The Power of Art: Rembrandt [BBC]

you you're a painter what's the worst thing that can happen to you disgrace derision no the worst thing is to have to cut up your masterpiece what a brought Holland's greatest painter to this moment of artistic suicide once Rembrandt had been of the walk in a city that couldn't get enough of him glittering fat prosperous Amsterdam but that was then now he's living opposite an amusement park drunks throwing up on his doorstep knife fights every Friday night but why is he mutilating his painting it had been hanging on the walls of the Amsterdam Town Hall but then a decision was made take it down get something else to fill the space so now what's he supposed to do with it this b-movie flop of a picture maybe if you can cut it down a little there'll be someone out there who might like the center of the painting the bit with the people in so under the knife it goes it's a brutal punishment the worst and for what exactly is Rembrandt being punished for being out of step with modern taste for painting like a Bavarian but then he isn't interested in refinement and beauty it bores him he does us flesh and blood you and me art that exists to tell the truth about the human condition that's his everlasting glory but in the end that's also going to be his problem Amsterdam in the 1630s Rembrandt's on a roll everything he touches seems to come up trumps he knows what the patrons want even before they know it themselves and as nothing I mean nothing he can't turn his hand to great action-packed histories heart-pumping stories with pop-eyed bystanders books which seem to breathe and lift with the breath of God and portraits spectacular portrays you they were made for each other the painter in the city just as no one had ever seen paintings like Rembrandt's the world had never seen a place quite like Amsterdam in 1600 it had been a backwater fishing port 30 years later when Rembrandt arrived the docks unloading Chinese silks Swedish iron and copper and the new mass market addictions sugar and tobacco in one generation the place had gone from provincial also-ran to economic lord of the world whatever he wanted and stirred an had it the discount supermarket for the 17th century so fortunes were made quick and spectacular and those who made them were not shy of showing them off so they built elegant houses on these canals and into those houses went all the good things gold stamped leather wool coverings Delft tiles fine mirrors in rich frames maps of the worlds they were conquering and of course pictures especially pictures of themselves this is Nikolas roots and his business is fur Russian sable in fact the priciest of the lot was it his idea I wonder all Rembrandt's that he should brand himself by wearing his stock in trade in any event it's a stroke of genius for this is the hairiest painting imaginable all that soft fall of fur dropping down his body like a river of luxury the hairs standing up in a gentle charge of electrostatic as if a hand has just sensuously traveled through them yet for all the sumptuousness Rembrandt has managed to avoid any impression of idle opulence with his fastidious Lacombe whiskers and sharp eyes almost as sharp as those of the animals from whom the pelts were taken Ritz's glance is that of a slightly impatient intelligence we almost want to say thanks for giving us a moment but he's also solid the deep shadow cast by the side of his head makes him thoughtful the slightly pinked in eyelids as though it sacrificed his sleep for the good of the investors no wonder JPMorgan bought the picture for has there ever been a better portrait of the businessman as hero Rembrandt not only understood his rich clients and the image they wanted to project her themselves he was also a virtuoso manipulator of merit no one looked harder at the topography of a middle-aged eyelid the oiliness of a prosperous nose the wateriness of the eyes vitreous membrane the shiny tightness of a forehead pulled back into a linen can look at this Rembrandt's portrait of an 83 year old woman in the National Gallery in London look at the translucent fabric of her bonnet wings their edges painted with a single stroke look at her eyebrow and droopy eyelid done with jabbing strokes the slightly unfocused melancholy the mood of poignant vulnerability everything softening the face of a tough old bird wistful in the certainty it's not long now before she gets to meet the great accountant in the sky not just the painter there but a psychologist of the human condition don't you think what's the job of the other big hitters Velazquez Rubens Van Dyke to paint masks studied look of princes and Pope's they know in advance pretty much the mask of the day martial resolution regal care pensive melancholy but Rembrandt looks behind the pose and this is what makes his portraits tuchis like nobody else's we can see people putting on their faces to the world and it doesn't make us less but more sympathetic to them you'd think that with his perfect pitch for understanding what the rich Amsterdam wanted Rembrandt would have grown up with them but he hadn't he grown up in Leiden a textiles and university town about 25 miles southwest of Amsterdam packed with piety learning and profit from the cloth trade Rembrandt's family were Millers the River Rhine flowed past their mill giving the painter his name Rembrandt Van Rhine Rembrandt was the bright one in a family of nine children the one who went to Latin School and the local university so dropping out at 14 to become a painter was I suppose an act of faith mind you no time for teenage masterpieces too busy doing what apprentices had to mixing primer grinding pigment suspending it in meaty smelling linseed oil no one thank God Rob graves anymore to make black pigment from charred skeletons they used suit instead all his life Rembrandt seemed to love the filmy mark of oil paint no one in his century ever explored its texture from thick and crusty to thin and fluid more lovingly you can see this plunge into the materials of his craft in this little portrait of himself down in his studio in Leiden in his twenties here he is in his work clothes all around him the tools of the trade but just look at this place the plank floor is cracking the plaster in the corner of the room is peeling and that of course is the point it's an old place dump really but it's still the place where a young man connects with an old thing for making of art and that's why it moves us strangely the little gingerbread man in his oversized housecoat mantled in the trappings of painting but look at him he isn't painting but all he's just staring but something is hidden from us a mystery whose only feature is that intense golden light at the edge of the picture frame the fire of an idea what we're looking at the picture seems to say is nothing less than a pocket manifesto the idea that arts is the marriage of craft and imagination no wonder then that with all this cleverness Rembrandt was talent spotted singled out by Constantine hyphens the most influential patron in all of Holland as the coming man a diamond in the rough what - soaring Rembrandt was a superlative storyteller take the story of samson and delilah most artists did Samson as a naked Hulk slumped in post-coital slumber this is what Rembrandt does instead of nude beefcake he dresses him and amazingly makes him seem more not less vulnerable all his paint wizardry is used on that knot which seems to tie Sampson to his lover and to his fate Delilah lifts a lock of Samson's copper hair ready to be shorn away but as she does so her other hand idly strokes his tresses so in one gesture Rembrandt gets to the heart of the story the tragic inseparability of amorous tenderness and brutal betrayal good as he was high cons thought his protege could be even better if he went to Italy but Rembrandt wasn't going to put in time sketching statues yeah bigger fish to fry this was after all the Republic of money and stir damn whisper to him come and get it so here he was doing very nicely thank you turning out stunning story paintings and portraits to order and not just to painter either but also a partner in the art business Rembrandt Island Burke Inc pupils taken in for a fee copies made original paintings commissioned so what was it about his partners nice young Saskia van I lumber with her butterball chins and lopsided crinkly grin a nice girl certainly a catch one would assume being the orphaned daughter of a BOGO master of northern Friesland she met Rembrandt when she was 21 blessed with a portion of her father's estate if Rembrandt could have written poems to Saskia he would have but instead he did this precious little drawing to mark their betrothal she's a child of nature the straw hat the wild flowers only Rembrandt could have done that dangling broken stalk and thought it was perfect whenever he can he paints her with flowers she's his flower child mind you the relatives up north state liked it very much they hear stories of Rembrandt and Saskia showing off their jewels and fur and fancy outfits and they nod their heads and say told you so always knew he was after her money and now they're spending it like there's no tomorrow for Rembrandt has become a Shopaholic Oh a Shopaholic and the best possible taste he buys paintings by old masters at auctions but every so often he hits the Amsterdam equivalent of the Portobello Road and he just can't stop buying Japanese armor Indonesian daggers plaster busts of Roman emperors and he tells himself it's all for art here's another impulse buy a pricey four-story house in one of the more elegant streets in Amsterdam not your usual artists modest residents then but then why shouldn't he be extravagant Rembrandt ears after all the most successful painter in Holland and his paintings are hanging in the houses of the richest most powerful men in the world what makes Rembrandt's later falling out with his patrons so surprising is that in his salad days in the 1630s no one could beat him for grasping exactly what it was the first generation of Amsterdam money men really wanted what they wanted were two contradictory things on the one hand the portraits of course had to say we are rich on the other hand they had to say but we are also god-fearing plain simple folk who know that riches never last every Sunday in church they heard their preachers say to them do not forget a humble place from which you have come do not forget that today's worldly pomp will be tomorrow's dust and ashes so the paintings had to show them off without making them show-offs Rembrandt had this rich but modest line down stone-cold so of course they're lining up for him not just merchants on the make but the creme de la creme the family trip for example you don't get much richer than the trips but a global Empire of iron copper and guns and we're doing very nicely thank you in the endless wars against Spain but alias trip head of the dynasty thought of himself as a pillar of Protestant society you're old-fashioned so beside it'd going arms trader so when Rembrandt was hired to paint his hugely rich unmarriageable daughter Maria trip he knew that the Display of wealth had to be crushingly supple the money then was in the detail below that milky put face with its artless little smile is a waterfall of stunning lace just a hint of the trip millions now the relationship between the painter and the painted is a devilishly subtle business but Rembrandt seemed to be in perfect sync with the money classes understanding precisely what they wanted because he wanted it to and how he wanted it he must have thought that this mutual admiration would go on forever here he is in 1640 34 years old dressed to the nines as if he's one with the greatest past masters his intuitions portrait of the italian poet Ariosto and he's gone and put himself in the same pose the oversized silky mutton chops leave on the aristocratic stone ledge a picture which would be creamy with self-congratulation worry not for a trace of wistfulness about his face as if he can't quite believe all this success what have you think about Rembrandt you've got to admit he's got nerve I mean just look at him from provincial nobody to the cheekiest Pater in the history of art always on the edge mr. clever clogs but you couldn't rightly call yourself a success in Amsterdam if you just did single person portraits no matter how rich the sitter's Amsterdam was a corporate town a beehive of capitalism ruled not from palaces but from boardrooms so what did the corporate citizen well first of all of course a good likeness of themselves then they wanted the artist to get their complicated pecking order just right the format has to get everyone in squeeze squeeze jostle nudge one of the choices well either elastic 8 the rectangle until everyone's in or double up the rows so one loss is on top of the other result the rugby first 15 you could as Rembrandt's most astute pupil Samuel von Hofstra and put it behead them all with a single blow now with his insatiable instinct for stripping off social masks Rembrandt wasn't going to settle for that so he says okay let's throw away the boardroom lineup let's just forget about the stale formula and turn cardboard cutouts into real events social dramas and here's the result the Night Watch it was commissioned in 1642 by a company of cloth merchants and part-time militiamen and as with so many of his paintings at this time Rembrandt had done the impossible made something heroic out of the world of merchants money now everyone knew the militiamen and this painting were real soldiers the real war was being slowed out somewhere beyond the frontiers these were toy soldiers Amsterdam's dad's army still they like to preserve the fiction of the citizen soldier they like to think they'd be there to defend the freedom of Amsterdam Rembrandt's great idea is flattering that's not the kind of flattery that's going to make them younger or better-looking more important than that it's the flattery of the entire fairy tale idea behind the painting the idea that a bunch of overdressed textile men playing on toy soldiers on Sundays with a real thing that they were actually alive with marshal energy so instead of having them pose Rembrandt has them in action he transforms them in that way from mere human ornaments into marching shooting drumming Guardsmen so just how do you capture that instant when your pulse goes whoosh with excitement well Rembrandt takes deep breath he has a what the hell moment and he goes for it he changes the usual side-by-side format into a back to front action so that the company of the officers and Men are coming right at us 3d from a deep dark doorway right up to the picture frame and into our own space blazing with light look at that spear poking into our space Rembrandt knows that rough painting can actually convey the illusion of a three-dimensional object better than any literal description the captain's name is Franz banning next to him is his left a note Willem vom writin Bern it's the left Tennant who gets the more dazzling costume somehow though he's showing us only strengthens the sense of command of his captain costumed in black but ablaze with a fiery red sash banning is giving the signal to move so his order falls as a shadow on the coat of his left hand they're off already in motion the tassels are flying at first sight the Nightwatch seems merely chaotic doesn't it but actually it's a him too noisy energy contained by discipline freedom and order miraculously held together much as I think Rembrandt thought the Dutch themselves did that's the secret of their success that is the glory of Amsterdam but did they see it the Sunday soldiers did the men who actually paid for the picture get beyond vanity beyond their need for a realistic depiction of themselves according to Rembrandt's pupil van Hove Stratton some of the sitters were less than thrilled not outraged just a bit bewildered you can almost hear them saying well it's got to be good it's a Rembrandt after all and what a wanita about arts but to me it does look a bit of a mishmash let's just say that the climate went from warm to tepid perhaps Rembrandt felt it perhaps not but for the first time since becoming the golden boy of Dutch painting one of Rembrandt's patrons is so unhappy with the painting he simply refused to pay and not just any old patron either but andris de Graaff a man from whom jobs and prestige flowed we don't know exactly what it was the defender to craft so much but we can guess with Rembrandt painting ever more freely it didn't quite match two crafts stately self-image to recover his money Rembrandt had to resort to something he must have found deeply humiliating an arbitration committee of his peers who sat in judgment on the quality of his painting two years later Rembrandt took revenge in a crude but eloquent little drawing it features a bunch of connoisseurs peering at pictures one of whom whose features aren't a hundred miles away from de Graaff has sprouted ass's ears another figure surely the artist lets us know in no uncertain terms with his trousers down just what he thinks of their judgment but it was Rembrandt who all of a son seemed to be giving off a bad smell the smell of someone from whom the fickle goddess for June was shying away have you ever felt at the top of your form at the height of your powers an odd but distinct sense of the winds just change direction it's blowing a bit chillier now Rembrandt's troubles came to him unremarkable like the first heavy drops of rain striking a windowpane a mild disturbance but then a downpour the portrait commissions dry up the house is loaded with debt and inside the house Saskia is deathly ill with TB her body wrapped by spasms of bloody coughing death was no stranger to their family Saskia and Rembrandt had already buried three of their children only the boy Titus was alive on the 5th of June 1642 a notary was called to the house to record Saskia's will nine days later she was dead her body was wrapped in a simple cloth and in a silent little procession it was taken to the outer Kirk for burial somewhere in this house Rembrandt pulled out a portrait of her that he'd begun many years before at the playful start of their life together it's unusual for many reasons one of the only paintings in which there's not a trace of a smile her head is turned in profile the outline unruhe in Brant e'en in its enamel like sharpness but for the last time he's loaded her with fabric and jewels it's as if he can't stop draping her but Saskia pulls the fur cape around her as if to ward off the chill of mortality but it's too late well then Saskia had gone and it was as though a peal of bells had abruptly stopped it's too easy were told to say that in that year 1642 everything changed for Rembrandt for his work as the sentimental romantic version to read art from life but you know something really had happened to Rembrandt an end to flamboyance an end to his theatrical mastery of the outward noisy show of life It was as though he'd turned down the volume of the world and switched on an inner quiet radiance the big gestures melt away and are replaced by a tender simplicity instead of a Portrait Gallery of the rich and powerful a maidservant leaning on a sill caught between inside and outside innocence and sex look at the highlight on her lower lip the left hand toying with a necklace here too in his drawings just a few summary lines here and there that managed to conjure up an entire scene it's a huge compliment don't you think making us his partner in completion giving us the benefit of the doubt that we wouldn't want anything so boring as the literal details the problem though was that Rembrandt's critics didn't see him as offensively avant-garde they saw him as offensively old-fashioned why because of a cultural see change for the first time in Holland sophistication seemed far more important than simplicity and piety the qualities the Dutch like to think brought them through their war against Spain but now peace have been declared and by the 1650s there was a perceptible sigh of relief so just as Rembrandt's paintings were getting darker the mood of Amsterdam was lightening and brightening the founding fathers and mothers modestly dressed in millstone ruffs had given way to their children the peacock generation gorgeous in screaming Scarlets and quaffed to the nines many of them had been sent abroad as part of their education and had come back eager to import cosmopolitan stylishness to the homespun republic they weren't interested in austerity they wanted to be like the Italians they wanted pillars all Rembrandt's murky browns and golds those garter marks and flabby breasts were a downer we all know this story don't we second generation the inheritance the trust fund brats so embarrassed by their parents who have sold fashion so parochial will they care about this church and business business and church and what a business to trade my dear so tawdry so off they go and buy themselves country villas while some inky finger Clarke manages the family investment this leaves them to concentrate on what they really care about cultivation but art they think is not just a report unedited from nature and it's certainly not about dwelling indiscriminately on ugliness just because it happens to be there no art is the divine road harmony its purity its clarity away with the misshapen bring on the age of refinement and here's Rembrandt no culture props just those big meaty hands stuck in his belt everything is starting to look heroically worn the coat itself the eyes pink rimmed the eyes of a man who never stops looking sketchiness of the whole thing he just doesn't care about Finnish anymore in fact Rembrandt's in the process of doing something which horrified the classical academicians he's abolishing the difference between a sketch and a painting and he does it for the subjects he cares most about he cares a lot about her she's and Raqqah Stoffels the soldiers girl from the sticks who came into Rembrandt's house seven years after Saskia's death Rembrandt had already taken his sons nurse here at your digs as his mistress but then Henry Kia arrived and it wasn't long before he wanted her in his bed and hit you out of it here's Hendrika looking down into the water the break of her legs through its surface a little tour de force of illusionism Rembrandt now isn't choosing his way of handling pain just as the fancy takes him but to convey sensuous experience so Hendrika shift called scandalously high her neckline scandalously low a painted thickly while her skin tones are as liquid as the water itself and the way Rembrandt has painted her hands as just a nun mobled smear almost dares the critics to make an issue of it you can hear them can't you Rembrandt van Ryan oh yes yes very talented but I can't so difficult never finishes a painting I think his best years are behind him don't you and what he's doing rattling around in that big old house with his excuse me a woman really don't know you have heard she's with child haven't you Church deacons quite shocked just squalid don't you think I might explain why he does is rather peculiar edgings just who's going to buy them really no idea running out of favors running out of time late with his loan repayments on the house the coils of Rembrandt's ruin began to rope themselves around him ever more tightly finally in July 1656 Rembrandt filed for bankruptcy this is where Rembrandt would have come to the chamber of insolvency passing through this door with its freeze of worthless stock certificates and rats scuttling through empty money chests of the profligate debtor just can't beat the Dutch for wagging their fingers at your wicked ways auction by auction hammer blow by hammer blow everything was taken this wasn't just furniture household stuff it was also Rembrandt's own personal archive of art the drawings and paintings all the strange fabulous stuff he'd collected all gone then the house itself one thing he did that masher hold on to and that was a great mirror in the finest evany wood frame titus his son found a bargeman who said for a sum of money sure he'd carry it to their new house so up on the bargeman's head it went and off through the jostle of amsterdam over cobbled streets and bridges and at some point the bargeman begins to sweat his hands get slippery his grip gets shaking and then as the barge room was stepping off a bridge witnesses who came forward to testify for the bargeman said he hadn't bumped into only one he hadn't fallen down the mirror must just have broken all by itself but there it was on the ground a thousand shards and slivers leaving Titus to carry home to his father just a frame with an empty center it's 16:58 Rembrandt has lost everything so how does he paint himself like a king like a God full-frontal mantled in lustrous gold and it's the paint that thick luxurious paint which gives him his power his magic no bankrupts downcast eyes either but a stare coming right at us little people who fancy we know something about art a suggestion of lordly amusement playing about his eyes his barrel chest soaks up the light the belly swelling in front of us like a genie the whole body pressing against the picture plane challenging it to contain his massive Authority and if Rembrandt thinks that his way of painting has been part of the problem he's certainly not going to abandon it now just the opposite in fact this is the painting that Bella's defiance that the apostles of crisp clarity and contour so you think that stuff was a bit much do you he seems to be saying just get a load of this you you'd think that with painting this free and this rough that would be downhill all the way for Rembrandt but it wasn't with almost everything gone reputation possessions house he still had a chance for a comeback the comeback to end all comebacks this the new Town Hall had just been built and the cream of Amsterdam painters were asked to supply pictures for its interior against all odds Rembrandt was one of them townhall doesn't quite describe this place does it in something more than Clark's and marriage licenses though the hague is officially the seat of government everyone knows amsterdam is where the money is so the new town hall is a shameless brag to the world about the great metropolis built on a scale that makes the Doge's Palace in Venice look skimpy in this solemnly beautiful setting tone was all-important any new paintings were going to have to be restrained severely classical pictorially will behaved which doesn't exactly spell Rembrandt does it in fact anyone but Rembrandt so of course at first the job went to someone far more reliable the painter pervert fling it was only when flink suddenly died that someone in the council chamber dared to say the r-word no doubt greeted by silence and then perhaps a why not he's broke he needs the work he'll behave when is he not delivered the goods when it really counted so after getting the commission by the back door Rembrandt set about work on the painting the results would be I think the greatest triumph of his visual imagination but it would also be his most shocking disaster the painting was supposed to hang here in one of the great arch spaces by the main hall what the burgomaster's wanted was a stirring depiction of the legendary story of how the dutch nation came to be born it was a history that every child in the dutch republic would have known it's important to them as Boudicca is to us the ancient Dutch known as the Batavian had their rebellion against the Romans - and their leader was called Claudius syphilis the story goes like this Claudius had been fighting on the side of the Romans against his own people but at some point he has a change of heart he decides there's been one tax too many his country bled white so he switches sides he summons a meeting of tribal chiefs declares a revolt and swears them to join him they take the oath the die is cast blood happens it's a stirring story but remember who commissioned it the establishment oh yes on a rebellion but only and it was a long time ago and only in the most respectable way the assumption was they get a respectable painting what they got was this ugliness deformity barbarism a bunch of cackling louts onion chores bloody-minded rebels the paint slashed and stabbed caked on like the makeup of warriors but that's what rebellion is all about Rembrandt thought he didn't think rebels were gentlemen here's the rebel leader with a wound in his face where his eye used to be so what if the rules of art said you had to hide a blind eye behind some decorous profile Rembrandt says no I'm gonna stick this blind eye right in the middle of your face that was one wild rough and free painting did goes together with a sword from hell and a cup maybe of wine maybe of blood needless to say it seems hardly likely that the grand unveiling went down at all well I mean just look at it this is a painting drunk on its own wildness nothing refined about this so down it came deposed disgraced expelled and down on his knees went Rembrandt chopping up his masterpiece hoping against hope that someone would buy a piece of it fat chance the claudius syphilis would not just be the ruin of Rembrandt's comeback it would also be the ruin of his greatest vision or so I think I can't be sure none of us can because we don't really know what the big picture looked like what we're looking at here is a fragment 1/5 of the original size the bit rescued from Rembrandt's knife all that we have left of the complete painting is the sketch Rembrandt made with prophetic irony on the back of an invitation to a funeral but this precious scrap is enough to let us see the visionary grandeur of the paintings design with its vast hall open to the trees about Berrien King's lair no wonder you think of the Last Supper when you see this picture for Rembrandt has painted a secular altarpiece mysterious dangerous joyously profane no halo but a bath of burning golden light no candles just the power surge of freedom the fire of an idea and you're thinking that it looks unfinished aggressively rough a work in progress but Rembrandt saying in a voice that a visual roar that's you a city a country a work in progress this is my group portrait of all of you a portrait of a people a portrait of who you are who you've always been Hey let the higher mighty celebrate their greatness with fastidious better yet let them even copy the rest of Europe as they must but Rembrandt the bankrupt has been was their patriotic conscience smother yourself in fashion at your peril he was saying these are your flesh and blood rough and honest your barbarian ancestry they made you - so banished your embarrassment embrace them honor them for everything you think matters dust each the town hall with all its acres of marble can go tomorrow Amsterdam can sink back into the sea again as long as you have your rough freedom you have all you need to stay dark so of course Rembrandt's not going to paint by the rulebook instead he does the roughest toughest history painting ever an old lions roar of a picture he had every incentive to paint it straight but something in him just wouldn't do it this is what drives the very greatest art contempt for ingratiation now Rembrandt had learnt this the hard way when the callow hand of fashion are given him a resounding thumbs down and when his relationship with the rich amounts to dam had turned sour and he'd been stripped not just of his fortune but of his illusions giving them what they wanted was now beside the point giving them what they needed was more like it but they refused to look and that's why he cut up his masterpiece one of the very last pictures Rembrandt painted was Simeon the priest being brought the Christ child by the prophetess Anna a story he'd done before his youth but then the painting had been sharp now it was dense and textured almost as if it was woven not painted out of the face of the Christ child pours a soft brimming radiance which falls on the face of the old man who with his eyes closed understands at last he has in fact seen the light Rembrandt's patrons alas did not the painting was one of those found in Rembrandt's house when he died on October the second 1669 it always been thought of as unfinished somewhere in that dim little house was another painting the world thought of a shockingly unfinished a mutilated stump of a picture this just may be the most heartbreaking fragment in the entire history of painting and just because you can see can't you that it looks nothing nothing whatsoever like an old master that it leaps from the decorum of the gallery wall into some other world of eloquence Rembrandt's Claudius civilus tells us that the very greatest painting isn't bound by time or taste a reminder if ever we should need it the eloquence doesn't always come with a pretty face and you

Channel: History - British Collection

Views: 152,018

Keywords: Rembrandt, Painting, Artist, BBC, Simon Schama's Power Of Art (TV Program), Simon Schama's Power Of Art (Award-Winning Work), British Broadcasting Corporation (Production Company)

Id: Hv26ifhMfpk

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2014