Patrick Bade
The Louvre, Part 2: The Northern Schools from Van Eyck to Vermeer

Patrick Bade - The Louvre, Part 2: The Northern Schools from Van Eyck to Vermeer

- Well, today I’m going to take you on a tour through the Northern Collections at the Louvre, the Flemish, Dutch, and German painting, and if I was taking you in reality, of course, again, we’d enter through the glass pyramid into the bowels of the museum. And this time we go up that escalator, you can see in the middle there up into the Aile Richelieu, the northern wing of the Louvre, and the paintings are on the top floor. So on the way, we could pass through the sculpture court, which houses baroque 17th and 18th century sculptures, and we could also pop into the very magnificent rooms created for the Emperor Louis Napoleon in the 1860s, and you see this amazing ottoman, which would’ve been a great relief to the Empress Eugenie and her ladies because they would’ve been able to sit on that, would’ve been able to accommodate their crinolines and their huge skirts. And then after going up several more escalators, again, a bit like in an airport, we get to the top floor, and we are rewarded with this astonishing painting. It’s one of the most astonishing paintings in the Louvre or one of the most astonishing paintings in the world. I remember many years ago watching a group of Japanese people mesmerised by this picture. They had their nose right up against the protective glass, and they really couldn’t believe their eyes. This is van Eyck’s “Madonna with Chancellor Rolin.” He was the chancellor of Burgundy in the early 15th century. Very powerful man, very rich man, and he commissioned this picture in 1435 for his private funerary chapel, and it stayed there till the 18th century. Then it was moved to Autun Cathedral. Then after the revolution when the Catholic Church was briefly dissolved, paintings from the churches were confiscated by the state, and it went into the Louvre from its very opening in 1793. So here is Chancellor Rolin, and it’s an extraordinary portrait. It’s more than a portrait. It’s like a map of a face painted with incredible detail, every wrinkle, every crow’s foot lovingly depicted.

So think you can say that there has never been an artist to equal van Eyck in his observation of the material world, the almost fanatical detail and accuracy and truthfulness, and yet it’s never dry or pedantic. His paintings sparkle. So he is a slightly younger contemporary than Masacchio. So you have these twin revolutions going on in the visual arts south of the Alps and north of the Alps that are going in parallel because it’s not really to the second half of the 15th century that they know what the other one is doing. It’s at 1450 onwards when Flemish artists like Rogier van der Weyden go to Italy, and there’s more of a interchange between north and south. So as I said, they’re working in parallel. They have a common aim. That is to make you think you can walk into the picture, to give you an illusion of reality, something that nobody’s really been very interested in from the fall of the ancient world up until this time, although, as we saw last week, we get a premonition of it in the work of Giotto at the end of the 13th, beginning of the 14th century. But in these cases particularly, it’s the background. I mean, if you think what byzantine icons look like, or early mediaeval paintings, they very often have a completely flat background, often a gold background that certainly prevents any sense of space. Now, Masacchio on the right-hand side has the advantage of mathematical perspective, the theory of which had been worked out by Brunelleschi, and he’s really showing off in this fresco of the early trinity where you have a barrel-vaulted space. So it really looks like. It would’ve been so astonishing to people in 1428 when they first saw this.

So just a few years later, equally astonishing, van Eyck, he doesn’t have the fully worked out system of mathematical perspective, and he’s trying quite hard, as you can see with the chessboard floor and the diagonal lines leading into space, but actually, it’s not fully correct. He has the great advantage of the medium of oil paint. Vasari thought that he invented the technique. We know that’s not true because there are earlier, in the generation before, there are paintings in Northern Europe in the technique of oil painting, but he’s certainly the artist who showed what you could do with the medium, and I think I mentioned last time that it has two great advantages. One is that it’s very slow drying. You can work much more slowly and more carefully, but most important, you can apply it in thin glazes, transparent layers. So you can get incredible richness of colour, the extraordinary jewel-like colour of Flemish paintings, particularly van Eyck, and you can get incredibly subtle gradations of tone. So let’s explore this astonishing background. Chancellor Rolin came from the city of Autun, which is now in France, was then in Burgundy, which was independent from France, and it’s believed that this is probably quite an accurate rendition of what the town looked like. We’re looking at, you know, a tiny area of paint on panel here, and we get this fantastic view, little tiny people on the bridge and of the town, and something, again, marvellous use of aerial perspective. Now, aerial perspective is not same thing as a bird’s eye view. Aerial perspective, the proper art historical use of the term, is to use changing colour and loss of definition to suggest misty distances, which we get here in this picture. Of course, there are no snow-covered Alps in Burgundy, so there’s a little bit of artistic licence being taken there.

Now, very intriguing are these two men seen from behind. Who are they? And some people think that they are van Eyck himself and an assistant and maybe the same two people who mysteriously appear in the background of “The Arnolfini Marriage” in the National Gallery in London. You can just see two tiny, tiny figures reflected in the convex mirror, one in red, one in blue. And look at this wonderful garden, and every flower there, every flower probably has a symbolic meaning. Almost everything in these Flemish paintings has a symbolic meaning, and it provides great employment, of course, to art historians. They don’t always agree. They come up with different theories about what things mean, but we know that they mean something. So the lilies will represent something, and the roses will represent something, but every flower is botanically correct and the birds and so on as well. And here, we get the view probably of the town of Autun. We can see people milling around in the streets, the perfect picture of a mediaeval town, and the Christ child. He’s a rather solid-looking baby, really isn’t he? Who’s blessing ‘cause the virgin is holding up the child to bless Chancellor Rolin, and he raises his arm in blessing. In this sense, I suppose that van Eyck is a little bit more old fashioned, looking back to mediaeval representations of the Christ child who was always very rigid and not very lifelike as a baby. Quite soon after this in Italy with artists like Filippo Lippi you see on the right-hand side, you find Italian artists. They’re fascinated by this ideal of young motherhood. I talked a bit about that last time with Raphael.

So with the Filippo Lippi on the right-hand side, that is a real baby who’s interacting with his mother as a baby might. Just look at this. We’re really looking at a few centimetres of paint on wood, and to get so much visual information about the city into this tiny area, it’s absolutely astonishing. And so I said, every detail is there for a purpose, and over above the head of Chancellor Rolin, we have these sculptures in the capitals of the columns, and they’re biblical subjects. So you’ve got the expulsion of Adam and Eve, we have Cain and Abel, Cain murdering Abel, and the drunkenness of Noah. I mean, some art historians think that these are three of the seven deadly sins. Well, the argument against that is, well, where are the other four? But it may be that these particular deadly sins were ones that Chancellor Rollin was worried about. Adam and Eve being expelled is pride because they took upon themselves to take the apple or the fruit from the tree. Cain and Abel, that’s anger, and the drunkenness of Noel would be gluttony. So maybe those were three sins that Chancellor Rolin was particularly prone to, at least that’s one idea. Now we leap forward to the end of the 15th century, and this is Albrecht Durer. He’s the greatest artist. I say the greatest. I choose that word quite carefully. Not the greatest painter. I think I’d say the greatest painter, it might be Grunewald or Altdorfer, but all round as an artist, I mean, much of his greatest work is graphic. It’s in drawings and prints and so on, and just such a remarkable figure, Albrecht Durer.

So the Louvre has one of the three self portraits, painted self portraits that’s survived by Durer. Self portraits are a new thing, really, in the 16th century. Hardly any mediaeval artists thought to hand down their likeness to posterity. So this is a new thing with the Renaissance. The earlier self portraits in Italy are usually in the background of religious pictures. You know, people like Botticelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, put their faces in amongst the background figures of a religious scene. The three self portraits by Durer are the earliest fully independent painted self portraits that we have, and this is the earliest one of the three. It’s 1493. As you can see, he’s 22 years old, still looking like a slightly bolshy adolescent but very finely dressed. He was a man. I think he was quite narcissistic, really, and self obsessed, as we shall see from his other self portraits, and although he doesn’t particularly flatter himself. I don’t think he’s trying to make himself look prettier or more beautiful than he was. He was quite a handsome man, I think. He’s holding a thistle, and when he painted this, he was engaged to be married, and the German for this type of thistle is , male fidelity. So it seems to be a declaration of fidelity for his future wife, Agnes. Didn’t turn out that way, actually. I think he actually wasn’t that keen on her once he’d got married and took every opportunity to scarp her off elsewhere and rather neglected her, and there are also some theories that he was basically homosexual rather than heterosexual. Here are the other two painted self portraits. The one on the left, that’s one from the Prado, and he’s really making a statement here, isn’t he?

And that one on the left of ridiculously over the top fashionable clothing, and the one on the right, which I shall be looking at in a week’s time when I’m in Munich with a group, is from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, painted in the holy year of 1500, and you can see that’s very prominent there, 1500 AD, Albrecht Durer, out on the left-hand side. And this portrait, it’s an astonishing portrait because he is effectively showing himself as Christ. I think it’s actually a blasphemous, almost blasphemous portrait. This frontal pose and the arrangement of the hair and so on is usually reserved for images of Christ the redeemer. He was certainly very self obsessed. So I think while probably could use the term narcissistic. He made his first self portrait at the age of 13, which you see on the left-hand side, and there’s an inscription in his handwriting saying that he was 13 years old when he made that portrait. So as well as giving us the first painted independent self portrait, this is, as far as I know, I think probably the first ever nude self portrait, and, again, it’s a rather astonishing image. You may find that you know rather more about Albrecht Durer from this image than you really want to. So here is the hypnotic gaze of this astonishing self portrait of Albrecht Durer, the one from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. And a closeup here of this slightly wary, bolshy-looking 22 year old of the Louvre portrait.

Another great German artist of the Renaissance period is Lucas Cranach who originally came from the south but spent most of his career in Saxony, and so his fame and his importance is very bound up with the reformation rather, as we shall see shortly, like that of Hans Holbein the Younger, who’s so associated with the English Reformation and the period of Henry VIII. And this young lady is the teenage daughter of Luther, and so Cranach is the first artist, first major artist of the Protestant Reformation and very, very involved with it and personally in terms of personal friendship with Luther. Painted many portraits of Luther and his wife, who was an ex-nun. And yes, now we come to Hans Holbein the Younger from Augsburg in South Germany, but his breakthrough really came through his association with the great humanist scholar Erasmus, who was living in Switzerland, and one of the most influential thinkers of the Renaissance, Northern Renaissance. And although he remained within the Catholic Church, he was also a big influence on the breakaway Protestant movement. His fame was international, and he commissioned several portraits by Holbein to send around Europe to his admirers and patrons. Two were commissioned to be sent to France. This is presumably one of them. And he’s another artist where you can be sure, really, that Erasmus really, really looked like this. I’ve said several times in these lectures that artists, portraitists divide themselves into those who are more interested in the truth and those who are more interested in idealising the sitter, and I think one has to say that Holbein was definitely on the side of truth. We’ve got details of his hands. Look at the rings on the hands and his handwriting.

So I don’t know how truthful he was, though, with Anne of Cleves. As I said, he’s very associated with the English Reformation because he was working for Henry VIII from around, in fact, he’d been to England already in 1521, recommended my Erasmus to Sir Thomas More. But by the time that he came back again in 1530s, Sir Thomas More had born from favour and been executed. Very dangerous time to be at court if you went a full foul of Henry VIII, and, of course, Henry VIII was getting through his wives at a pace. And so he’d already had three wives, Catherine of Aragon who’d failed to produce a son, Anne Boleyn, who also failed to produce a son and was executed, Jane Seymour, who did produce a son, but died. So he was looking for a new wife and who didn’t have email or Instagram or all those sort of things in the 16th century. So off Holbein was sent to paint this portrait of Anne of Cleves that you see on the left-hand side. It said, she looks, I think, to modern taste like a very comely young woman. In fact, she looks rather more attractive, I think, to modern eyes than Jane Seymour, who he also painted on the right-hand side. That painting is in Vienna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But anyway, as you all know, I’m quite sure, when Ann of Cleves arrived, she failed to please Henry VIII, and he found her very unappealing and referred to her as the Flemish Mare. So leaping on a century from 1530 to 1630, the Louvre has a great collection of paintings by the greatest Flemish painter of the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens.

Well, many museums have great collections of Rubens. So the National Gallery, the Prado, Kunsthistorisches Museum. My own choice for the greatest paint collection of Ruben’s paintings would be Munich, the Alte Pinakothek, but, I mean, Rubens was just a phenomenon. Just how did he do it? There are, you know, world’s museums absolutely full of enormous paintings by Rubens. Well, of course, the answer is that most of them aren’t 'cause he had a pretty, well, a factory system with up to 100 assistants. So for many of his paintings, he was reducing compositions, the designs, the modelli, and the assistants were doing most of the work, and he would then, depending on the importance of the client, touch up the final thing or not. But this painting on the left-hand side of Rubens’s second wife, Helena Fourment, and her two children is certainly completely in the hand of Rubens 'cause it was painted for his personal pleasure. Now I very often say to students, “Don’t marry an artist. Artist are not good spouse material,” but I think Ruben’s was good spouse material. He was happily married twice, and he also completely contradicts the cliche of the artist being a tormented and unhappy person despite having suffered a very, what must have been a very traumatic and difficult childhood because his father was accused of adultery with the wife of William of Orange, and, well, I won’t go into that story now. You can look it up if you want to, but there must have been quite a heavy shadow over his childhood, and they must have lived in fear and danger.

But if I could choose to be any artist, I’d certainly like to be Rubens 'cause we have a very fair idea of what he was like 'cause he’s a lot of his correspondence survives, and he was not only a great genius. I think he was a happy man and a good man and a man singularly without jealousy or bad feelings towards other artists. That’s quite rare, I would say, then and now. And his first marriage was a very, very happy one, but his wife died of the plague, Isabella, in 1626, and we know that he was really quite grief stricken by this. So 1630, he was internationally famous. He’d been knighted by Charles I, so he was technically an aristocrat. He was immensely wealthy, and there’s a letter where he says, oh, he was 53 in 1630, 53, and he said, “I’m not so old that I want to permanently give up the joys of the flesh.” So he decides to marry, and everybody says, “Well, now you’re Sir Peter Paul Rubens. You can marry into the aristocracy,” and he said, “No, I don’t want to marry a woman who would despise me because I earn my living with my hands,” and instead, and this might sound a little bit dubious, you know, as far as modern attitudes are concerned, this 53-year-old man married a very pretty 16-year-old girl, Helena Fourment, who came from the bourgeoisie rather than the aristocracy. I think she was happy. I mean, you can only really tell from the many, many paintings of her where she looks happy. He looks rather rattled, doesn’t he, in this portrait on the right-hand side, self portrait. But he was absolutely obsessed and besotted with her, and particularly, I think it’s very obvious from all his paintings of her which part of her anatomy was especially appealing to him.

This is a detail from a portrait of her that’s in Munich, and this is a portrait of her, rather risque, really, like a sort of Pirelli magazine image that this is his portrait of her in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. So there are several wonderful paintings by Rubens in the Louvre, but the real prize is the Marie de’ Medici cycle. This is 24 paintings that were commissioned by the Dowager Queen of France. Marie de’ Medici, she was the widow of Henri Quatre, and really celebrating her whole life and career in very heroic terms. Theoretically, she also commissioned another parallel series celebrating the life of her husband, Henri IV, who probably was rather more deserving as he, I think, was usually regarded as a very successful French king who brought the wars of religion to an end and introduced something of a golden age to France. Her career, I mean, was, I’d say she was really the Liz Truss of the 17th century. She was pretty disastrous, but we don’t get that from Rubens’s painting. It’s all very high flowing, very baroque, very magnificent. Here is on the left-hand side Henri IV admiring a portrait, falling in love with a portrait of Marie de’ Medici. Very unlikely. They married by proxy before they’d actually ever met, and curiously, Rubens was present at the marriage of Mary de’ Medici to Henri Quatre, and Henri Quatre wasn’t. He was back in France. The marriage by proxy took place in Florence in 1601, but this is how Rubens imagines it. You’ve got the gods Juno and Jupiter with their attributes, eagle and peacock floating, looking down benignly. You’ve got Mercury holding up the portrait of Mary de’ Medici and Minerva, goddess of wisdom, whispering into his ear.

And then there’s this tricky moment when Marie de’ Medici arrives in Marseilles, and she eventually meets, I’m not sure she met him in Marseilles. She may not have met him till she got to Paris. Anyway, that moment must have been a bit of a shock for him because, by all accounts, he was a great lover of women and beautiful women, and by all accounts, she was not a beautiful woman. So this tricky moment of the two of them meeting for the first time, Rubens deals with this by, again, falling back on classical mythology, and now Henri Quatre and Catherine de’ Medici have themselves been transformed into Juno and Jupiter, and they’re floating on a cloud. This is the coronation of Marie de’ Medici in Notre Dame in Paris. Oh, actually, this precedes that. This is the arrival of Marie de’ Medici in Marseilles, where she’s rather upstaged by these wonderfully luscious looking bifurcated mermaids in the foreground. Probably the most famous detail in this vast series of 24 huge paintings are the drops of water on the buttock that you see on the right-hand side. Now the Marie de’ Medici series, once again, Rubens produced oil sketches and modelli. These were presumably partly to get approval from Marie de’ Medici, but also he handed these over to his assistants, principally Jakob Jordaens, who painted the pictures big on canvases, and then they were, I suppose, rolled up and transported to Paris, and they were installed in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. And then Rubens spent a couple of months repainting them in situ.

As you study the canvases close to when you go around, you can see these details that can only be Rubens, like the little drops of water here. This you’ve got, again, actually rather better quality, giving you these drops of water, which you’ve got an incredible illusion of this 3D drop of transparent liquid, and he creates this. This how it’s done. It’s an optical trick with little touches of pigment placed side by side, and this was something that in was taken up by de Delacroix. Delacroix used to, whenever he was running out of inspiration, he’d take a cab from his studio on the left bank to the Louvre, where he’d go and study these paintings of Rubens, and here are the drops of water. The same idea, little separate touches of pigment placed side by side that give you this illusion of glistening liquid. Here is the good government of Marie de’ Medici, ha ha, with protecting the arts and driving out vices and all the negative things. Well, it wasn’t like that, I’m afraid. Apollo there in the middle, and in very, the Apollo is, of course, inspired by what was the most famous piece of sculpture in the world at the time, the Apollo Belvedere that you see on the right-hand side. But Ruben’s, he actually wrote an essay where he says, “Yes, a young artist must study the antique. They must study.

That’s how you learn. Ideal beauty is looking at antique sculpture, but the danger in that is that your figures just look like coloured sculptures.” So Rubens is very, very good. Well, he’s fantastic at flesh. He is the great master of flesh, isn’t he? Living, moving flesh. And this is my favourite image from the Marie de’ Medici cycle because it’s so funny, really. This is Marie de’ Medici graciously handing over the helm of the ship of state to her son Louis XIII. Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. She was desperately hanging on and trying to handbag him out the way, but I love the idea of France being this boat being vigorously rode by sexy, bare-breasted ladies. Rubens’s is, of course, the giant, giant, giant figure, by far the greatest Flemish artist of the 17th century. Number two, and he’d be wincing in his grave somewhere, is van Dyck, who spent his own entire career, really, in the shadow of Rubens trying to escape from under the shadow of Rubens. It reminds me of Brancusi saying he didn’t want to be in the studio of Rodin ‘cause nothing grows in the shadow of big trees. But the one area where van Dyck really could outshine Rubens was portraiture. I mean, Rubens can do great portraits of people he loves, people he knows very well, but he didn’t like painting royal portraits and official portraits, and it just wasn’t his thing, and van Dyck, this fitted him like a glove. Now, van Dyck, like Holbein a century earlier, he had a brief period, 1621, at the court of James I, but obviously didn’t agree with him, and he quickly flitted off to Italy, and he comes back in 1632 to the court of Charles I, which is much more cultivated, much more civilised.

And just as we see Henry VIII and his court through the eyes of Holbein, we see the age of Charles I through van Dyck. Van Dyck made many portraits of the king, but Charles, I people say he was the unlucky king 'cause he had his head chopped off, but in one sense, he was very, very lucky, and that was that we now see him through, largely through the eyes of van Dyck, and look at him here. This is actually, I think, the most wonderful of all the many portraits that van Dyck made of Charles I. How suave, how cool, how handsome, even sexy. This was not how he was, by all accounts. He was tiny, he was 5'4", and he was awkward and shy. This portrait of him of Prince of Wales is probably closer to the reality of his personality than this wonderfully elegant and suave image of van Dyck. And even Daniel Mytens, who was the best portrait painter, he was the Dutch painter, but the best portrait painter in England before the arrival of van Dyck, and he does a good job on Charles I, but hey, look at these two images. Who do you want to be painted by? And, of course, at the moment that van Dyck arrived in England, it’s rather like sergeant at the end of the 19th century. Like Sergeant van Dyck cornered the market, Mytens went back to Holland with his tail between his legs, and every everybody else was pretty well driven out of business.

So there is Mytens on the left, Charles I and van Dyck on the right. Now we arrive in Holland, and when you go round any great museum of old masters in the world, the moment you walk into the Dutch rooms, you sense a great change. The pictures are on a much smaller scale. They’re more domestic. This reflects, of course, changes in society, changes of patronage. Holland is such an amazing country in the 17th century. It’s really a kind of dummy run for everything that’s going to come later in the rest of Europe. Theoretically, it does have a monarchy, at least some of the time. By the end of the century, it has a monarchy, and there is a Dutch aristocracy, but they’re not important. It’s the bourgeoisie. It’s the mercantile, wealthy who are important, and they are the people who are buying the pictures, and they’re living in houses that may be grand, but they’re not palaces. So the size of the picture has to reflect that, and the other very important thing, of course, is that Holland has become Calvinist. So Dutch churches are whitewashed. Religious imagery is banned. This is an artist called Saenredam who painted pretty well nothing but church interiors, and that is another striking new feature of the art scene in Holland in the 17th century, this degree of specialisation not seen anywhere else, and it’s probably as a result of the new system of patronage. Instead of having Marie de’ Medici saying, you know, “Young man, do this for me,” or, you know, Isabella d'Este and, you know, Isabella d'Este telling the artist what subjects they should paint, what size they should be, and really interfering even with the composition.

Dutch artists in a way had a greater freedom to paint what they wanted to paint, but they were then subject to the tyranny of the market because they are selling to a dealer who’s selling on to clients and collectors rather like today. And so the dealer says, “Well, you know, your church interiors, I can sell those as good and well.” So the artist, you know, gets stuck painting a particular type of subject matter. These are wonderful pictures, these church interiors, and they have a kind of abstract quality. I think it’s always very interesting to, if you’re thinking about composition, I used to say this to my students when they were doing a pictorial analysis, that it was a very good idea to buy a postcard of the picture and analysing and to hold it upside down. Immediately, certain things become more clear about the composition, and you can see how the composition is structured in terms of horizontals and verticals, almost like a Mondrian. Of course, the greatest Dutch artist of all is Rembrandt, and he is another great self portraitist. There are over 80 surviving self portraits by Rembrandt if you include drawings and prints. That’s far, far more than any other artists right up until, say, the 19th century. I don’t sense narcissism in Rembrandt’s self portraits in the way I do in those of Durer and van Dyck, although this particular portrait in the Louvre, he is showing off. This is painted in the 1630s when he was at his most successful and earning a lot of money as a fashionable portraitist in Amsterdam. So he’s showing himself very richly dressed in furs, and great status symbol for an artist is the gold chain, and you can see he’s touching it, he’s pointing to it. Now the gold chain goes back to Titian. Titian was the first artist to be a noble.

He was made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece by the Emperor Charles V who gave him this gold chain. And there are two self portraits by Titian where, quite discreetly, he includes the gold chain as a symbol of his success and prestige, and thereafter, in 16th and through the 17th century, many artists paint themselves with gold chains, referring back to Titian. As I said, I think van Dyck is another artist with a strong whiff of narcissism in his self portraits. He was given a gold chain by Charles I. I think probably poor Rembrandt had to buy his own gold chain. Nobody was going to give it to him, but you can see the rather flamboyant gesture of holding up the, you know, gold chain. In your face, gold chain. There are two very closely related portraits. The one on the left is the Louvre. The one on the right is Wallace Collection. For awhile, it was demoted. The Rembrandt Commission said that it was a studio copy. I never doubted for one second that the Wallace Collection picture was by the hand of Rembrandt. I haven’t really got time to go into great detail. I probably will do a talk on the Wallace Collection for you later in the series, and I’ll tell you more. Look at this. This is actually from the Wallace Collection self portrait, this crust of thousands of little touches of paint building up this sort of crusty surface. This can only be Rembrandt, and this amazing detail of the curly hair where he’s reversed the brush, There’s an under layer of warmer paler brown and a over layer of dark brown, and he’s reversed the brush, and he’s drawing, he’s insizing through the wet paint to create the effect of the curls. That’s a totally Rembrandt effect.

I don’t think a copyist or an imitator was going to be able to do that. So see these ones, clearly, there is an element of showing off and pride in his success, but we all know the story of Rembrandt how, in the 1640s, he fell out of fashion. How old you think he was when he painted this? This is certainly from well after his, actually, it’s from after his bankruptcy in 1657. I mean, he looks as old as the hills, doesn’t he? But he’s actually 53 when he paints this picture. All the late portraits and, you know, the self portraits have this incredible moving quality. What are we looking at? We’re looking at a canvas with mud on it, you know, different shades of mud, if you want actually, and yet it’s so alive. I mean, it’s a cliche to say that he doesn’t just paint the surface. He paints the spirit, that he paints what’s going on inside the head. How can you do that with just smearing this gungy stuff on a surface? It’s a kind of a miracle, and another star painting in the Louvre is this, “The Flayed Ox,” which became very, very occult picture, I would say, in the 19th century and in the early 20th century. Particularly for those artists, as I said, who are more interested in truth than beauty, it’s a shocking image really, “The Flayed Ox,” and some people have even suggested that there are intimations of crucifixion in the pose, if you want to call it that, and just an amazing, amazing piece of painterly work. I earlier talked about how oil painting can be applied, oil painting can be applied in thin, transparent layers, but you can also, and from tissue onwards, you can use impasto.

That’s thick, opaque paint, and Rembrandt does this here brilliantly to give you an extraordinary sensation of the flayed flesh, and, of course, a great inspiration to later artists like Soutine who regularly went to the Louvre to study Rembrandt. Now another very great Rembrandt in the Louvre is this one, “Bathsheba.” It’s a theme, as you know, from the Jewish Bible. She was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and David lusted after her, and he arranged for Uriah to be killed in battle so that he could then enjoy Bathsheba because he first of fallen in love with her or fallen in lust with her because he was spying on her while she was bathing. So he saw her nakedness, so that’s, of course, the excuse here. This is a bathroom scene for her nakedness, but she’s holding a letter in her hand, and the letter is informing her of what has happened to her husband. And so this makes a very interesting comparison, the same subject, more or less, by Rubens. This is in Dresden on the left-hand side, and in this picture top left, you can just make out there is David looking down lustfully on the semi-naked Bathsheba. And in this picture, it’s very operatic. It’s like a scene from a Handel opera. You see the black servant coming in. He’s just giving the letter to Bathsheba whereas, and this is a key difference in these two pictures, in Rembrandt painting, she has already read the letter.

She knows what’s in it. And so Rubens’ Bathsheba, she’s a gorgeous young woman, sumptuous, fleshy, just the type that he likes. She’s a good time girl. She looks very untroubled really by the whole thing, but look at the face of of Bathsheba in Rembrandt, what Rembrandt has this incredible ability to depict complex emotion. What is she thinking about? What is she feeling? I think probably very contradictory feelings, and here, you’ve got the two faces of the Bathshebas. Frans Hals, two very, very famous Frans Hals in the Louvre, this one of a young musician. They both date actually quite early in his career from the 1620s, Frans Hals who lived in Holland and hardly ever left it. Of course, we don’t know as much about Dutch artists as we do about Italian artists, but there are odd bits of information of surfaced. One is that Frans Hals was supposed to come to Amsterdam to finish off a group portrait that he’d started and just never did. He just refused to make that journey, and when you think, actually, he could’ve gone on foot, you know, from Holland to Amsterdam, you know, you could walk it in a couple of hours. It’s not that far, but he just wouldn’t. He stayed put. So it’s intriguing, in this portrait, the Italianate influences. He certainly never went to Italy. So he picked up these Italianate influences, well, really from Caravaggio but secondhand through the Dutch Caravaggist artists from Utrecht. Oh, look at this wonderful detail. I didn’t get to it last week, but in my final Louvre lecture, I will talk about Caravaggio. This is in the Louvre, “The Fortune Teller,” and the format, the half-length format against a lit wall, this is something that Frans Hals has picked up, as I said, via the Utrecht artist from Caravaggio.

The other very, very famous picture is this one, the “Bohmienne,” “The Gipsy Girl,” dating also from the 1620s. Frans Hals is the great master of animation. You know, his figures are so alive and animated and full of vivacity, and much of this is conveyed through the brushwork. Look at this, this slashing, angular, free broken brushwork. I sort of see him as like a fencer with a sword, wielding the brush in a very animated way. This little picture actually is not with the other Dutch pictures because it’s part of a donation that was given to Louvre, so it’s actually in the south wing of the Louvre, but I’m putting it in here ‘cause it fits in nicely. This is by Samuel van Hoogstraten, who was an artist from Dordrecht, and he’s a minor artist, but a very interesting link. One of the great controversies about Vermeer is whether he used the camera obscura or not. I’m sure he did. Even though we don’t have full proof of it, documentary proof, I think the proof is in the pictures. It’s visual, and this is a camera obscura. It’s a kind of box, and you can project an image, and you can paint from the projected image, and certain photographic features will then come into the painting, and I think it’s very likely that Samuel van Hoogstraten painted this scene also from a camera obscura image. And the other interesting thing is the painting in the background, which is easily attributable to ter Borch and, ter Borch, there are so few documents, but there are documents that link ter Borch to Vermeer.

So that is an interesting if tenuous link between Samuel van Hoogstraten and Vermeer. So Vermeer lived in Delft, and so did Pieter de Hooch, who we see here, and there’s a period in the late, around about 1660 where Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch are very close to one another and painting very similar compositions. And in a small city like Delft, they must have known each other really well, and fascinating comparison between the two artists. I mean, Pieter de Hooch is also an absolutely magical artist when he’s at his best. And so here we have a bourgeois interior. Like with so many of these Dutch paintings, there’s definitely a kind of moralising and rather titillating moralising meaning. I can’t actually make out what’s happening in the painting in the background. It’s quite likely to be a brothel scene, or it could be a biblical scene of the prodigal son misbehaving, and it reflects on, you know, these actually rather respectable-looking people in this picture, but they’re drinking alcohol, and the little dog is a clue as well. The dog is asleep. So that means, you know, she’s going to get drunk, and she’s going to probably behave in a very naughty way. The sleeping dog is her virtue that’s gone to sleep. Here is a Vermeer. Where is this? I think this is Dresden where you could, I mean, the similarities are very obvious, aren’t they, in the composition? And this painting also in the Louvre by wonderful Pieter de Hooch of a woman weighing coins.

All these paintings, as I said, a lot have some kind of symbolic meaning, and this is likely to refer to the last judgement , this painting by Vermeer, which you can see is very similar. These two artists must have known each other’s work. Vermeer actually makes the connection with the last judgement much more explicit by including a depiction of the last judgement on the wall in the background. Now the Louvre has two masterpieces by Vermeer. This is “The Astronomer,” and it’s one of a pair of pictures which are thought to represent the great scientist and thinker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and again, there are documentary connections between him and Vermeer. So they certainly knew each other, and this is always referred to as the Rothschild Vermeer. It was bought by Baron Alphonse James de Rothschild in the 1880s and was, you know, a jewel of Rothschild’s collection, and in Second World War, it was confiscated by the Nazis, and actually to this day, it still bears a swastika stamp on the back of the picture. But it was given back to the Rothschilds after the war and then given to the French state in lieu of tax in 1983, and I remember that very well because like many of you, I suppose, I would count Vermeer as perhaps my favourite artist. Not a very original thing, but I’ve always been absolutely obsessed by him, and I think I’ve seen nearly all of Vermeer’s by travelling around the museums where they’re shown. I’ve seen all the ones in America, and I think I’ve seen all the ones in Europe, actually, but I hadn’t seen this one. So when it was acquired by the Louvre, I was beside myself with excitement, and I went to Paris for a week, and I saved it for the last day. This was going to be the cherry on the cake of a wonderful week in Paris.

Usually, when I came to Paris, I just loved it so much. I would get up early in the morning to do architectural walks, and I would spend all day long in museums, and as I said, I saved this for the last day. In those days, it was in what we call the Petit Cabinet, the small rooms either side of the Grand Galerie. And so I arrived full of excitement on the last day and found to my horror that the Petit Cabinet were closed. There was some staff shortage. So I was really upset, and I went to this guard, and I said, “Oh, I’m leaving Paris tomorrow, and the whole point of this trip was to see 'The Astronomer.’” And to my amazement, he took out a big key, and he unlocked the room, and he pushed me in it, and he said, “You’ve got 10 minutes,” and so for those 10 minutes, I owned this picture. I was the only person in the world that could look at this picture for those 10 minutes, and I’ll never forget that. So here is the pair picture, which is “The Geographer,” which is in the Stadel Institute in Frankfurt, and I’m going to end with this, of course. And if anybody wants to give me a really nice birthday present at the end of this month, this is what I’d like. I covered this picture. If I could have any picture in the Louvre, it would be this magical little picture of a woman of making lace, and, of course, this painting, it’s been in the Louvre since the 19th century. It inspired Roust, it inspired this little picture by, we are on the left-hand side. I mean, it’s a small picture, but everything is, again, it’s got a slightly photographic quality to it. It’s as though seen through a slightly blurred lens. Anyway, at least I got through the material today, but I’m sorry to overrun, and I’m going to see what your questions say.

Q&A and Comments:

“Pre-football.” Oh yes, of course there is. Well, I couldn’t give up what’s it for the football, I must admit. Yes, it’s true. It’s more authentic. It’s more truthful in a photograph. I agree with you about that.

Q: “Did one really know or people in olden time when ?”

A” I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re saying then and that it’s not come through a little bit garbled.

“Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour always strikes me as uncharacteristically,” yes, she was supposed to be a very sweet woman, wasn’t she? It’s not a very flattering portrait.

“This never ceases to astonish me when Mary and Jesus are depicted with typical Northern European features and complexion.” Yes, the only person who did know better, of course, was Rembrandt. He’s the only artist before the 19th century who gives Jesus distinctively Semitic features. Yes. Usually, Jesus is a bottle blonde with blue eyes. He certainly is with Rubens.

“Archaeologists have proven that a male from that time in history noting his ethnic heritage and geographic location of his birth date would’ve had dark hair.” Yeah, that’s pretty obvious really, I think. Yeah. Nowadays, you know, we can find images from all over the world. We can download them, look at them on our phones. They only knew what they were familiar with.

Thank you, Susan, and thank you, Arlene. The thin, it was not considered desirable for a woman to be thin until the 20th century, not really till after the First World War, and there’s a whole lecture of that, really, why that came about. The same with, you know, suntan. Nobody wanted a suntan before exotic holidays, and having suntan was a sign of wealth and not a sign of poverty. Let me see. Thank you, Katrine.

Q: “How were these big artists’ reputations made?”

A: Well, you know, I think obviously, many of the artists I’ve talked about tonight, it’s through patronage, through royal, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic patronage.

Judy. Thank you, Judy. I mean, Rubens’s greatness, you can’t dispute it, but it’s true. He’s not an artist who pleases a lot of people these days. Thank you, Suzanne.

Q: “Why was music so far behind art?”

A: Do you think it was? You know, how about in Rembrandt’s lifetime? You’ve got Monteverdi’s “Marriage to Poppea.” Try listening to the final duet and tell me again if you think that music was so far behind painting. I’m not sure that it was.

Thank you, Ruth. Yes, it would take you more than four lifetimes.

I’m sorry, Rita. It would take everybody four lifetimes together to buy that painting. Thank you.

Q: Could I comment on Vermeer’s, including…

A: I have done a whole talk on Vermeer. You could probably get that off the thing, and certainly, I mean very, very interesting the way that he depicts the carpets, you know, in an almost pointillist way with little blobs of light. I talk a lot more about his technique in the talk I did on Vermeer.

Self portrait in The Frick. You think it’s the best? It’s very grand, isn’t it? One very noble sort of kingly, the one in The Frick, but they’re all wonderful in that way.

Yes, I didn’t go to the Vermeer exhibition ‘cause, actually, I prefer to go and see them individually in their museums. I was kind of put off by the thought of the number of people, and, you know, I didn’t really like the idea of that exhibition.

Thank you for all your very, very kind. Yes, Dutch East is very important for particularly Dutch still life painting, all the stuff that’s coming back from the Dutch East Indies. You managed to have the “Mona Lisa” to yourselves. That’s really something. Thank you all.

Q: “Is there a woman peering around the flayed ox?”

A: Yes, I think there is.

And thank you for your very, very kind comments, and this thing keeps jumping all over the place. You’re quite right. You may have noticed that I’ve actually started putting pictures on the ceiling. In fact, in the other room there, the whole ceiling is covered in pictures. So I really am running out of space. Though can I recommend the best two? Well, I can recommend two that are very good. I wouldn’t know if they’re the best, but the two that I work for are Kirker and Martin Randall. They’re both wonderful. They’re different. It really depends on your temperament, I think, which one of the two you should go to. Martin Randall, a bit more expensive, a bit more micromanaged, but I love working for Kirker, too. I like working for both of them. But I know there are many. I’ve recently started working for a wonderful Australian company called Academy, and I’m really impressed with them. They’re fantastically, meticulously organised, so it’s been a real pleasure. I’m doing two trips for them next year. So I think that’s everything, and thank you all for you, and it’s so lovely to be back with you, and thank you all for your kind comments.