National Gallery Page #9

to bring in. You're right, it's very cautious.

But it... it enables us to balance a budget

that has accommodated the costs

that we consider to be reasonable

to do what we want to do next year.

And it provides us with some flexibility

to cover eventualities that we can't predict,

and also, new projects that might

come up during the course of the year.

So we could include more income,

but then we'd be including

a much bigger contingency,

- which I'm not sure is a brilliant message.

- Yeah.

Here is the decline

of the empire.

Here, something terrible has occurred,

it's the end of Carthage,

their overthrow by Rome.

The men are all being taken off,

prisoners, to Rome.

The women are weeping for them.

Here, the sun is descending,

I think, in the sky.

It's a very dramatic sunset,

with quite a lot of red in it.

Turner himself referred to it

as an ensanguined sunset,

an ensanguined sky,

and here, these rough brush...

marks of the brush, in a dark red,

I think, if you go into the exhibition,

you'll see it is a dark, browny red,

almost, perhaps, like encrusted blood.

So this is a very dramatic view of empire.

So, here, I think Turner really starts to

detach himself from Claude in many ways,

because these are not tranquil

depictions of classical subjects,

these are reflections on history.

And Turner was immensely interested in

and influenced by history.

He also wrote poetry on this subject.

And he can't have avoided, of course,

the events around the painting

of these compositions in 1815,

and this one in 1817.

It was, of course, the very end

of the Napoleonic Wars,

the end of the Napoleonic Empire,

and, by contrast,

the rise of the British Empire.

But Turner took a very long view

of these things.

He was interested

in the rise and fall of empires

over hundreds and thousands of years.

Do come in.

So, welcome. Now, you're looking

at a picture of Frederick Rihel,

painted in 1663.

It came into the National Gallery in 1960.

It had been quite obscured

by lots of accumulated yellow varnishes.

The picture was restored

not that long ago,

but the varnish that was used

was very, very degraded.

And what you are seeing now is a picture

where I've done quite a lot of cleaning.

That means using solvents

to reduce or remove

discoloured varnishes from the paint

over most of the surface area.

There's an area roughly corresponding

to here where I haven't cleaned, so...

Not yet. It's a little hard to see

the differences, I suppose, now.

I can tell you, it looked much worse.

No, I think the interesting thing

about a yellow varnish,

everyone understands

that a yellow varnish makes...

shifts all the colours

toward the warmer end of the spectrum.

You know, blue becomes green,

and I would say a yellow filter...

film over a yellow colour

doesn't change it much at all.

And so you might wonder about a picture

like this, which is mostly warm colours,

you know, white, red, brown, yellow,

about the distortion.

I mean, there are two things I would point

out that have changed quite a lot,

and you can distinguish

some quite important things

that are going on in the picture.

The differences between the yellow and

white impasto, very typical of Rembrandt,

was completely impossible to see.

I mean, the sleeve and the sash

were more or less the same colour.

But the other thing I think...

the other important thing

to think about while we clean pictures

that people often underestimate is the fact

that varnishes not only change colour,

they often go a little bit foggy.

They develop a fine craquelure

and they scatter light.

And it's really, on a microscopic level, like

looking at a shattered windscreen on a car.

There's still a film there,

but you can't really see through it.

And that really changes

the way you see the darker colours.

So they become much lighter,

and so you can't see the distinctions

that are in the painting between, say,

quite dark, very dark and extremely dark.

And that's really important

with a picture like this,

where there's so much going on that's

about distinctions between brown and black.

And really, the illusion of depth and volume

and spatial recession

is the key gain, I think, from this picture.

I think the kind of investigation

I was saying before that we do

as pan of any restoration,

even preliminary to any restoration,

has shown some other interesting things

about this painting.

And I'm gonna take

my one visual aid here.

We... Oops. Sorry about that.

We... Sorry. We normally take...

do X-radiographs of pictures like this

before we start restoration,

so here is a typical X-ray,

where you can see the denser pigments,

the ones with the heavier atomic weights,

show up white,

and luckily, it just so happens

that lead white, white pigment,

is actually one of the heaviest pigments,

so you can see the distribution

of some of these things.

And it tells you very important information

about how a picture is planned.

For example, you know, the sky

is sort of painted around the head.

The head isn't on top of it,

because we don't see that going through.

You learn all kinds of interesting things

that are often very revealing about

a particular painter's way of working,

that are often very revealing about

a particular painter's way of working,

certain mannerisms of how he might

handle impasto, and all the rest.

But the fascinating thing about this picture,

which many of you

may have already worked out,

is that if you turn it sideways,

there's another picture.

And this is very, very unusual

for this kind of picture.

Rembrandt did this a great deal,

something like a quarter of his self-portraits

are recycled and reused,

something like a quarter of his self-portraits

are recycled and reused,

but it's very unusual in the context

of an important commission.

This is not a painting for the marketplace.

This picture was

for a rather important client.

So we can't be absolutely certain

about this underlying painting.

It... I think it's fair to say

it's the same sort of body type and

general characteristics as Frederick Rihel,

it's the same sort of body type and

general characteristics as Frederick Rihel,

so you might say that he may have changed

it in response to this event that happened,

is one theory.

This in itself is quite a bold

and very unusual composition.

There are more or less

no full-length portraits

after his experiences

with the reception of The Night Watch.

So that in itself is unusual,

So that in itself is unusual,

and to have this great empty space

with what look like trees

and the rest coming through

is quite fascinating.

But, for whatever reason,

of which we can't be certain,

this picture, which is probably not entirely

finished, but very far along, was changed.

And then we get into

some interesting things

about what happened when it was changed.

Because he, amazingly enough,

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