were defending the city in times of war. So, in that period, the war against Spain. But when Rembrandt was doing the Night Watch, the Spanish troops were gone. In my opinion, they were not real soldiers anymore. There was a sense of nostalgia. The Dutch people were very respectful towards them and grateful towards them for what they had done in the past. But what was there left for them to do? They were, in general, rich, important people. We know about them as Old Boys Network, a sort of Rotary Club or Lions Club. They were quite well-known because of their, well, gatherings in which they were drinking and eating and gambling and giving each other good positions within the society. They may have done more networking and drinking than fighting, but the importance of the militia was still deeply ingrained in their communities and their minds. This was a young country which had just freed itself from the Spanish Empire by fighting. But Rembrandt couldn't bring himself to copy what had come before him, even if radical reinvention would add extra difficulty to an already tricky brief. You have to paint anywhere between 10 and 20 guys, but that makes for a really boring composition if you have to just line them up. So the challenge for the artists was to turn this into an interesting composition where you have the impression that they maybe interact with each other, that they talk to each other, but they also all have to look at the viewer in order to be recognised. So it seems like an almost impossible task. This was why most artists responded with a traditional, simple arrangement. Even then, there were added complications. They paid for their individual portraits, so the more money you were paying, the best position you could get. The cheapest option would be at the sides of the painting, in profile, maybe just your head or a bit of your eye. And the most expensive would be your whole figure, doing something majestic, doing something very dramatic. With The Night Watch, Rembrandt was juggling 18 different figures and egos, and the position of his subjects wasn't his only challenge, because this work was not intended to stand alone. Six other Dutch artists had also been commissioned to make major group portraits for the same room, and by the time Rembrandt started painting, four had already been finished. They had all played by the rules. This was entirely competent bus queue painting, and therefore, for the ever-ambitious Rembrandt, more than a little boring. And so the artist who'd based his entire career on being different decided to create an entirely new type of militia portrait. When it was finally unveiled, The Night Watch would indeed be a painting completely unlike any of its predecessors. In 1640, Rembrandt began work on a painting that would come to define him, The Night Watch. This was the only civic militia portrait he would ever produce, but true to form, Rembrandt scrapped convention, instead taking the biggest risk of his career. What Rembrandt did, which was very different, was to place his figures as if they're in an actual battle. It actually looks like they're about to go to war, and he constructs a narrative around them. He presents what is a portrait more like a history painting. That had never been done before and was completely game-changing. This was amazing. This was like watching a movie, and because the figures are life-size, you really feel as though you've got to get out of the way because they're going to come towards you, and you're in danger. You're in the way. He has created a very unusual and risky composition, throwing aside all the usual rules about lining people up so that he can achieve the illusion of this militia company literally marching out of the wall, off the canvas and towards the viewer. And to do that, he has made some very strange decisions about the lighting. Most other artists lit their civic guard portraits pretty simply, a bright overhead glare, but now Rembrandt tried something very different. Shadows shroud much of the canvas, and instead he picked out his main characters almost as if with spotlights. If you look just here, for example, you can see the light illuminating Koch's outstretched hand, casting a shadow which cuts across the Amsterdam coat of arms embroidered on his lieutenant's jacket. It's a bit like a theatre director or a film director's lighting, and that gives the picture a dynamism that Rembrandt can't have been sure when he started it would actually achieve. The whole painting is a performance, and Rembrandt has even provided his own soundtrack. A musket goes off behind the captain. There's the rat-a-tat-tat of a drum. A dog seems to bark. It's a cacophony of noise, action and movement. And here is the final, almost ludicrous risk that Rembrandt is taking with this picture. This is a militia. These are would-be soldiers. They are men who want to be remembered as soldiers. Dangerous men. Except that this must be the least dangerous, least lethal, least threatening group of so-called would-be soldiers in the history of art. They are ridiculous. One's firing his gun by mistake, all their weapons are pointing in different directions, and their mascot girl is laughing at them. Rembrandt is telling a story, but it's not the story that militia expect. It is an entirely different story. And it was one he had to tell carefully in order to tread a fine line between honour and insult. This was a far from straightforward painting to complete, and for nearly two years Rembrandt worked on the canvas relentlessly. In July 1642, the Night Watch was finally finished, and with great expectation installed in the militia group's guild hall. I think it's fair to say they were in for a surprise. It wasn't what they expected at all. They didn't know how to react to this drama. Are they meant to laugh at it? Are they meant to be aghast at it? Are they meant to be in awe of the fact that every one of those people is captured through the expression and the personality and the stance? I think some of the sitters in the picture were quite unhappy about how they were shown, because they did not get the prominence that they had expected. But it must have been admired, because it was immediately put on the wall. Rembrandt was paid for it in full, and the head of the civic guard had several copies made for himself to have in his own home and to give to friends. The Night Watch may have been unveiled to a mixed reception, but no one could deny that this was daring, unique, bold. Rembrandt had taken a huge gamble, and he'd created something extraordinary. Everyone could see that. But now, just as Rembrandt triumphed artistically... ..disaster befell him at home as his beloved Saskia died. Rembrandt really loved his wife, Saskia. That was a period of great melancholy for Rembrandt. He was devastated when she died. Commercial success seemed to mean so much less without Saskia to share it. This was before she'd given birth to the couple's only surviving child, a boy they'd named Titus. And now Rembrandt faced raising his son alone. But his time of disaster wasn't over. After the Night Watch, which really represents the peak of his career, Rembrandt's career goes into something of a decline. In the decade that follows, his commissions significantly decrease. Public taste changed. People wanted a little less brown, something more fashionable, something more frivolous, what they considered to be lighter, brighter paintings. And I think Rembrandt couldn't, or didn't want to, keep up. For the first time in his working life, Rembrandt was out of fashion, out of commissions, and therefore, pretty soon, out of money. Rembrandt continued to spend extravagantly even after his fortunes were in decline. And eventually, in 1652, his creditor said, that's enough, we're calling in our debts. And Rembrandt couldn't cope. Eventually, he had to sell his house and possessions at auction and was forced into bankruptcy. Rembrandt had to move from the big house he'd bought with Saskia in Amsterdam to a very rough part of town where he lived for the last 13 years of his life. The man who'd once been Amsterdam's richest painter now cowered in the city's shadiest suburb. It had only been a handful of years since he'd produced his masterpiece, but his life was now unrecognisable. It was a real fall from grace. In order to recover some of his debts, he's even forced to sell Saskia's tomb in 1664. That must have caused him great melancholy and trauma. She was the love of his life. Rembrandt's livelihood was hanging by a thread, and yet, wrinkle by wrinkle, failure by failure, he magicked disaster into triumph. The realism he'd brought to Banningcock's men now applied to his own ageing features, creating what are now seen as his most moving work. Even now, worse was still to come. In 1668, Titus, his son, was killed by a plague. There was simply nothing left for Rembrandt. He struggled on for one more year before dying painless and alone at the age of 63. He was so forgotten by the town that had once loved him, there wasn't even an official notice of his death. In spite of the fame Rembrandt achieved in his lifetime, he was buried in a pauper's grave. So it's an unmarked grave, and it doesn't exist today. You can't find it. All that remains of his final resting place is a plaque erected in 1909 in the Westerkerk church, acknowledging his forlorn death. It's frankly very moving to be here, to reflect on Rembrandt's own life, all the hard work, the years and years of toil, the terrible disappointments, the struggles, the disasters, the bankruptcies, and towards the end of his life, that sense of a great dark cloud hanging over everything. What would he have thought had he been able to be here now and realise that his greatest and most complicated work is at the heart of Amsterdam, at the heart of the greatest Dutch museum, and in many ways at the heart of the Dutch people. But before the Night Watch could embark on its triumphant progress to Dutch national icon, it would, a little like its creator, suffer its own humiliation. 73 years after it was first hung in the Militia HQ, the colossal canvas was moved to Amsterdam's palatial town hall, now a palace. Alice Takken is its curator of exhibitions. So this is the room where the Night Watch was hung in 1715, when it was taken from the Klovermeerstule to here. This was the office of the colonels of the Great War Council. But in bringing the Night Watch to its new home, the officials faced a rather tricky problem. The Night Watch was placed in between those two doors behind me. The problem was, though, that the space between the doors was too small. So they took the pragmatic route and cut it down on all sides. In what must be one of the most brutal truncations in art history, Rembrandt's glorious Night Watch was chopped down to fit its new home. We know what was lost on the Night Watch because of a small-scale copy made by Gerrit Lundens. The portions that were taken off were actually essential to understand the painting. So what we see on the copy is that the guard company is passing through a city gate and over a bridge over a canal. So that makes it very logical that all the people are moving. So they cut off about two feet from the left, which took off a couple of people, and it cut off an area at the top, which meant that all the wonderful perspective and the archway and the rods and the banners, that was all not as intended. We have no idea what happened to the pieces that they cut off. They cut those pieces off because they thought they weren't that important, so in all probability they just threw them out. We have no idea. Maybe they'll turn up sometime. By the end of the 18th century, Rembrandt was long dead and forgotten. His remains lost in a pauper's grave, his most important work butchered to fit its space in a gloomy council chamber. It seemed this masterpiece must surely be consigned to history, and yet there's an extraordinary twist to the story still to come. By the turn of the 19th century, Rembrandt's Night Watch, the work he'd been most proud of, the one he'd produced right at the peak of his extraordinary career, was hanging in an out-of-the-way council chamber, a fraction of its original size. But this all-but-forgotten masterpiece had not reached the end of the road just yet. Now, among many other things, Rembrandt was a storyteller, and I think he would have been delighted that his greatest painting, his most complicated painting, is not only valued around the world for its own qualities but also for the extraordinary and, frankly, bizarre story behind it. And the next chapter of this canvas's tale begins 300 miles from Amsterdam, in the world's artistic capital at the time, Paris. By the later 19th century, a new artistic movement was gripping the French, the Impressionists, a radical group of then-young avant-garde artists painting real life as they saw it. They much preferred Rembrandt's work to the cold academic traditions of their own city. They loved the rich warmth of his shadows, the immediacy and the realism of his sitters. This new wave of painters fell to kinship with the old Dutch master. There's a real re-appreciation of Rembrandt. And I think people like the romantic, wild side of Rembrandt, especially those late works where he's really painting with very thick paint. What was once out of fashion becomes more loved. Certainly his humanity in the pictures, his talent for getting through the surface to something deeper in the sitter, and his compositions, the lighting and so forth, has certainly impressed and influenced many artists. Van Gogh called him a magician, writing, ''Rembrandt says things for which there are no words in any language.'' And as his status and influence soared around the world, the Dutch too began to notice. The prodigal son was, at long last, welcomed home. He was rediscovered, if you like, and then became a national icon as the archetype of Dutchness. He became the national hero. And as Rembrandt came back in vogue, so too did his most patriotic painting, a reminder of the days when the Dutch had fought an empire to find their citizens' republic. In 1885, Amsterdam's brand-new Rijksmuseum prepared to open to the public. The Night Watch was top of the curator's priority list. And they had a much more radical solution than their 18th-century counterparts about how to fit this enormous canvas to the wall. They decided to build it a whole new wing of its own. This gallery was specifically built for the Night Watch. You know, this kind of... What resembles a church interior. It's a gallery of honour, and you walk in a ceremonial way up to the high point, which in a normal church would be the altar. At the end of the Enfilade is then the great masterpiece, which is the Night Watch. Rembrandt's masterpiece was no longer just being displayed, it was being worshipped. Resting in the very heart of the new National Gallery, this painting was now a national treasure. Rembrandt painted the Night Watch to raise pride in anyone who looks at it, civic pride, to be proud of your town, proud of your country. And centuries later, it still does that. It does exactly that for Amsterdam and for the rest of the Netherlands. That painting's so loved by the Dutch because it's part of their history and it shows, you know, we're heroes and we're here to protect and we're dashing and we're frivolous and we're action-packed. We're superheroes. Night Watch mania has gripped the Dutch nation ever since. Nowadays, Rembrandt's canvas is visited by more than two million people every single year. It's so loved that when the Rijksmuseum reopened after major refurbishment works in 2013, the painting was welcomed back on display with enormous fanfare. People go wild. The painting's paraded through the streets of Amsterdam. There's tremendous celebration. The Night Watch is transported in this huge wooden crate and there's children there waving flags and people are throwing flowers and it's almost like the World Cup final footballers have arrived home. And the extraordinary tributes to this beloved canvas haven't stopped there. To mark the museum's reopening, this group of actors in Southern Holland brought the Night Watch to a shopping centre in a way that would surely have made Rembrandt chuckle. It's a love affair that shows no sign of abating. It tells a story in a way that no other painting has ever done. It tells a fragment of history with action. It's crazy that a painting in the 21st century is treated with such adoration. This is such an iconic painting and Rembrandt is such a symbol of Holland and Amsterdam that it holds a place like no other work can. A national icon, absolutely. But for me, it's so much more. The Night Watch is a painting about perfectly ordinary people standing up to tyranny and that's a theme that can speak for everyone. This is a picture which comes out of the Dutch experience but it's not for the Dutch, it's for everybody because what does it show? It shows a group of very human humans strutting, ridiculous, absurd. They are silly, as I am silly, as you are silly. But they're coming together for a common purpose. They're all doing their own thing in this picture but it shows the moment just before they do one single thing marching out into the light together. This shows what happens when a free people come together for the common good. It is therefore the greatest republican painting ever made. A great painting of democracy and ultimately of tolerance. It shows what happens at that very moment when we stop doing our own little self-absorbed, selfish things and come together to do one big thing all together. And at that moment, the encroaching dark which seems so scary, which surrounds them and surrounds every one of us suddenly doesn't seem quite so frightening after all. Next time, Tate Britain's most popular and most haunting canvas. This is not a pretty story. It's a young woman's suicide by drowning. A painting in which life mirrored art. The fact that Lizzie Siddle did suffer whilst posing did inject that extra sense of realism. And it even inspired a grave robbing. He claimed that her hair had grown so much it filled the whole coffin. The remarkable story of Millais' Ophelia.