#58. The Secret Life Of Portraits ~ A History Of Portrait Painting

The earliest European portraits that we know about are from Greece and they even go as far back as ancient Egypt but this technique wasn't really oil painting. Essentially oil painting is taking a pigment and suspending it in linseed oil, poppy oil, some kind of oil. This kind of portraiture was actually mixed into beeswax. It was quite a fluid beeswax, not like a candle wax but like a fluid beeswax. So if you see the surface of these paintings in the British Museum they're actually quite waxy. They are incredible paintings, they're just very lifelike and they give you this incredible insight into what these people were thinking and feeling and how they lived. I mean they're astonishing portraits but they're not actually oil paintings and they're also in Afghanistan and Central Asia you find early portrait paintings as well. This was around 6 to 700 AD and I imagine that sort of this very nascent artistic technology and knowledge spread into Europe through the silk routes, these pigments that they were grinding in Central Asia, maybe in places like China making different inks and things like that. I'm sure spread during this time sort of 6-700 into Europe, probably starting in places like Constantinople and then spreading to ports like Venice and then from Venice into Northern Europe. There is very little evidence of how it really began but we're not going to dwell here too long although Afghanistan does play an important role for artists and the early pigments as I just explained. They produced very important pigments to Renaissance artists like lazuli which is more expensive than gold in weight but I want to just jump forward another 700 years from these early paintings. So for thousands of years since the disintegration of the Roman Empire in Western Europe due to various different forces at play, the church took over slowly running the state and the European state. It was the grand organiser, it was the head of social order, it was the authority to crown a king or a queen in various parts of Europe, the organisation that gave arms to the poor, it was the institution that led the education of the academic classes, it was the producer of tonics and remedies and medicines. It's hard to state how in a secular society that we live in, it's hard to state the importance of the church and the role that it played in people's everyday lives. Slowly at the end of the medieval period in around the 11th and the 12th centuries, a new kind of person was born into society, the private merchant with private wealth, his or her own money to spend on what he or she wanted to spend it on, not attached to the power and the wealth of the church. What the church deems as good taste which usually stays in line with whatever theological doctrine is in fashion at the time, these changes over periods of time like when we converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in England in British history, it was this brutal cold-blooded attack on the church art and on anything that seemed decorative under the reign of Henry VIII of course. But let's focus on this new kind of person and if we get into the mind of this new merchant class that was evolving during the medieval period, this new kind of individual is born into society. I say born into society, of course there were rich individuals in ancient Rome and ancient Greece and places like that, of course there were, but in the medieval times what we're seeing is a breaking away of private citizens with money from the authority of the church and this essentially is what creates the renaissance in broad terms. This early medieval wealth starts mostly from wool production in England. So the wool gave private individuals wealth and they could break away from the church and a lot of the wool was still controlled by the church. A lot of the early wool buyers were actually people that worked for the church but I'm talking, we have to imagine, this is a slow breaking away of the private individual with private means and in England is where the finest wool of Europe was produced and this led to cloth merchants in places like Antwerp. So essentially they would buy the finest wool in Europe from England, they would take it to places like Antwerp, they would turn the wool into cloth, people from Italy would come up wanting this cloth because the wealth of the Italian state, they had huge wealth, and they came up and they bought from places like Antwerp or Bruges and port cities like that and they took the cloth back down into Italy. The Medici of Florence, for example, they're an early example of the private individuals that made private wealth. They were wool merchants. First they created so much money from selling and trading wool that they started lending their money and they created the Medici Bank, famously. Then they made so much money from the Medici Bank that they started funding public art. So it's all interlinked. But in the medieval period before this, so let's say before 1200, the church was really running the show. A lot of the church art that you see is beautiful but it's not expressing any sort of individuality. It's all about God, it's all very pious, it's all very religious. It's a bit of a mystery and it's hard to put a finger on why the area of Europe, the Netherlands and Belgium, was the first place to start painting in oil. But this area of Europe was considered the breadbasket of Western Europe and it produced wheat, it produced grain and it produced flax or flaxseed in vast amounts to feed Europe essentially. Flax is important because when you press flax, a by-product of this is linseed oil. Flax is the only crop that really grew in that part of the world. It's heavy in marshland. Artists of the low countries of the day were suspending their pigment, not in beeswax anymore, but they started experimenting and they started suspending their pigment in linseed oil instead of egg tempera which they were doing in Italy. In Greece they were suspending their pigment in egg tempera. It's egg essentially, it's a sort of mixture of egg yolk and beeswax in Greece and Egypt as we discussed before. In this part of the world, the low countries, Belgium and Holland, because of this vast quantity of this by-product of flaxseed that they were growing so much of, they started experimenting and dipping their and suspending their pigment in linseed oil. And also in the low countries it's a very damp area of Europe as England is relatively compared to France and places in Spain and Italy. Egg tempera in Renaissance art, in early Italian art, dominated. There was no oil painting. If you go back to Florence and places like the Brancacci Chapel, all of these paintings are painted with egg tempera. So the fashion in at the time, sort of 11, 1200, was to paint everything in egg tempera. They hadn't even realised what oil painting was at the time. But there is a divergence and that happens in the low countries. And because of that, they could work the oil paint longer. It worked better in damp conditions. Egg tempera really didn't work in damp conditions. It was very hard to draw with. You had to work in very dry conditions because it had to dry quickly, you had to paint quickly. Egg tempera typically dries in a day and you have to work very quickly. You can't go back into the painting and remodel it. You have to get it right the first time. So that limits you to what you can actually do with the paint. Whereas with oil paint, they realised, we could actually work this for weeks. We can put layers on. We can refine our paintings over and over again. And the colours are brighter with oil paint. They're fuller. They're truer. They're truer to the sense of life. They don't fade in sunlight. So if you put egg tempera directly in sunlight, it will fade. Oil paintings don't fade. The oil protects the pigment. They don't fade. You can leave them in sunlight for hundreds of years. The reason why they clean them is because of the dust. They don't clean them because as soon as they take the dust off, the colours are true again. So it's an incredible medium and artists of the low countries start to understand this and they start producing these incredible works of art. Artists like Jan van Eyck, as we see here, his famous self-portrait in the National Gallery. Roger van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, who painted these extraordinary paintings that we see here. All of these paintings are painted in oil. And the style evolves. But these are sensational works of art. They're supreme works of art in the history of art. But this is like night and day. If you go to the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, it's beautiful, sure. But there's nothing on the altarpiece. I mean, these paintings were, you know, it's like night and day. It's like looking at colour television for the first time. You're not going to go back to watching black and white television after that. And this, of course, Jan van Eyck is considered the first early master of oil painting. I'm sure there's people before. It's very hard to pin down. There's so much going on in art history. But we do get these crucial figures like Jan van Eyck that really broke through and transcended what it was to be an artist, what you could do with oil paint. And he's considered the first supreme master of the Low Countries. And he painted the Arnolfini portrait in 1434. So if you get an idea of where we are in history. So oil painting started to take hold in the 1200s, 1300s. And by 1434, he's painting things as real as this. And it's believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolo Arnolfini. And of course, this couple here, he's a merchant. He's come from Lucca in Tuscany to the Low Countries, to Belgium. And he's a cloth merchant. He buys cloth and he takes it back to Italy. And he sells the cloth in Italy. But what does he also take back? Well, he takes back these paintings to Italy. And as soon as Italian painters see them, and Italian artists start seeing these paintings, they want to know how the hell are people painting with such realism, such true colours? What's the technique? How do you do it? And these oil paintings start seeping into Italy. Venice is one of the biggest collections of Hieronymus Bosch paintings, because they loved oil painting. Because Venice was a damp climate, where oil painting worked well, it lasted. Egg tempera paintings in Venice did not work. There is no egg tempera paintings in Venice. They're in Tuscany, where it's a drier climate. In Venice, where it's damp, they're on the sea, there's no egg tempera. But oil painting, that worked in Venice. This painting is considered a unique form of a marriage contract. It's sort of recorded as a painting. So instead of, they went to the church, of course, to sanctify their marriage, but they were also, they had private wealth. We get back to this idea of private wealth. Well, what should we do with our money? Let's also sanctify this marriage by getting a portrait painted. This was a new idea. Usually, like I said before, history of art, people were painting for the church. People weren't having individual portraits painted of themselves. But it's not a king or a queen. It's a wealthy merchant and his wife. They're trading in woolen cloth, silk and tapestries. Like I said, he started taking these paintings south into the Italian peninsula and exposing Italian artists to the wonder of oil painting. But this skill and technique takes hold in Venice, which is similar to Bruges and the Low Countries is in that it has, it's a port, has a large private sector of wealthy merchants that trade with Northern Europe. This is the German trading house in Venice, which is still there today. And it's the biggest of all the trading houses of any of the states or regional powers in Venice. So the trade with the North was significant to the economy of Venice. And what does this tell us? It tells us that the techniques and information about how to paint in oil start to seep into the artistic communities of Venice. Why? Because they had a damp climate, because egg tempera didn't work well in Venice. The Northern Europeans were painting on panel, on wood. But what happens to wood in damp climates? It warps and it changes shape. Due to the industrial scale of shipbuilding in Venice, a huge amount of sailcloth is produced in the city. And they were producing a warship every day at the height of their powers. The Venetian boats transported most of the soldiers to the Holy Land for the First Crusade, for example. So there were a massive naval power and they were also producing these huge warships and boats on an industrial scale. And with that came all of the sailcloth, the excess sailcloth. They had factories producing sailcloth. And they started to use paint on it, like they experimented with the byproduct of flaxseed, the linseed oil. They started experimenting with that because they had so much excess of it. In the Low Countries, in Venice, they had so much sailcloth. And so they started experimenting with that. Because it doesn't warp, you can roll it up, you can transport it easily. It's relatively cheap. You don't need a woodworker to cut it for you. It's a very versatile material. And it's almost like it was invented to be painted on. Because once you've started painting on canvas, you don't go back. I mean, look at artists even today. They still paint on canvas. But back in the day, back in the medieval times, everyone was painting on panel. But once they started painting on canvas, there's no going back. And over time, we see Venetian painters go from painting on wooden panels, like the Assumption by Titian. This is one of Titian's most famous paintings. And this was painted on panel. To this, Paradiso by Tintoretto. This is the largest painting on canvas in the world. And it's painted by Tintoretto. And we have to then get into the mind of someone living in Venice 100 years later. So we're talking about 1500, the height of the Renaissance. 1500, 1520. And we have to remember how much art would have been on the walls. Rooms would have been covered from top to bottom in paintings, like we can see an example of here. This is the Doge's Palace. This is the Doge's, the main room in the Doge's Palace. And all along the walls, if you go there today, all over the walls, it is paintings from top to bottom, from the top of the wall to the bottom of the wall, and all along the ceiling. It's not only an expression of Venetian wealth, and the Venetian power at the time, it's also an expression of what Venetian artists are capable of producing. You know, there's no other city in Europe that can produce works at this level, at this skill, on this scale. You don't see this anywhere else in Europe, oil painting like this, at the time. And essentially, it's a celebration of what Venetian artists can create. It's a celebration really of oil painting. And you can go to the Sistine Chapel and look at the works by Michelangelo on the ceiling. Of course, they're incredible. But I think these are more incredible. And when you go to the Doge's Palace in Venice, it's just mind blowing. And Titian, and here's some more pictures of the Doge's Palace, you can see Paradiso at the end on the wall. And Veronese painted some of the ceiling paintings, Titian in the other room. So all the Venetians greats, but Tintoretto really, and I'll come to him in a minute, but Tintoretto really put his mark on the Doge's Palace and on Venice in general. But before we get to Tintoretto, we get to an artist called Titian. Now Titian is an artist in Venice that's almost discovering a new way of seeing things. He is looking at the world in a new way. It's almost like his visual consciousness, like the human visual consciousness is waking up and he's working out how to see things. Because if you look at Bellini, who was his teacher, Bellini's an incredible painter, but Titian goes so much further and he takes the art and what you can do with oil painting to such a level that I really don't think has been surpassed even to this day. What we can see in his career as an artist in Venice is that he's fueled by the wealth of the city. That's clear. And as you can see here, this lady that's lying down on the bed almost has like gold raining on her. And he's fueled by the wealth of the city, which at the time was the wealthiest city in Europe by quite some distance. And it wasn't fueled by the money from the church. If you look at Rome and you look at someone like Raphael that went to Rome or Michelangelo, they were funded by the church. But the art of Venice is funded by the merchants and by the private sector. And they make their money from trade, trading, buying things in the East and selling them in Venice and beyond into Europe. And they made huge wealth from it. And he starts to produce incredible works like this and this. And, you know, these kind of paintings have not been surpassed since. They're just the greatest portraits that have ever been produced. And it's because Venice had this wealth, freedom, private wealth that wanted to express itself in these private individual's ways, not in a pious way and not something to do with the church, but expressing themselves by maybe holding a book, saying that they could read. Little individual expressions that they started to get. And they started to get portraits of themselves painted. You know, you're just seeing a level of visual language and consciousness that just really transcends anything of its day. And because of this, he became hugely, hugely famous. And he realises that if he creates a foreign market, this, for example, was the King of Spain, King Philip II. And he realised if he creates a foreign market for his paintings and sells them to dukes and kings around Europe, he can charge premium prices for them. As we know from his correspondence, if you read Titian's letters, he's very concerned with money. He's writing about money all the time. He's writing to the King of Spain, asking for his commission, asking for the payment for paintings. And they're quite funny letters, to be honest, because the King of Spain's completely broke. And he's sending things back like, I'll give you the rice licence for Venice, or I'll give you the rice licence for Austria. And Titian's like, I don't want the rice licence. I want my money. I want cold hard cash. But Titian, in 1550, he meets King Philip of Spain. At the time, he was the Crown Prince. Later, he would become King Philip II. He meets him in Augsburg. Augsburg was in the German states. And why did he meet in Augsburg? Because that was where the headquarters of the Fugger Bank was. And the Fugger Bank family were the richest bankers in Northern Europe at the time. And they basically were bankrolling the Spanish throne. Jacob Fuller learned his trade in the German trading house in Venice. And that's when he was young. He learned how to trade. He learned about money. He learned how to lend money. And that's why his relationship there starts in Venice. And that's why he knew Titian. And he introduced Titian to the Crown Prince at the time, who would later become King Philip. And that's why if you want to look at Titian paintings, you have to go to Spain. You've got to go to the Prado. There are some incredible Titians in London. There are some incredible Titians in Venice. But the most incredible paintings I think Titian ever produced are in the Prado. And that's essentially, he started the Royal Collection. King Philip started buying Titian paintings. And that's what started the Royal Collection, which then became the collection that's in the Prado Museum, one of the greatest museums in the world. But let's come back to portrait painting. Here we have a portrait of his great friend, his best friend, Titian's best friend, a gentleman called Pietro Aretino, who was the greatest poet in Europe in the Renaissance. And he had fled Rome due to the Pope wanting to put him in jail for slanderous poems that he was publishing and putting up on the walls of Rome and making a mockery of the Pope. And he fled to Venice, which was a much more liberal society than other cities in Europe at the time. And he was wealthy from his pen. And they became friends. They were the great artist and writer. They drank together. They rioted together. They ate together. They had supper together. There's amazing letters back and forth between them throughout their lives of how they lived together. And Aretino championed Titian to the wealthy and the powerful. And the wealthy or the powerful of Venice, or all over Europe, would fall over themselves to have something written by Aretino. He was even more famous than Titian in his day. He's sort of unknown now, but he was incredibly famous back then. And Venice at the time was a capital of publishing. So it was a great place for him to be. He could publish his letters, publish his poems, and become even more famous and escape the wrath of the Popes in Rome. Titian and himself were really the foundation of the idea of what an artist could be. They weren't craftsmen, as they had been previously, painting for the church, at the margins of society. But they were arguably above the norms of society, living outside of the constraints of what normal society expected, so they could produce their art, so they could write their novels, so they could write their beautiful poems. And arguably, this is the first portrait in European art to achieve life-size presence with a real life-like effect. This is not symbolic in any way. It's not idealised. It's tangible. It's like we see Aretino from across the room. It's almost like we can walk into the painting and shake his hand. This is a pioneering method that Titian started. Who knows who actually started it? But you can really see this as one of the earliest sight-size portrait paintings. And sight-size portraiture is what would come to dominate the method of portraiture in the next 300 years, from Van Dyck to Reynolds to Gainsborough to John Singer Sargent. It all begins here with Titian in this painting. Very life-like, painted with the sight-size technique, where you put the canvas right next to the sitter and you walk back, observe the sitter from a distance, walk forward, make the mark, and try and get the shapes. So if you look at his head firstly, there's a shape there. Then there's shadow all around the head. So you're painting light, dark, light, dark, mid-tones. You're going for your lightest light and your darkest dark. Then you're going for the mid-tones. And you build up this painting, which only you can really do with oil paint. You couldn't do this with fresco painting. He came back to this probably day after day. He probably did this over a period of 10 days. So 10 layers of painting goes into this. You can't do that with fresco painting. It's one layer and that's it. It's a sketch, then one layer, and you've got to nail it. So it's very difficult to do. Much more forgiving oil painting. And what's going on in England at the time? Hans Holbein's in And he's painting for the court of Henry VIII, which I can imagine would be quite a precarious situation to navigate. And here are some examples of what was going on in Rome at the time with Raphael. Incredible. I mean, what he could do with painting was out of this world. Leonardo da Vinci. And of course, these monumental figures in the history of European art are some of the greatest works ever produced. But they're sort of outliers. We focus on them in art history so much. But what is really happening in oil painting is Venetian influenced. What's really going on in oil painting in Europe at the time is happening in Venice. And Venice is influencing everything. They're painting these huge... People in Rome and places like that want to paint like the Venetians. They want to paint these huge paintings with oil on canvas, massive scale, life-size. All of that influence comes from Venice. Because if you go back to the Low Countries before, they're not painting to the scale of life. They're painting much smaller paintings. Go to Venice, they're painting life-size portraits, massive scale, huge decorative pieces, all on canvas. Look at what painters do now. They're painting in oil, they're painting on canvas. Venice has this huge influence on European art. And everyone wants to paint like the Venetians, including someone called Caravaggio. This painting is called The Calling of Matthew, painted around 600. So we're jumping another 100 years into the future. And this is where oil painting has gone. Now, this is very, very influenced by Venetian art, especially Tintoretto. These dark colours, these dramatic, figurative scenes that he was putting together. People think that Caravaggio just turned up in Rome and just invented this idea of chiaroscuro, painting light and dark. If you think back to that Aretino portrait, the light and dark is there. The light and dark is there in the Venetian style. Caravaggio is taking this language that the Venetians had invented and he's taking it to Rome. And he's doing new things with it, of course. But to think that Caravaggio, people say, Caravaggio is a genius, he turned up in Rome and changed art forever. Well, yes, but he also was very influenced by people, especially people like Tintoretto. This is 1600, this is painted in. What happens in that same year as well is Charles Stuart, the future King of England, was born. And he was a man that was obsessed with art. He's obsessed with painting. And when he was the Prince of Wales, he took a trip to, as a 22-year-old, to the court of Madrid. And when he arrived in Madrid in 1623 to seek and arrange marriage with the Infanta Maria Anna, who was the youngest sister of King Philip IV of Spain, he toured the magnificent Spanish Habsburg court and he witnessed the extensive collection of paintings by Titian. Although there were, of course, religious differences, Charles was a Protestant, Maria Anna was Catholic, and this probably dampened the potential relationship, Charles didn't return to England disappointed. Instead, he fell in love with Titian paintings. And he realised that looking at these paintings in Madrid, he understands that paintings can be more than decoration. They actually represent real power. They are a kind of a state craft that they represent as a king. And he realised this. And in 1625, he became the King of England. And within a few years, the King's collection obtained, he sent agents out to Europe and he obtained some of the greatest works in Europe at the time. He was literally poaching works from the greatest collections in Europe and spending fortunes doing it, sending out his agents to do his bidding in places like Florence, Modena, Venice, Rome, all over Europe. He realised soon that he needed his own court painter to produce magnificent works of art. And in his court painter, he found the greatest at the time, the greatest artist in Europe, a prodigy that had come out of Peter Paul Rubens' studio in Antwerp, Antony van Dyck, who we all know because he had such an impact on British art. He basically bribed him. He went to him and gave him an offer he could not refuse. He offered him a knighthood straight off the bat. So that's why we in England know him as Sir Antony van Dyck. In Europe, they don't put that on the little labels. They don't put Sir Antony van Dyck. He's just Anton van Dyck. But in England, he got given a knighthood. He got given an apartment in the Royal Palace. He got given a gold chain, which he's wearing here, which was worth about £200, probably about £2 million in today's money. So he's just offered everything to come to England. He probably didn't want to go to England. It was probably considered a damp backwater of Europe. And he was like, you know, what am I going to do in England? But the King Charles persuaded him. And he was King Charles I's right-hand man from 1632 onwards, painting dozens of portraits of the King, the Queen, Henrietta Maria, and their growing brood of children, including King Charles II. Van Dyck revolutionised British art and the court's traditional formalised portrait aesthetic in favour of this light-hearted European sensibility, this poetic naturalism that reflected the King's own unique tastes. He had very good taste, the King. He probably wasn't a great King, but he was certainly very good taste in art. But the following decade, it would spell the end of King Charles. And a series of wars broke out. Of course, the Civil War broke out. And the nation was embroiled in this long civil war. And Oliver Cromwell won. And Charles was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. And on a cold January morning in 1649, he walked through the banqueting hall at Whitehall in London. And on the ceiling, as he's walking to his death, he's looking at the paintings that he commissioned 20 years earlier by Rubens, probably some of the last paintings he ever, some of the last things he ever saw before he was beheaded. And here they are, you can see on the wall, this is the room that he walks through to his death, through that door, and then onto the windowsill and out he went to his death. So some of the last things he ever saw were the Rubens paintings on the ceiling. I always find that incredibly powerful to think about. Months after the King was beheaded, nearly all of the portrait paintings in the Royal Collection were auctioned off in a series called the Commonwealth Sales. And paintings were just sold for a fraction of their price. Antony van Dyck died about eight years before all of this happened in the plague in Blackfriars. But he lit the fuse for British art. And British art went from a relative unknown to Europe's leading country for the arts over the next 200 years. It was the trendsetter, it raised the bar of portraiture, and artists like Dobson were born in England, Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, the great Joshua Reynolds who started the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, probably one of the greatest portrait painters in the These artists are painting in that same tradition that we saw Titian start in Venice, painting Aretino to the scale of life with that lifelikeness, looking at nature, looking at the human, looking at the human psychology too. These are very psychological. There's a lot of pathos and psychology in these paintings. We're seeing this new language getting explored more and more and deeper and deeper by these paintings. But what's also happening in those 200 years was the early beginnings of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and what was created because of that. Private wealth again. The British Empire was also coming into force and Britain was, for right or wrong, extracting huge wealth and resources from foreign lands like the West Indies and the Caribbean, India, and it was becoming by far and away the wealthiest country in the world by miles. You know, just like Venice was the wealthiest city in Europe by miles. And what does that create? It creates wealthy citizens and they want portraits of themselves. They want art. They want portrait oil paintings. And what became the grand manner of British school portraiture. But then what happened? In 1789, the French Revolution happened and it created so much chaos in France and Europe that the only way to bring it to bring control over France was and the bloodshed that was going on in the French Revolution. I've read so much about the French Revolution. It's so hard to get your head around. It's just chaos, madness and bloodshed. And there's you read about one particular era in France and then another era in France and they just don't marry. You can't tell what's going on. It's absolute chaos for like 15 years. And the only way that they can bring any control over it is basically by installing a military dictator to take command of the country. And Napoleon happens. And this relative nobody, should we call him a libertine? I don't know. He was certainly an incredible human being. He came from this small island in Europe, Corsica, and rose to the greatest heights of power in Europe and basically took over Europe. I mean, he just walked through countries and obliterated them. But the British weren't interested and he could never beat the British. And he was obsessed with Britain. He could never beat the British. Napoleon's grip on continental Europe was finally broken. The British Navy beat him at Trafalgar and then finally beat him at Waterloo in 1815 with the help of the Russians and the Dutch. And after exile, after this long collapse, something really interesting began to happen between France and England. For a good 20 years, Britain had been basically cut off culturally and physically from France. No one was traveling to Europe from England. The Napoleonic Wars were not only a military blockade, but there was this aesthetic blockade. And while Paris crowned itself the capital of taste, British artists were left to evolve in what many Europeans still regarded a provincial backwater, shall we say. I don't think it was at all. And yet, in this isolation, incredible art was being produced. Not grand history painting, not classical perfection like Jacques-Louis David, for example, in France, but weather and light and mud and vapor and speed, sensation. Britain was cut off from academic Europe, but it invented another way of seeing. People like we see here. John Constable started to become powerful landscape painters. People like Turner. And Britain started to become a place of interest for the French. And artists started to cross the channel like pilgrims. In 1824, at the Paris Salon, a group of British painters traveled across the channel to Paris and exhibited their work. And among them was the shy and stubborn man from Suffolk, John Constable. And his paintings caused an absolute scandal and revelation in Paris at the time. The French had never seen anything like it. They absolutely loved his work. Constable opened the door to the French, but Turner burnt down the whole house. I mean, he had already been painting as if these worlds were dissolving long before the French were ready for him. But here he's making seas look like memory and sunsets combust like fiery balls and cities reduced to steam and flame. Like I was saying before, he's painting sensation, he's painting weather. And Turner's works really began to circulate in the 1820s and 30s, in Paris especially. And French artists did not know what to call them. He painted these strange ships appearing on the horizon out of completely atmospheric clouds and things like that. And French artists started to comment that they seemed unfinished, that these paintings didn't seem like they were finished. You get articles at the time commenting on how these paintings didn't seem finished. But they're almost like Impressionists' paintings, aren't they? We're seeing the early beginnings of Impressionism here. The French are looking at these paintings and they're trying to understand the language of British artists. And in 1845, Turner's works were shown in Paris. And among those who went again and again with his sketchbook in his hands was a young Claude Monet. And Monet later spoke of Turner not as an influence but as a complete force of nature in his life. And this painting, this painting here, starts Impressionism. This is called Impression, Sunrise. And this is where Impressionism gets its name from. French Impressionism starts here. From Claude Monet, looking at Turner paintings, probably looking at Constable paintings as well. But it's the British that invented this, I like to think. So from Monet, he learned that, like the British painters, the language of the British painters, he learned that water could be a mirror one moment and then smoke and a shimmer on the surface the next. Cathedral could be blue at dawn, gold at noon, violet in the evening. And in 1870, Monet had to flee Paris and flee the Franco-Prussian War. The French were fighting the Prussians, what later became the Germans. And he fled to London as a refugee. He was homeless, he was short of money, and he was wandering the Thames embankment and he found himself, you can imagine the scene, this French artist trying to understand, you know, the visual language of the British artists, but trying to make it his own voice. And he found himself standing in front of a river at sunset and creating works like this. Britain so often is framed as the conservative cousin of European culture. But in this moment, it really is the inspiration for everything that came afterwards, basically modern art. What started with French Impressionism, by looking at these turners, turned into what came later. We get Picasso, we get the birth of modern art. But that's a story for another day. But I'll just leave you with the most amazing quote, I think, about art that I've ever read by the Greek philosopher Hippocrates. Life is short, but the art is long.