National Gallery Page #3

What I don't want is to end up

with the gallery...

producing things to the kind of lowest

common denominator of public taste.

But I don't even want the kind of av...

I mean, I'd rather have

spectacular success followed by...

sort of, really interesting failure,

- than have kind of average, you know'?

- No...

In fact, I'm quite in favour

of those things going up and down.

OK, thanks.

I'm going to try something

a little bit new today,

I'm going to try something

a little bit new today,

which is because the painting is slight...

is sort of rather more abstract

than most of the ones we talk about.

So we're going to have a bit of a go

with some touch drawings.

I... I son of made a very, sort of,

simple sketch of the main structures

of the picture

and then put it through this very exciting

machine that heats it up and it all goes furry.

I don't know whether it's going to work

for you, but I just thought it was worth a try

and that it might help some people

get the overall structure of the picture,

which is not a narrative painting

or a painting with great detail.

So the sort of abstract shapes

within it are quite useful,

to, sort of, get a sense of.

And then we'll move on to

a normal reproduction as well.

- If you could possibly...

- I'll pass those around.

Thank you.

Raised image here.

Professor Whitestick,

I'll be back in a minute.

Raised image here.

So, today we're talking about Camille

Pissarro's Boulevard Montmartre at Night.

It was made in 1897,

so just over a hundred years ago.

Certainly, the viewpoint he takes,

which is a viewpoint from a hotel window,

high above, an aerial viewpoint

of these streets,

adds to the sense of someone

who's a little bit distant.

Whereas his colleagues

would have a viewpoint like that

but include, somehow,

a sense of themselves,

even if it was just

a bit of balcony or whatever,

he... you just get no sense

of the window frame,

no sense of his presence,

and the whole thing is viewed,

you know, at a distance.

And the particular painting

we're looking at,

though it was one of a whole series

of 14 of the Boulevard Montmartre...

He went for these big campaigns,

painting a lot of pictures at once,

trying to capture the changing light effects,

so he might have several paintings

on the go.

But this is an exceptional one,

because it's the only night-time one.

His work's always a little bit dappled,

you might say,

and full of little brushstrokes,

but in this one, nothing is very clear

because it's dark and it's been raining,

and all the sort of things that can be seen

are sort of merged together

in this great sort of watery pool

of colour, light and shape.

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