Documentary : The Lost Rubens portrait of the Duke of Buckingham

so we're hunting for this fellow here he's called George Villiers he was the first Jew cracking huh quite a pretty man oh really you think but he was described as the most handsome man in England first if he says maybe he still is Thanks No [Music] the Julie buckingham portrait that we saw on part UK's website was only recently moved here from Pollak house where it was safely put into storage somewhere among this embarrassment of riches is Jericho adiga this place is full of treasures here's an El Greco just on the floor as you would find in El Greco oh and here is all men still looking pretty handsome but we need to get him out to have a tryst look the artist behind his painting is currently unknown it's listed on art UK as being after Peter Paul Rubens which means it's considered to be a copy by almost anyone except Rubens but I'm not so sure well I shall have to say I feel a bit nervous stand in front of this because my theory is that this is by Rubens and that's quite a the discovery of a lost Rubens would be quite a coup born in Antwerp in 1577 Sir Peter Paul Rubens was one of the Giants of art history his energetic and daringly executed paintings dominated artistic taste in the 17th century and influenced artists from Rembrandt to Renoir today he is regarded as one of the most naturally gifted painters who ever lived but did he paint this portrait of George Villiers if the picture in this condition is quite difficult to see is this of quite obscured by this nova painting what have you his complexion but there is this Jordan disguise of yellow sheen is that varnish yes but there's little certain sort of telltale signs which I think you can pick up on you see he's done the eyelashes they're not actually painted on like paint on the eye he's scored the the paint through the tip of his brush you see that so it's just sort of cutting benzion technique that he does and I don't think a copyist would do and there's another lovely little thing here detail which the collar comes up like that but originally and you see there's another little line down there sort of disappears oh yeah now I think that could be a Penta mount where the artist I changed his mind and so you can just see evidence of the sort of creative originality and the background just seems very dark I didn't even realize he had this this lustrous head of hair until I'd looked at it for quite some time is that something that will kind of be improved when it's I really hope so and there's some really sort of not-so-good bits which should make me think oh god what am I talking about I mean the detail of this little front of the collar here is a bit of a mess it's got no definition doesn't really work at the moment I think there's no chance in the world that we could get this accepted as a Rubens looking like this there are too many confusing things like the fact that this hair doesn't work as you see in the front its face looks too yellow all of those things which I think will make people very nervous about accepting as a Rubens to do so we will have to build a compelling case step one is to ask curator of European art Pippa Stephenson and for every available document relating to this picture's history unfortunately there's not very much of it it's a very thin file but please feel free to so after Rubens gorge village marking him gifted by mrs. 1967 so is that a relevant date for Pollock house yes that's when and Maxwell Macdonald gifted a very large collection of paintings of Pollock house including our Spanish paintings but of course the vilius was obviously included in that gift do we have any information prior to this date I'm afraid not the price that it's a bit of a mystery I see so it's not a picture the Sterling Maxwell has sort of written about himself his real passion was the Spanish painting so that's that's what took up most of his time my Tia bought this picture of a British sitter is a sort of decorative thing do you think a trinket I would think so yeah he was very interested in royalty and and won okay so I would say that kind of played in quite nicely with with his interest well we have to see if we can add to this and maybe if we're lucky change the artist Glasgow museums have kindly allowed us to send the painting of the Duke of Buckingham to restoration expert Simon Gillespie in London his first job is to assess its condition and its quality does he think this is a potential lost masterpiece this is a big one Simon what do you think well I'm hoping this is by Rubens and if it isn't it would be very embarrassing if it is they'll be quite a good one there are little bits of restoration of dotted around right and repaint which are confusing the I see what sort of a gained you think we're gonna get out of it it'll be a completely different personality but now it looks almost like an 18th century print but it'll be freed up from all of this yellow varnish and careless bits of over the paint on it yes covering original paint making the whole thing look very flat and the background sort of overwhelms in yes it does it's like a big tsunami coming towards it are there any good bits you liked about the picture yeah there was normally it's only a little tiny bit to chain it gives you a hope there was something good but in fact there's lots of good bits on this there's some really interesting bits which are completely typical of Rubens is hand good it's been fiddle around with in the past but I think it's gonna reveal so that's the challenge but as you and I know Simon getting a Rubens accepted is extremely difficult and in fact the bar is very high so you need to transform the appearance this picture I need to do some historical digging so how do we know that Rubens ever painted such a portrait of the Duke of Buckingham in 1625 after they met in Paris - Duke commissioned Rubens to depict him on a grand scale in an epic equestrian portrait unfortunately that was destroyed by fire in 1949 but we have a very good idea of what it looked like from this preparatory oil study which is in a museum in the USA it must at many feet high have been an extraordinarily impressive portrait now as Rubens his usual practice when he had a portrait commissioned like this to first do a drawing from life of the sitter and fortunately that survives - is in a museum in Vienna in the Albertina and is a really penetrating drawing I absolutely love it but in this case Rubens also painted an additional portrait a study in oils of just Buckinghams head how do we know that he painted it well it's listed in Rubens's posthumous inventory here in 1640 a portrait of the Duke of Buckingham and he probably kept it because it meant something to him but the current catalogue raisonné that's the complete survey of Rubens's known portraits lists that portrait as whereabouts unknown and it's my theory that in fact he's supported from pollak house however the catalog entry describes a possible rival contender to be the missing original in the you fitzy gallery in Florence and I can see from the photos why some people in the past have thought that this is in fact by Rubens it looks to be a really good quality so something that we really need to check out meanwhile what I want to know is who exactly was George Villiers the first cheek of Buckingham to answer that first a short history lesson is it [Music] in 1683 Queen Elizabeth the first died leaving no heirs and without being her successor for a time her cousin Mary Queen of Scots had been the legal heir to the throne despite being both a foreigner and a Catholic but her execution 16 years earlier for her part in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth had put an end to that and so it was there within hours of the position becoming available the Tudor reign ended and that of the Stuart's began Mary son King James the sixth of Scotland also became King James the first of England and Ireland this change in monarchy was mischievously commemorated by a popular epigram doing the rounds at the time it roughly translates from the Latin 'as Elizabeth was King now James is Queen to explain why I've come to a port palace in Northamptonshire this was by far James's favorite royal residence so much so that he personally contributed to its extension to make it more suitable for the princely recreation and commodious entertainment that he enjoyed so much although married with children King James rarely spent time with his dependents he far preferred parting it up with his entourage which always included as one course year coyly put it a number of male lovelies historians and biographers have long debated King James's sexuality but few now doubt that he was either gay or bisexual and quite openly so and that's where young George Villiers enters the story the future Duke of Buckingham er was the son of a penniless Squire who died when Villiers was just 12 his mother then sat about schooling him and dance and languages grooming him for life as a courtier Villiers proved to be an excellent student and his mother's investments him paid off more handsomely than she could ever imagined in the summer of 1614 age 21 Villiers met James the first at a hunt here at up foot palace the Kings attraction was immediate and the pair soon became inseparable the intimate relationship between Villiers and King James is well documented not least in the volume of love letters the pair exchanged in one letter King James writes I desire only to live in this world for your sake and so god bless you my sweet child and wife and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband I mean this is no passing fling this is a full-on and intense relationship [Music] in other letters James uses Villiers pet names tini after Saint Stephen who a setter have had at the face of an angel but up thought Palace itself offers an even more intriguing clue to the nature of their affair this is the bedroom King James had built for himself the grandest in the house where he slept during his many rural progresses here in 2007 renovation workers removed a section of plaster to reveal a secret doorway this one's conceals a hidden passageway long since bricked up which in turn led to the second grandest bedroom in the house new prizes for guessing his left ear within months of their meeting Villiers finds himself appointed royal cup bearer a sort of gentlemen's gentlemen in charge of serving wine it was a position without any significant power but it did guarantee access to the king this was just the beginning videos ruthlessly exploited the Kings infatuation acquiring title after title in an astonishing rise to power by count Errol baron from gentleman of the bedchamber to Knight of the Garter the list seemed endless until finally he joined the highest ranks of the English peerage as Duke of Buckingham in 1623 [Music] Buckingham rewarded himself and his family in both riches and political standing even after James's death in 1625 he remained a royal favorite under the new King Charles the first but Buckingham wielded this power clumsily he'd already made himself unpopular with Parliament through his negotiation of the marriage of Charles the first to a Catholic he then compounded his problems through a series of disastrous military campaigns in Cadiz in Spain and La Rochelle in France in August 1628 Rockingham was preparing a second mission to France and he was approached by john Felton an army officer who had been wounded in the failed excursion to la rochelle Felton obviously held a severe grudge he whipped out his knife and stabbed the Duke to death and like the passing of Queen Elizabeth Villiers and wise were celebrated in a barbed couplet the Duke is dead and we are rid of strife by Felton's hands that took away his life if the prospect of finding a lost Rubens isn't tantalizing enough even more exciting is the fact that our portrait could be one of the only three British sitters painted by Rubens why so few well for one thing Rubens barely had time to paint anymore Rubens wasn't just a brilliant painter he was a diplomat even a spy and there's no better demonstration of his many talents than here in the banqueting house in Whitehall ironically Rubens didn't really like painting portraits his commissioned works were primarily religious mythological and historical subjects which not only paid better but lent themselves to the epic scale that Rubens preferred he once wrote I confess that I am by natural instinct better fitted to execute very large works than small curiosities and this is one of the largest of them all [Music] in 1629 Rubens came to London on a diplomatic mission to secure peace between England and Spain naturally he succeeded but while he was here King Charles the first commissioned this extraordinary ceiling paintings it's the only one by Rubens that survives in situ called the apotheosis of James the first it honors Charles's father and shows him being drawn heavenwards by various angels and gods as he's being turned into a deity the painting is trying to tell us that all of James's virtues and indeed his whole reign was derived from God's in other words this is the Divine Right of Kings in action did Rubens really believe this probably not but Charles the first certainly did and saw paintings like this as a way of reinforcing his autocratic rule alas Charles a little man of very limited abilities wasn't very good at playing dictator and when in 1649 he walked through this room having lost the civil war on his way to have his head cut off this painting would have been one of the last things he ever Rubens's masterpiece is a fitting legacy to the hubris of over-mighty rulers but if Charles had been shrewd enough he might have seen it as something of an omen although the preliminary sketches for the ceiling were made here in London Rubens painted the canvases in Antwerp and had them shipped over only when they arrived did the limitations of working remotely become suddenly and drastically apparent when the finished canvases were first unrolled on the floor they were met with a horrifying realization although both the English and the Flemish measured things in feet and inches each nation used a slightly different standard and so at first these divine paintings simply wouldn't fit and urgent alterations had to be made on-site the solution they actually locked bits off the canvases fortunately this didn't diminish the power of the finished work it's price tag flawless Ruben's was paid 3,000 pounds at a time when your average servant earner move on a few pounds in the year it's no wonder it was a revolution one man who has made a career out of studying Rubens's prolific body of work his Ben van beneden director of the Rubens house gallery and a member of the Center for Ruben scholarship in Wow I want to spend [Music] secondly what makes him outstanding is incredible versatility is it is it fair to say that Rubens took the lightening difficult race as much as religious pictures subject pages only other epic pictures he's painting I think you're absolutely right in that as opposed to do with in 16th and 17th century it was something that everybody was able to do really I'm sad to hear I think it's a noblest form of art or that's my bias when you're presented with a possible Rubens portrait what what are the qualities that you immediately look for the make you think crikey this might be by as a man himself but at the same time he's pushing boundaries and and also an immediacy you actually have an impression that the city is at Philippi and finding those same qualities in our portrait will be crucial to having it accepted as a Rubens like me Simon Gillespie is itching to begin the cleaning process that would allow us to properly assess this portrait but before he starts to help us determine the origins of the painting more accurately we can turn to science detailed scans in both the infrared and x-ray spectra allow us to peer beneath the paint layers searching for clues painting analyst dr. Nick eStore showed me the results starting with the infrared the streakiness that's the ground layer underneath the paint but on top of the panel right yes absolutely essentially with Rubens you have to have this for it to be Rubens almost no exceptions to this rule I see so it's it's a good thing to find up from Rubens typically applied a preparatory layer known as in premature er to his panels using a broad brush which left this characteristic streaky texture in the paint it's a very good sign and what can we see in the x-ray well let's take a look the x-ray does show up around the large hole in his forehead that the damage of the split in the panel looks quite them slightly more adharmic in this picture in actual fact this is to do with a join in the panel it's the two boards that stuck together so you tend to end up with a wide border the narrow boards and you can very often go to galleries look at 7:16 seventeenth century portraits and you will see there is a join running down the panel so this is very typical of panel manufacturing techniques and period good good so it looks like we're hoping in on our portrait leaping from the right time frame and at least it's the right sort of preparation one of the things that struck me is seeing some of the curls in the hair here which don't quite conform to the balance the volume of the hair on the left to finish painting because the hair on this side of the face is obscene in the painting there we can begin to see underneath different directional curls two years so it's got a texture to it that's showing through the paint mm-hmm which I would agree corresponds to much more what we're seeing in the x-ray well the reason I'm having good night and I'm often guilty of clutching at straws but in the life drawing that Rubens does which is in the Albertina the hair is very different on that side of the head that we see in this painting mmm but the hair actually matches what we can begin to see in the x-ray so is it possible that Rubens first started to paint the hair as he had done in the drawing and then changed his mind to give him a little bit more of a sort of voluminous bounce on that side of his head so certainly the x-ray has revealed that the artist originally had a slightly different plan for the Duke of Buckingham hair and reassuringly that plan matches the initial drawing which we know was by Rubens alterations like this are proof that our painting is no mere copy and strengthen the case for it to be a lost masterpiece thank you very much for sparing us always pleasure fascinating Simon now gets to work cleaning off the layers of dirt and grime and more importantly removing the Troublesome yellow varnish which is obscuring the Dukes interns and I can't wait to see what that reveals it's a small percentage of change in color taking the CLE varnish off suddenly you get this huge magical information coming through these just show you some little great piece of painting yeah it's a lovely condition underneath this minute yeah a little beard it's just like it's been freshly waxed it's sort of that comes forward you could grab it then occurred is tweakin to do named blacks live it oh yeah he probably had a special beard wang xuan his retinue but now that the thing launches come off you can see the texture as a paint so much more clearly and it's so tangible is being applied almost oh because as a sculpture isn't it yeah you can feel him working the brush and freaking out where the nose is gonna end and all these details and the lips just allow you quivering those are there it's gonna be it's gonna be absolute it's in great condition let's see what happens to the eyes wait okay filled his eyebrow getting three-dimensional twitching look at these little strokes in the I will have little indications of hair in the I said this this is enabling us to see into the picture well everything here is looking better than I could possibly have hope for if the crack in the panel has emerged but we were expecting that and it's lovely to see more of the the ground layer that Reuben zooms leaky premature occur through and it's feeling much more sketchy isn't it it's it's really a work of exploratory progress yeah over done with huge confidence that yes yes the one area the picture that is not working is the junction between his hair and the background and yeah I'm guessing has to do with the over painting which is cloaking the whole of this background here I'm pretty confident we should be able to hit it we've got some very nice parts of original gray yes now that's the I think that's the only thing is holding a specular moment if you can fix that they merely motoring yeah it was the first people to really appreciate this for centuries you know this it's very moving privileged to see this as for me I need to do a bit of sleuthing at the Magnificent pretty palace in Florence of all the many treasures to be found here I want to examine one work in particular there are two paintings that have a chance to be Rubens is lost original portrait of the Duke of Buckingham our picture from Pollock house and one here in the plaque so pity if the painting here is good enough to be by Rubens then all my theories are worth noting so this could be a rather sweaty moment [Music] this ornate Florentine setting is certainly more deserving of a great masterpiece than a museum storeroom in Glasgow but as we know the Piron seas can be deceptive well despite what it says on this large label I'm pretty sure this is not by Rubens I'm quite relieved it's a really good early copy but it's not by the man himself it just feels far too tight as if it's been painted by someone who's very carefully copying something that has already been painted it's also missing some of the telling details that we see in our painting from Pollock house for example in our picture the left eye the eyelashes and the eyebrow are scored in with the tip of the brush which is a very Rubens technique but in this copy is just a plain straight line another thing we don't see here is that Penta meant that change in the line of the collar where Rubens changed his original design in the Pollock house painting but here the copyists has just painted the finished article but I'm very pleased to have seen this however because it's in very good condition the most obvious thing we can see is the background which in our painting is covered in a sort of brown gunky over paint but here it's a rather interesting light greeny blue and I think our painting may clean to resemble this it allows us to see around Buckinghams head much more clearly so I'm gonna take some photos these details on cylinder Simon will give us a guide as to how to proceed with the cleaning I may be going out on a limb but I'm confident enough to discount this portrait as the Rubens original and resumed the focus of our investigations a little closer to home one crucial detail about our painting of course is its age which expert Peter Klein was able to determine through dendrochronology careful measurement of the growth rings in the wood allowed him to accurately date the panels on which the picture is painted and this reveals that it was made in the early 1620s which would fit perfectly for Rubens to have painted the Duke of Buckingham in about 1625 so while the evidence for our portrait continues to stack up a missing piece of the puzzle concerns the paintings provenance or history can we prove that Sir William sterling Maxwell's painting was that listed in Reubens own collection unfortunately the trail of Rubens's portrait goes cold he dies in 1640 of Reubens portrait of Buckingham does crop up in a sail in London in 1691 and that might be our picture but sadly there are no records as to who sold it or who bought it however I have found one potentially very important and reassuring clue in 1742 the greatest art historian of his age George virtue record seeing are painted head that you could Buckingham Barry Rubens in England now virtue knew his stuff and if the painting he saw is the same as our painting then that helps build art historical momentum behind an attribution to Reubens virtues saw the painting in the collection of Horace Walpole one of the leading collectors of the 18th century so once Sir William sterling Maxwell's painting once owned by Horace Walpole I think we can make a convincing case first of all George which you had already seen Rubens's large equestrian portrait of the Duke of Buckingham so he knew exactly what a Rubens portrait of buckingham looked like secondly in war Paul's own plan of how he hung his pictures in his house we see here on one of the walls number 6 George Villiers Duke of Buckingham by a Rubens and the important thing about this plan is that we know from the measurements of some of the other paintings that the dimensions of Walpole's painting of Buckingham are a very close match to how a painting finally there's a description of Waldo's painting from 1774 which is a really close match to ours it describes a picture of full-face with whiskers and rough hair check of a peaked beard and a square ruff with pointed lace check black Van Dyck dress and a Blue garter sash over the right shoulder check you have all these things it's a dead ringer but we make a link between Walpole's collection and so William sterling maxwell's I've been able to transport Paul's painting to a sale at Christie's in 1866 but the earliest that I can trace sterling max was painting is to 1867 there's a gap of 1 year so I cannot prove that sterling max was picture was a wall Paul's picture but given that wall post painting disappears in 1866 and one which matches it in every detail then reappears in 1867 I think on balance of probabilities it must be the same painting back in London Simon has now completed the restoration work the thick over paint has gone and I can say with some relief that the results are more encouraging than ever I think for me the most exciting revelation is just how sketchy this picture is it's absolutely not intended to be a finished portrait and we can see that in just how loosely all the drapery is painted and the best gain of all I think is in the background what we can see here is the traditional Rubens Ian gray background but on top of that he is too sketched in a little bit of blue around the side of the head in all historical terms we call that the penumbra and it's absolutely not the sort of thing you would expect to see in a copy and what I think Rubens is doing here is he's just mimicking the blue background that we would see in the finished equestrian portrait just to see how Buckinghams head would be offset in the finished picture but I'm afraid there's one area that painting we just have not been able to fix and that's the crack down the middle of the panel whoever last restored it thought it would be a good idea to shave down the crack and in the process they lost a crucial three or four millimeters on either side of the join and then they simply glued the two bits back together and as a result we've lost a really crucial part of Buckinghams eye and the edge of his mouth and that means when we look at the picture his eyes are not quite aligned as Rubens would have left them if indeed Rubens did it's the moment of truth now as I rather nervously present the restored portrait to Ben van Beurden for his expert verdict hello bindle see doing all this way see our man George you give bucking okay he's had quite a tough life I can see that mm-hmm mercifully the bits that are really important in terms the attribution of survived quite well the modeling is quite consistent with what we know from Rubens and so are the details if one look at the the brush work in this curly very fashionable mustache it's in focus like is freshly waxed doesn't it that was - it's been tended to by some servant also be built above the nose and those little details in the the eyelashes in the eyebrows they're beautifully done quite confident also with well what level of attribution would you be happy to say for this picture well I would be happy to say that we're looking at a head study of the Duke of Buckingham by Rubens for probably for the lost a question portrait good well I'm delighted and relieved to have a world leading expert confirmed that this is a Rubens portrait of one of the only British sitters he ever painted is truly special now we're hoping the painting will receive a warm reception back at Pollock house where the gathered crowd from Glasgow Museum still has no idea of the treasure we've discovered without further ado we will reveal the gentlemen behind the cloth the sitter's identity was never in question we knew that this was the Duke of Buckingham a close companion of King James the first of England but it was the identity of the artist that was unknown we know from Rubens his posthumous inventory but a portrait head of the Duke of Buckingham by Rubens did once exist so the question is is this it our restorer Samuel SP has worked something of a miracle it's one of the best kleeneze of a painting I've ever seen and we have investigated the history of the painting we have analyzed it by x-ray and infrared and we found all sorts of fascinating things which helped build a case for the attribution and we have showed the painting to a leading Rubens expert called Ben van beneden who is the director of the Rubens House Museum in Antwerp and I'm very pleased to be able to tell you that his view is that this painting is indeed by Rubens [Music] the lost original portrait study of the Duke of Buckingham painted by Rubens in Antwerp in 1625 and it is now the only portrait of British City by Rubens in Scotland [Applause] it was felt that this was a great collection of copies and over the last 20 years so many of them have become really important and this is another one but an exceptionally special other one we will get this painting back on display as soon as we can because I'm sure our public will love to see this fabulous painting if you'd like to help art UK in their investigations here are two more paintings for you to consider this portrait of the Duke of Buckingham had Gainsborough old Hall in Lincolnshire is by an unknown artist do you have any ideas who might have painted it and this portrait Apsley house in London certainly is by Rubens but the sitter is unknown can you identify him to help solve either of these mysteries go to the art detective pages of the art UK website [Music]

Channel: Whitehall Moll Documentaries

Views: 281,278

Rating: 4.7740207 out of 5

Keywords: george villiers, duke of buckingham, james i, james vi, rubens, art documentary, monarchy, gay, gay history, gay king, masterpiece, glasgow, national trust of scotland, portrait, lost portrait, documentary, history, history documentary, 16th century, whitehall, banqueting house, scotland, scottish king

Id: MLli3Nm_oDc

Length: 37min 36sec (2256 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018