"This is the last film in the series." "It's where we explore some complex technical issues about colour wheels and optics, so I'm just testing all the equipment, making sure it's working." "The magic wheel of light..." "Yep, that's working perfectly." "Monet's glasses are perfect." "Can't see a thing." "Good!" "That's all working." "So we're ready to go with the final film in the story of Impressionism." "SONG:" "L'Ogre featuring 70 Million by Hold Your Horses!" "# Though it hardly looked like a novel at all" "# And the city treats me, it treats me to you" "# And a cup of coffee for you" "# I should learn its language and speak it to you" "# And 70 million should be in the know" "# And 70 million don't go out at all" "# And 70 million wouldn't walk this street" "# And 70 million would run to a hole" "# And 70 million would be wrong, wrong, wrong" "# And 70 million never see it at all" "# And 70 million haven't tasted snow #" "This is the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris," "France's most prestigious art school." "It was established in 1648 by Louis XIV, so this is one of the most historic locations in the story of art." "'Usually I wouldn't bring you anywhere near here 'in a film about the Impressionists." "'Impressionism was modern, 'and this place isn't.'" "Perversely, though, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts played a huge role in the story of Impressionism, because this grandest of art schools is where Georges Seurat studied." "Ah, yes" " Seurat, king of the dots!" "He painted some of the best-known pictures in the chronicles of Impressionism." "But the man himself was a mystery." "The only photograph you'll ever see of him is this one." "And the only real evidence of his thinking is his art, with its strange stiffness, and those puzzling dots." "This is a film about the final days of Impressionism, how it ended and what it became, so of course Seurat has to feature." "Seurat was invited to show with the Impressionists by Pissarro." "He was completely unknown then." "But when this famous picture, A Sunday Afternoon On La Grand Jatte, popped up in the last Impressionist exhibition of 1886, everybody noticed it." "Impressionism was obviously on to something new here." "But what the hell was it?" "If you ask ten art critics about Seurat, you'll get ten different opinions." "He was such a private and elusive painter, kept it all locked away, stored in here." "'Until Seurat arrived," "'Impressionism had been happy to capture the moment, 'and to live for the present." "'Remember all that joie de vivre you saw in the earlier films " "'Renoir's boating parties," "'Monet's beautiful days.'" "Suddenly none of it seemed enough any more." "Seurat's pictures are looking for something deeper, less fidgety, more permanent." "'Seurat was a student here at the posh Ecole des Beaux-Arts 'from 1878." "'He was here for two years, 'surrounded by the past." "His parents were very well off, so he never had to work, and by rights, he should have become a very traditional and conservative painter, the kind of artist who does this." "But he didn't." "Instead, Seurat became this sort of artist, and this." "These were, are, and always will be strange pictures." "And the first of them, The Bathers At Asnieres, was begun when he was just 23 - his first masterpiece, and already so puzzling." "WATER SPLASHING" "I reckon it was painted about here." "See that bridge there?" "That's the railway bridge at Asnieres, and you can just about make it out way in the distance in Seurat's Bathers." "# La fille du roi" "# Etait a sa fenetre" "# La fille du roi..." "It's a sunny day by the river, probably a Sunday." "That was when working men in Paris generally had their day off, and all the bathers at Asnieres are working men." "You can tell from their overalls and their battered bowler hats." "Perhaps they're workmen from the factories you can see in the distance at Clichy." "Clichy had become a busy factory district, so all the chaps by the river here could be workmen taking time off together in a bloke-ish fashion, as blokes do." "Bathing was traditionally a feminine subject in art, an excuse for naughty Old Masters to paint beautiful young women naked and wet." "So Seurat, by confining his picture to men, is already being revolutionary and confrontational." "One of the boys in the water, the one with his back turned to us, is clearly based on a famous painting by Ingres that hangs in the Louvre - the Valpincon Bather, a mysterious Oriental odalisque whose naked back would drive men wild." "# Joli tambour, tu n'es pas assez riche" "# Joli tambour, tu n'es pas assez riche..." "'Actually hanging in the chapel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 'where Seurat studied, was a set of copies of Piero della Francesca, 'the calmest and most luminous of Renaissance Old Masters.'" "They were hung there to inspire the students, and they obviously did, because Seurat took the pose of the man sitting on the riverbank directly from Piero." "If you've been watching the rest of this series, you'll have seen painter after painter deliberately taking on the Old Masters." "Renoir did it, Degas, and now Seurat." "All of them set out to prove that the modern world can be just as monumental, just as heroic and beautiful, as the ancient world." "'In the end, it's probably the most important 'of all Impressionism's revolutionary messages - 'the present is just as precious as the past.'" "# Il y en a de plus jolies" "Seurat was so secretive that he only told his parents he had a mistress and a son the day before he died." "Till then, no-one had known that the bosomy Madeleine Knobloch was Seurat's lover and the mother of his child." "With a man as secretive as this, you need to dig deep to break the code." "So Seurat wasn't a student at the Ecole for very long, was he?" "No." "He had been a student for two years only." "He was admitted with bad marks, and his marks were worse and worse, because he was not a conventional student." "The other thing that was very important for Seurat when he was here at the Ecole was his exposure to lots of scientific books." "I mean, there's a famous book called The Grammar Of Art by Charles Blanc, who was actually director here at the time." "Yes." "Charles Blanc wrote this book," "Grammar Of The Art Of Drawing." "It means that Charles Blanc discovered laws for colours and for lines - warm colours, and lines going up, convey a feeling of joy, of pleasure." "Happiness." "Of happiness." "Of course, with cold colours and dark colours, it's an impression of sadness." "You've got here the actual books that Seurat could have looked at in the library." "This is, I know, one of the most important for him." "This is Chevreul, with his theories of colour." "The first thing, of course, you see about it is that most of the illustrations are these beautiful arrays of dots." "Yes." "There are lots of experiences about colours in those books." "Of course it's rather scientific, but it was meant to help the painters." "Mm." "Well, it certainly helped Seurat, didn't it, because, if you're looking for the origin of Seurat's dots," "I think you don't need to look much further than here, do you?" "Er..." "It's complicated." "Why did Seurat paint dots?" "It's the first thing we need to clear up." "What were the dots supposed to do?" "To find out, I've transformed the old chapel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts into a Seurat laboratory, where we're going to carry out some experiments..." "..with colour." "OK, it's not state-of-the-art, but, then, I'm not sure that Seurat or his dots ever were quite as dauntingly scientific as he made out." "What's certain is that this is the great period of colour exploration." "Various theories were being proposed to explain the behaviour of colour, and the first thing to grasp here is the difference between colour as a pigment..." "..and colour as light." "Pigment and light have different properties." "If I mix blue, red and green as pigment," "I end up with a dark-brown mess." "But if I mix them as light... ..the opposite happens." "Blue, red and green become white, or, at least, a luminous grey." "What Seurat decided to do was to put down his pigments in blobs or dots, so that instead of mixing on the canvas, they would mix in your eye, in a manner that was luminous and full of light." "The culmination of Seurat's investigations into dotty-ism, his masterpiece, was this unmistakably mysterious scene of A Sunday Afternoon On The Grande Jatte." "It's such a strange, strange picture." "I've come here to Chicago to see it maybe a dozen times now, and I still don't really get it." "What a thing to come up with in 1884!" "Here in America," "Buffalo Bill was still shooting at Chief Sitting Bull." "But in Montmartre, in his mysterious scientific studio," "Seurat was concocting this." "It reminds me of those frescoes in Pompeii that were trapped under the ashes of Vesuvius." "History has been frozen." "A moment in time has been turned into something eternal." "La Grande Jatte was a tiny island on the Seine, upon which Parisian leisure-seekers would descend in droves on a Sunday to stroll about, parade and flirt." "These days it's a dump, frankly." "Fashionable society doesn't come down here any more." "They've left the banks of La Grande Jatte to the junkies and the joggers." "But in Seurat's day, in the 1880s, this was THE place to go, particularly if you were a fashionable chap looking for an unattached girl - because La Grande Jatte was full of them." "It was known as the island of love, and a good many of the fashionable ladies strolling around La Grande Jatte in their Sunday best were working girls fishing for clients." "Everyone looking at this picture in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition of 1886 would have known immediately what Seurat was implying." "I mean, this girl over here, the one fishing on the riverbank - she doesn't look like an angler to me." "What's she really fishing for?" "And the big couple over here..." "To us they seem terribly respectable, so tall and stately." "But Seurat's audience would have known at once that he was a client and she was a prostitute." "In the middle of the picture, so central and important-looking," "Seurat has placed a mother and her angelic daughter, dressed all in white." "They seem to be looking straight at us, straight at the future, as it were." "What does that future hold for them, Seurat seems to be asking." "What does it hold for all the little girls running around La Grande Jatte so innocently?" "La Grande Jatte was inspired by another painting that's also here in Chicago " "The Sacred Grove, by Puvis de Chavannes." "Puvis was the elder statesman of French art." "His pale, mysterious symbolism was much admired by various Impressionists, especially Seurat." "That sense of being frozen in time is something that Seurat definitely took from Puvis." "But Puvis' picture isn't set in the modern world." "It's set somewhere way back in time, on an idyllic mythological island, where the nine muses of art have gathered to stroll and think and look lovely." "So what Seurat has done... is to update the sacred grove, to show us what such a place might look like in 1884 AD rather than BC." "La Grande Jatte shows us what the modern world has become, and niggles us to compare it with what it used to be." "There's something else that's important." "I'm absolutely certain that La Grande Jatte here was painted as a deliberate parallel..." "..to the bathers at Asnieres." "The two pictures were meant to work together, a deliberate call and response..." "..between posh Parisian society on the Right Bank, with its parasols and its smart folk, and the world of the workers on the Left Bank with the belching factories and the smoking chimneys." "Look at the way the boy here, the one in the water, is calling over to the other side of the river..." "..where the people on the opposite bank watch him so silently and glumly." "On this side of the river, something massive and threatening has cast a huge shadow across La Grande Jatte." "But not on the other side, even though the sun is in the same place." "On this side of the river, people take their shirts off and sit in the sun." "On the other side, everyone hides under their parasols and keeps their tops on." "So Seurat has produced a stereo image of modern Paris, a heads and a tails..." "..two sides of the modern world confronting each other across the river." "Right." "This is another crucial aspect of Seurat's optical theory, about the importance of the afterimage." "In a moment, the screen you're watching is going to go blank, completely white." "But please don't turn over to another channel." "Keep watching." "If you want to understand Seurat's colour theory, you need to keep looking at this screen." "So, are you ready?" "Here we go." "Right." "See the red rectangle?" "Just keep staring at it." "Don't look away." "Keep looking at it." "One, two, three..." "Don't look away." "Four..." "Keep staring." "Five..." "Now look." "What do you see?" "A green shape, right?" "Did you see it - the green afterimage?" "That wasn't really there." "That was just a retinal memory in your eye, and Seurat, with his dots, was trying to control that sensation." "He knew that when he put down a colour, you would also see its complementary, so when he put down red, you would also see green next to it." "And if in his painting he actually put green next to red, he knew that the green would seem greener there and the red would seem redder." "In theory, he was trying to turn painting into science, to control your vision." "But he never quite pulled it off." "In reality, there were just too many things to juggle with, too many optical issues, too many dots." "SEAGULLS CRYING" "WIND BLOWING SOFTLY" "Working on these giant masterpieces was exhausting and demanding." "So when La Grande Jatte was finished," "Seurat began a set of smaller views of the sea... ..his marine landscapes." "SEAGULLS CRYING" "Every summer, he'd head for the French coast, book himself into a small hotel or lodgings, and embark upon a meticulous campaign of sea paintings." "Seurat's marine views are among his most accessible and delightful achievements." "Every summer from 1885, he went somewhere else and did some more." ""Let's go and get drunk on light," he wrote of his journeys to the sea." "Interestingly, though, and typically," "Seurat didn't go south to the Mediterranean like the other Impressionists." "He went north to the Channel coast, where the sea can be bleak and austere..." "..and where these long, low dune-scapes alternate with rocky and craggy headlands." "SEAGULLS CRYING" "WAVES MURMURING" "In 1890, he spent the summer here at Gravelines." "It's near Dunkirk and Calais, almost on the Belgian border, and beaches don't get much longer or bare than they are here." "The most intriguing of the Gravelines paintings were done from here, the quay in front of the lighthouse, looking out across the water to where the old signal mast used to stand, showing how high the tides were." "In one of his views from here," "Seurat captures so masterfully the pale tonality of the sunny days you get around here." "There's hardly anything there." "It's so white, so watery, like the tenth cup of tea from the same teabag." "Then, from more or less the same place on the same quay, he painted the same view in the evening, so same place, but completely different mood." "This time it's twilight." "The coast is glowing darkly." "Night is at hand." "One reality, two viewpoints." "This is Impressionism becoming something else." "Impressionism is breaching the fourth dimension." "In that influential book by Charles Blanc on the grammar of art that Seurat read as a student, there's a picture of a set of faces drawn by Humbert de Superville, another of these wacky pseudo-scientists who were publishing their theories at the time," "and de Superville's faces illustrate the emotional power of lines." "So this face here..." "..is happy, joyous... ..while this one is glum and down." "And the one in the middle, well, that's... ..calm, contented, composed." "All done with simple lines." "This idea that horizontal lines create sensations of calmness is one of the reasons why Seurat came to this coast." "France doesn't get much flatter or more exactly divided than it does here." "In his day scene from here," "Seurat's gone for an impression of immense calmness, with these clear verticals above the horizon, and a stretch of sandy emptiness below." "But the evening scene goes for the opposite effect." "In the evening scene, Gravelines puts on its sad face." "The boats are scowling." "The anchors are downcast." "Gravelines at sunset is glum." "So here's an artist treating emotion as a scientific challenge, manipulating your moods with carefully considered painting strategies, as if he were a scientist and you were the guinea pig." "LIVELY ACCORDION MUSIC" "CAN-CAN MUSIC" "MEN WHISTLING AND HOOTING" "Seurat died when he was just 31 - such an early departure for such a big talent..." "..particularly since his work was getting stranger and stranger." "I mean, the marine paintings are beautiful enough, but everything else he was doing in Paris was increasingly eccentric." "CAN-CAN MUSIC CONTINUES" "Seurat had developed a taste for theatres and circuses, and in a set of strikingly unusual pictures, had taken to recording the nocturnal pleasures of the Parisian bourgeois." "SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE" "CAN-CAN MUSIC CONTINUES" "'His final painting, Seurat's last masterpiece, 'was, of all things, a painting of some can-can dancers.'" "The can-can, or chahut as it was known, wasn't really a dance at all." "It was a bit of late-night Parisian naughtiness, in which provocative women would throw up their skirts, expose a bit of leg, and whoop." "DANCER WHOOPS" "CAN-CAN MUSIC" "Seurat's painting is usually seen as one of his brainy attempts to put theory into action." "All these dizzy diagonals are supposed to create a sense of gaiety." "It's the lessons of Humbert de Superville again." "But if Seurat really was trying to paint a gay and happy picture, he hasn't exactly succeeded, has he?" "There's a stiff and forced air to Seurat's Chahut." "If this is a fun night out," "I think I'd rather stay at home." "But I don't think it was meant to be a fun night out." "I think Seurat's motives were deeper and darker." "These days we think of the can-can as a seedy tourist attraction, something to go and watch in the Place Pigalle." "But in Seurat's time, it was genuinely dangerous and decadent - so decadent that the anarchists actually blew up a notorious can-can club in Lyons, because they saw it as the embodiment of bourgeois decay." "For me, all of Seurat's paintings have this niggling, insistent sense of politics about them, as if they're trying to comment in secret on the world around them, its phoniness and silliness and hypocrisy." "The more I look at Seurat's art, the more firmly I'm convinced that under this cloak of colour theory and the lines of emotion, what we really have here is a very pessimistic observer of modern life." "CAN-CAN MUSIC" "Impressionism had grown cynical, disillusioned with the illusions." "Having set out to see the modern world properly, it was now seeing it all too well." "Art was changing moods." "There's an old Dutch proverb that says," ""If the sky is blue, it'll be grey tomorrow."" "The Dutch, alas, are not a cheery bunch." "Amazingly, though, Holland and the Dutch played a big role in the story of Impressionism." "Monet came here on several productive visits, and painted glorious flower scenes of the tulip paradise in miraculous bloom." "But Holland's greatest gift to Impressionism was a redhead, small and wiry, beady-eyed and grumpy." "It's that brilliant little Dutch gnome, Vincent van Gogh, or, as his own people call him, "FAN GOFF!"" "If you think Van Gogh was cuddly, think again." "He was dark, driven, obsessive." "His father was a Dutch pastor, and a gloomy world view was Van Gogh's inheritance." "As another gloomy Dutch proverb puts it," ""A frog will always jump back into the pool, even if it sits on a golden throne."" "You can never escape your past." "A frog will always be a frog." "'Van Gogh's energetic attempts to escape the pond 'took him to England, then Belgium, 'and finally to Paris, 'where he arrived in 1886, 'just in time to see the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition.'" "Van Gogh's younger brother, Theo, was an art dealer in Paris, who'd been supporting the Impressionists." "So when Vincent suddenly turned up here, the good news was that he could get up to speed quickly on the latest developments in art." "The bad news was that he had nowhere to live, and was moving in with Theo." "'These days we think of Van Gogh as a soulful, warm-hearted genius, 'a fragile soul too brittle for the modern world.'" "He was a genius, all right, but he was also the last person on Earth you'd want moving into your flat." "Disruptive, decrepit, difficult," "Van Gogh had no personal hygiene whatsoever, and drank like a fish." "After a couple of absinthes, he could start a fight with a Buddhist monk." "His health was shot, too." "When he arrived in Paris, he was already suffering from syphilis, and in Belgium, where he'd just dropped out of art school again, his teeth had rotted so badly he had to have ten of them taken out in one go." "That's why you never see Vincent smiling in any of the fierce and brooding self-portraits he began churning out in Paris." "In his troubled vision of himself," "Van Gogh always kept his mouth shut." "In real life, it never was, particularly after a drink or two." "Vincent and Theo lived just here at the bottom of Montmartre, at 54 Rue Lepic, up on the third floor, where Vincent soon made sure the rooms were so squalid that Theo was embarrassed to invite anyone round." "The Rue Lepic was just a stone's throw away from the Moulin de la Galette - once a windmill, now a can-can joint." "By the time Vincent arrived in Montmartre, most of the old windmills had been turned into bars and cabarets." "But from the outside at least, this still looked like home." "If anyone was ever handing out prizes for the least familiar views of Impressionist Paris, then, Van Gogh's gloomy cityscapes would surely win." "With all these rickety windmills dotted about," "Van Gogh's Paris looks more like Holland than France." "In those days, Montmartre was still a messy scrubland of working gardens and scruffy allotments." "Exiled in this pretend Holland, a lonely Dutch frog was missing its pond." "Apart from walking, painting and arguing," "Vincent's other great hobby was drinking." "He did a lot of that - some of it in here." "CHATTERING AND LAUGHTER" "The Lapin Agile, or Agile Rabbit, is the only bar in Montmartre that remains more or less as Vincent would have known it..." "ACCORDION MUSIC" "..small, dark and shabby." "Une cerise, s'il vous plait." "Oui." "To get Vincent out of the house," "Theo enrolled him in an art school on the Boulevard de Clichy, the Atelier Cormon, where the head boy was a small chap called Toulouse Lautrec." "Merci." "Vincent wasn't the art-school type." "He was studying mostly at the bar, and it wasn't for a law degree." "One of Vincent's most striking Paris pictures is actually a portrait of a glass of absinthe sitting daintily on a cafe table." "They called it "the green fairy", because when you poured in the water, absinthe would go milky green - pretty and dangerous." "And that's what Vincent's painted - a glass of absinthe sitting on its own in a bar, like a pretty girl waiting to be chatted up." "It was about now that he got himself involved in a grubby little love affair with a local bar-owner called Agostina Segatori." "Agostina was in her mid-40s when she met Van Gogh." "She was from Naples originally, and had come to Paris, like so many Italian girls, to pose for artists." "She was dark and fiery, and much in demand among those salon painters who specialised in Middle Eastern slave scenes." "By taking her clothes off, Agostina saved enough money to open a small restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy called Le Tambourin..." "HE JINGLES TAMBOURINE" "..because the tables there were all shaped like tambourines." "Her affair with Vincent was short-lived and unhappy, one of those grim urban collisions you get in the modern city, joyless and lonely." "But it did at least inspire some fascinating art." "The only nudes that Vincent ever painted are pictures of Agostina." "Most nudes in art pretend they have some higher purpose, but not these." "They're shockingly direct, and very physical." "Agostina was notoriously hard-headed." "She let Vincent swap some of his paintings for meals, but they had to be flower paintings, the only pictures of his she thought she could sell." "If you look carefully at his glum portrait of Agostina looking tough and alienated at Le Tambourin, you can make out some fuzzy shapes on the wall behind." "They're Japanese prints, a new passion of Van Gogh's." "Agostina let him put on a show of them at Le Tambourin, and he's painted her sitting in front of it." "These Japanese prints changed Vincent's art dramatically." "It was as if someone suddenly threw open a door and let in colour." "His final portrait of Agostina, before their squalid city romance disintegrated into arguments and name-calling, is a full-colour revelation..." "..Agostina, in her Italian folk costume, as sun-drenched and yellow as a sunflower in August." "Van Gogh was only in Paris for two years before he suddenly decided to leave for the South of France, just as abruptly as he had arrived." "So this Impressionist phase of his was really short, but the change in his work was momentous." "This is Van Gogh at the beginning of his stay in Paris." "And here he is 18 months later, once Impressionism and Japanese prints had got to him." "This isn't progress." "This is an identity swap." "The Eighth Impressionist Exhibition of 1886, which unleashed Seurat on the world and transformed Van Gogh, turned out to be the last." "Impressionism had opened its final door, and all sorts of art was rushing through it." "Among the original Impressionists, the hard-core founding members," "Pissarro had a bash at Seurat's new style, but he wasn't much good at it." "In the end, he went back to his first ambition of capturing the busy rhythms of modern Paris." "Renoir, alas, turned into something ghastly - a peddler of plump and greasy nudes which he churned out like a string of pork sausages." "The true hero among the original Impressionists, the ones who started it all, was Monet." "The second half of Monet's career was even more radical than the first." "RIPPLING CLASSICAL PIANO MUSIC" "This is Giverny, of course, where he spent the last 40-odd years of his life, and where he planted this famous garden." "And one of the reasons he created this garden was to make life easier for himself, so he wouldn't have to travel so far..." "..to find his subjects." "The Haystacks, that unprecedented series of outdoor picturings that Monet embarked upon in the 1890s were painted out here, in the fields just behind the garden." "He'd load up a wheelbarrow with canvasses, paints, easels, get a lackey from the house to help him push it, and park himself in a nearby field, where he'd set up a row of easels and dart from canvas to canvas," "painting the different light effects as the day changed." "It was a simple idea, but something no-one had ever done before - a completely new way of painting." "Apparently the local peasants, who didn't like Monet or modern art, would demolish their haystacks early on purpose, just to annoy him." "Although he first came to Giverny in 1883, he actually waited a couple of decades before he began painting the most famous bit of his famous garden - the pond." "These are the first water-lily paintings that Monet did." "They were started in 1899, so these are the last Monets of the 19th century, and the first Monets of the 20th." "Down at the bottom here, between the house and the lily pond, there used to be a railway track..." "..and a cheery little train would puff up and down here six times a day, and lift his spirits." "TRAIN HORN HOOTING" "Monet loved trains." "They kept popping up in his art all through his career." "Their smoke was an exciting challenge to paint, and their symbolism seemed to trigger hope in him." "TRAIN HORN HOOTING" "All that changed in 1914, when the Great War broke out, and the army began ferrying wounded soldiers from the front line up and down here, and the cheery little train became an insistent reminder of war and death." "'What could he do?" "How could he help?" "'He was in his 80s now." "The days for practical action had long gone.'" "But the war had come to his doorstep, and he had to do something." "The answer came to him on Armistice Day itself," "November the 11th, 1918, the last day of the war, when Monet wrote a letter to his old friend Georges Clemenceau, who had now become prime minister of France." "Clemenceau had been an inspirational wartime leader, the French Winston Churchill." "And unlike most politicians before and since, he also understood the power of art." "Before he became prime minister, Clemenceau had been a journalist, and he'd actually written with great insight about Monet's art." "They were old friends, so it was to Clemenceau, on Armistice Day..." "..that Monet made his great offer." "To commemorate the end of the war, he would give the French state a set of his pictures." ""It's not much," he wrote poignantly at the time," ""but it's the only way I have of taking part in the victory."" "He'd been dreaming for some time of something momentous, unprecedented... ..and already, in 1914..." "..he'd built himself this massive new studio." "These days it's mostly used as the Giverny gift shop, but Monet built it to realise a dream." "He wanted to paint a set of giant water lilies, and to hang them in a large, round space so that they completely encircled you." "But there was a problem - a big one." "For some time now, he'd been having trouble with his eyesight." "Monet had developed cataracts in both of his eyes." "There's three types of cataract, two of which he didn't get, but he did get the normal age-related cataract, which is called nuclear sclerosis." "In that, the crystalline structure of the natural lens gradually changes, and it happens to all of us, in actual fact, and it yellows with age, and it kind of gets like paper, yellows with age." "The lens yellows with age." "Now, we've brought along some filters for the camera on your advice, which approximate some of the effects that Monet would have seen." "I mean, we can put on this filter now, and I think what people watching will see is that it's not so much blurring - it's also the colour change." "Absolutely, and what yellow filters do is, they take out blue light, so the blues tend to go." "So just as your blue tie looks sort of grey now, all the blues would have looked greyish to Monet." "They'd have morphed into one sort of splodge." "And as the cataracts grew worse..." "We've brought along another filter to show what might have happened." "It's quite a huge difference, isn't it, because the eyesight actually starts going." "What happens then is, the eyesight begins to blur, as well, which of course is an added frustration, because you can get quite a lot of cataract before the eyesight starts blurring." "But eventually, of course, it does blur, and it blurred in his case significantly." "He ended up having to just rely on the labels on his paints, because he couldn't really tell the blues, greens and the purples and that." "He couldn't really tell them, so he had to rely on the labels." "So Monet attempted to solve his problems by resorting to surgery, didn't he?" "He did." "The surgery had advanced enormously by then, but it consisted of taking the lens out of the eye, so you had to open the eye, get the lens out, and then, obviously, you have to have spectacles" "to correct for vision, which we can simulate for you, if you like." "So when I put these on, I will see the world in the way, or nearly in the way, that Monet saw it after his operation." "You just need a yellow filter just to make it absolutely right." "Have a look at your thumb." "Good Lord!" "Look at your thumb." "I can't see anything." "My thumb..." "Agh!" "The thumb is not one thumb but two thumbs." "There's a big thumb in one eye, and a sort of little thumb in the other." "And that is..." "And the brain is incapable of putting the large image with the small image and giving you binocular vision." "I would have said that was impossible, to paint with eyesight like that." "Absolutely impossible." "In fact, Monet's appalling eyesight had a positive impact on his art." "It freed his vision, and forced him to trust his imagination." "The French government found a superb location for those water lilies he'd promised - a former greenhouse on the Tuileries, set magnificently on the Place de la Concorde - the Orangerie." "The Orangerie is long and thin rather than round, so Monet changed his plans." "Instead of one huge circular room, he designed an even more ambitious scheme for two interconnected ovals." "The Surrealist painter Andre Masson once described this as the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism." "But it's actually two Sistine Chapels laid end to end." "A good thing to notice about the water lilies is how few water lilies there are in here." "There are some, of course." "Couple here, perhaps." "A clump here." "But there's not that many, and in some places there are none at all." "Because Monet's great enfolding mural is concerned not with flowers, but the shimmering, reflective, endlessly fascinating presence of water..." "..the darknesses it harbours, the shifting reality in which it lurks and lives." "He's put us on an island in the middle of a lake, so that the water surrounds us in every direction." "And when Clemenceau first saw this, he suggested they should build a lift right here in the middle, so that visitors would be deposited at the centre of the experience rather than coming in through a door at the side." "The job of the water lilies you do see in here is to give your eyes something tangible to grasp, a sense of where you are." "They're like coloured drawing pins holding in place this shimmering, endless, sublime twilight." "RIPPLING CLASSICAL MUSIC" "Monet never saw this finished." "He died in 1926, the last of the surviving Impressionists." "But he'd saved his most revolutionary moment till the end." "I set out in this series to take Impressionism off the chocolate box, to put it back into the furnace, and remind us again of how brave it was, how fiery and inventive." "But to be honest, I've spent all this time making four huge films trying to convince you of how revolutionary Impressionism was, when all I really had to do was to bring you in here and show you that." "An 86-year-old Impressionist granddad did that." "It was wild art then, and it's wild art now." "This art will never be tamed." "If you want, you can see it as the end of Impressionism." "But how can the end of something be so full of possibilities?" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk" "." "In this series, we're going to be looking at some of the greatest art ever painted and the greatest painters." "Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin." "The story of Impressionism is their story." "'It's a story of rebellion and courage." "'Monet painted some of art's bravest pictures." "'Renoir, some of the liveliest." "'Degas unleashed the ballet." "'Seurat unleashed the dot." "'Van Gogh, well, he unleashed colour." "'I think it's the most exciting mutiny in art." "'The days when everything changed.'" "# And it hardly looked like a novel at all" "# And the city treats me It treats me to you" "# And a cup of coffee for you" "# I should learn its language And speak it to you" "# And 70 million should be in the know" "# And 70 million don't go out at all" "# And 70 million wouldn't walk this street" "# And 70 million would run to a hole" "# And 70 million would be wrong, wrong, wrong" "# And 70 million never see at all" "# And 70 million haven't tasted snow. #" "Morning, Tom." "Good morning, sir." "Good morning, Dick." "Good morning, sir." "Good morning, Harry." "Good morning, sir." "This is the room that Monet, the most famous of the Impressionists, actually used to stay in when he came to London." "He used to paint the Thames from this very window." "In those days, of course, Monet wasn't as famous as he is today." "These days, Monet and the Impressionists are everywhere." "Terribly popular, terribly familiar, terribly commercialised." "I have been Impressionist shopping and look what I've got." "Impressionist umbrellas, Impressionist pen," "Impressionist bag, Impressionist jigsaw, this fine Impressionist shirt and, above all, Impressionist chocolate." "Boxes and boxes of chocolates." "'When you're looking for art to put on a chocolate box, 'you turn to the Impressionists, don't you?" "'Because these days their art seems so sweet and pleasant.'" "But what if the Impressionism never was this charming, sugary art movement we like to imagine?" "What if the real story of Impressionism was the story of a revolution, an overthrow, artistically dangerous and hardcore?" "What if the art of the Impressionists belongs not on a box of chocolates... ..but on a case of dynamite?" "'The Impressionists never really had a plan." "'That wasn't how it happened." "'History threw them together to change art." "'Some contributed more than others 'and they're the ones we need to follow." "'If their story began anywhere, it was here," "'St Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, 'where the painter Camille Pissarro was born 'on July 10th, 1830." "'Pissarro isn't the best loved of the Impressionists.'" "He's not the best known or the most popular." "Monet is more famous than him, and so is Renoir, but none of them could've got together and did what they did without him." "Pissarro was the glue that held Impressionism together." "'The Impressionists had eight exhibitions, and that's it." "'Eight shows that changed art." "'And the only artist who appeared in all of them was Pissarro.'" "'The Pissarro family ran a hardware store in the High Street, 'supplying useful stuff for the boats coming in and out of here." "'As far as art is concerned, however, 'the most interesting thing about them is that they were Jewish.'" "If I were to ask you to name me a great Jewish artist before Pissarro, you couldn't, because there weren't any." "Plenty after him, of course." "Rothko, Modigliani, Soutine, but none before." "'Because the Jewish religion forbids the making of art." ""You shall not make for yourself any likeness" ""of what is in the heavens above or on the earth below,"" "'says the second commandment firmly." "'That's why there are no paintings or sculptures in synagogues.'" "Pissarro's family were orthodox enough to follow most of the observances of their religion, but they also had reason to challenge it and turn against it." "'Pissarro's father, Frederick Pissarro, 'had been sent to St Thomas to take over his uncle's business when the uncle died." "'To everyone's horror, he quickly started a relationship' with his uncle's widow, Rachel Pissarro." "And even though she already had four children, they got together and had four more, including Camille Pissarro." "'The synagogue disapproved - how could it not?" "'Nephews shouldn't father their auntie's children." "'The marriage was never accepted, 'and a crack appeared in the ancient relationship 'between the Pissarros and their faith.'" "Whether he was supposed to or not, Pissarro drew all the time." "He was always at it." "'Down on the docks, watching the fishermen." "'Out in the fields with the working women." "'It seems so modest, this Impressionism-to-be, 'so sensitive, so quiet." "'But don't let this quietude fool you." "'Powerful sins are being committed here." "'A Jewish boy is breaking an ancient taboo.'" "Not just any Jewish boy, either, but a Jewish boy stuck 4,500 miles away from Paris, in the Virgin Islands, just about as far away from the story of art as you can get." "'If Pissarro had been alive in any other era, 'there would've been no chance of him becoming a painter." "'Not only was it a religious no-no, 'but the practical difficulties were immense.'" "Where around here would he have got materials he needed to become an artist?" "In those days, painters needed so much stuff and the colours they used were so complicated to prepare." "This is lapis lazuli, semi-precious stone." "Incredibly expensive, it comes from Afghanistan, but the best blues were made from this." "First, though, you needed to crack it and crunch it and grind it and turn it into paint." "And when all the grinding and oiling was done, how do you actually carry around this paint that you've made?" "In those days, you shovelled it into pigs' bladders." "Yes, pigs' bladders." "'So at the beginning of the 19th century,' painters needed all this to make art." "But then, in 1841 in England, an American called John G Rand, working for good old Winsor  Newton..." "..invented something remarkable, something brilliant and inspired." "Rand... ..came up with this little beauty here." "The paint tube." "The impact of the paint tube on art can't be overestimated." "It changed everything." "This freed art." "It freed Pissarro and made Impressionism possible." "The new paint tubes were spectacularly portable, so easy to carry wherever you went." "Squeezed quickly out of its quick new tube, the new paint could capture quick new movement." "All sorts of elusive light effects were now easier to record and enjoy." "It had a liberating effect too and seemed to free the spirit, as it definitely freed Pissarro's." "None of this had happened yet, of course." "All of it was now possible." "First, though, Pissarro had to get out of the Virgin Islands and into Paris where the quick new paint was particularly useful." "But when he finally got here in 1855," "Pissarro found a city fast forwarding crazily into the future." "What was happening to Paris was scary." "The city was in the middle of a huge transformation." "Everything was changing." "The old Paris was being knocked down and a new one was being rushed up in its place." "Pretty much all of the Paris that we love today, the boulevards, the parks, the big vistas, all that was created now." "And it was happening at breakneck speed." "Paris was now moving to a new rhythm." "And that rhythm got into its art." "It had to, didn't it?" "Renoir, the second of the great pioneering Impressionists, actually grew up next to the Louvre on what is now the famous Rue de Rivoli." "This is it today." "One of the poshest and most fashionable addresses in Paris." "But when it Renoir grew up here, the Rue de Rivoli didn't even exist and this bit of Paris didn't look anything like this." "It was more like this." "A wobbly medieval ghost ride of spooky streets and twisted alleys." "Infested with rats, sewage slopping in the streets, the old Paris had barely changed since the Middle Ages." "It was a superb home for the Hunchback of Notre Dame." "But not for an Impressionist." "So why the big rebuild?" "Why start Paris from scratch?" "Because France had a new emperor, Napoleon III, nephew of the first Napoleon." "And when a Napoleons take over, they change things." "For the citizens of Paris, turfed out, moved on, these were terrible times." "An era of disruption." "But for the Impressionists, the conditions were perfect." "A city was changing beyond recognition." "So its art needed to change as well." "Renoir's father was a tailor and apparently little Renoir learned to draw by using his father's chalks on the floor." "You know, those tailor's chalks they used to mark out their designs." "But the most interesting part of his education came in his teens when he started to work for a posh manufacturer of luxury porcelain, churning out of vases and teacups and plates." "Napoleon and his lackeys liked eating, drinking and commemorating their achievements, so they needed lots of posh plates to dine on." "Renoir was 14 when he was sent to work at Levy  Sons as an apprentice porcelain painter." "Renoir was so good, so quick, at painting flowers on plates, that he soon made enough money to buy his family a house." "And it obviously influenced him, too." "Look at the way people paint these plates." "The tiny brushes, dabbing on pretty little effects, so decorative, so luminous, so Renoir." "TRANSLATION:" "What is the difference between painting porcelain and painting pictures?" "TRANSLATION:" "With porcelain painting the painter has to work horizontally, with the elbow locked and the hand locked so they don't shake." "We work on things that are very fine and delicate, and you have to learn to control your movement so that it is only the wrist that moves." "The colours are very decorative, like this blue." "You don't find THAT in paintings." "This blue is cobalt blue." "It has been used since antiquity by the Chinese." "The speciality at Sevres is to apply it in many layers to create a depth of colour that isn't found anywhere else." "C'est vraiment magnifique." "The mark of Sevres is cobalt blue." "If we jump ahead a few short years and look at what Renoir went on to paint when he became an Impressionist, we can surely recognise the ceramic origins of his feathery, flickery, decadent touch." "Painting pots made Renoir different from everyone around him." "These really were crazy times." "Here's an amazing statistic." "In 1850, there were a million people in Paris." "By the 1870s, there were two million!" "Paris doubled in size in a couple of decades." "And these mad decades are exactly the decades in which Impressionism was born." "The new Paris was packed with temptations." "One third of all the babies born here in Impressionist times was illegitimate." "Poor old Pissarro, thrown into the deep end of this cauldron of change, couldn't have known what had hit him." "He was just too sensitive, and well brought up, for what was going on here." "Here's this small-town Jewish boy from the West Indies suddenly finding himself in the wildest and most sinful city on God's earth." "Do you know what a lorette is?" "It's a French word." "A piece of 19th century Parisian slang, which means a pretty girl." "A girl with loose morals." "You find them all over Impressionist pictures." "Smoking, drinking, giggling, giving you the eye." "They're the new woman, the woman of today, enjoying freedoms they'd never had before." "Lorettes are the kinds of girls respectable men stay away from." "And they are called lorettes because most of them lived around here, la Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette." "And so too, at number 49, did Pissarro." "Pissarro's mother came to Paris too to keep an eye on him." "So did his stepsister, Emma, and her five children." "There was a cook as well, a maid, and a black slave brought back from Saint Thomas." "So that's five women, five children, plus Pissarro." "All crammed into there." "Small wonder his earliest Paris paintings try so hard to get away from it all." "These quiet landscapes, painted on day trips out of the city, are the works of a man from the Tropics, who is in love with light." "In all its varieties." "On that corner there, where the Gothic building is, there used to be a beaten-up painting studio." "The Academie Suisse." "It was what they called a free studio, meaning nobody actually taught you anything in there." "You decided for yourself what you wanted to paint." "Pissarro, who had strong anarchist tendencies from the start, enrolled at the Academie Suisse as soon as he got to Paris." "One day a new student turned up at the studio, a handsome young chap, a bit of a dandy, who cut quite a dash with his lacy cuffs and his Antonio Banderas hair." "Pissarro got on very well with him." "This new chap also enjoyed painting outdoors." "The lorettes, they liked him too, which they made pretty clear." ""I only sleep with maids and duchesses,"" "replied this new chap haughtily." ""Preferably duchesses' maids."" "That was Monet." "Claude Oscar Monet was from Le Havre, a busy industrial port on the Normandy coast, whose watery textures he was instinctively quick at capturing." "Monet was so talented and the first unmistakable signs of this talent appeared when he was 14 or 15, and began drawing cartoons and caricatures of Le Havre's most prominent citizens." "The prominent citizens loved these jokey portraits of themselves." "Monet was soon churning them out and making so much money from his comic drawings that he started to dream of becoming a proper artist." "A serious landscape painter, quick enough and skilled enough to capture the shimmering, changeable sights that surrounded him." "First, though, there were hoops to jump through." "Big ones." "To make it in the Parisian art world, you needed to show your work at the infamous Paris Salon, the most prestigious art exhibition in the world, where every year, some of the world's most pompous pictures" "were proudly selected and displayed." "This is the enemy." "This is what Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, all of them, were up against, the official art of the era." "The surface of a typical Salon picture is as smooth and shiny as the paintwork on a new car." "Glistening, perfect, that's how they wanted it." "To make it in the Paris art world, this is the game you had to play." "Everything was controlled from here." "The Institute de France, created by a gang of Freemasons in 1795." "In here is the Academie de peinture et de sculpture." "The Academie appointed the teachers who taught here at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts." "To get into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, you needed first to pass some exams." "Judged, of course, by the Academicians." "The Academicians also made sure your work was accepted for the Paris Salon, because they were the jury for it." "If you did well at the Salon, the state, advised by the Academicians, naturally, gave you a prestigious commission." "Like these ones here at the Pantheon." "After a few prestigious state commissions, you too could now become an Academician and teach at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where you passed on your methods to your students and the whole rotten process could begin again." "So that is what the Impressionists were up against." "That is what they had to get away from." "That is why they happened." "Churning out Venuses was not the career that Monet wanted." "His guilty pleasure was the real world." "This is the biggest Monet exhibition of recent years." "It's at the Grand Palais in Paris, a magnificent display of everything that Monet achieved." "There's the beaches near Le Havre where he grow up." "And here are the forests he sneaked off to paint with Pissarro." "And then, at the other end of his life, look at these outrageously brave and inventive water lilies." "I mean, how adventurous is that?" "All that happens later, of course." "But I've brought you here now because I wanted to give you an important tip for looking at Impressionist art." "If ever an Impressionist picture begins to look predictable or boring, like you've seen it before, another seascape, another riverside view, what you need to do is get closer." "Shuffle right up to it, as close as you can." "If you are in a museum, get as close as they'll let you." "And really look at what's happening in an Impressionist picture." "Notice the brushstrokes, look how brave they are, how cocky and adventurous." "A new language is being invented to convey new sensations." "The closer you get to an Impressionist picture, the easier it is to feel the spirit of the revolution." "To beat the Salon system, various private art schools had opened up in Paris." "This one here, down this secret alley... ..was run by an old boy called Charles Gleyre." "Gleyre had been a Salon painter in the past, specialising in doomy mythologies." "But he was of a liberal bent, so the students he had were more progressive than most." "Renoir was here already, and known to be something of a slacker." ""Young man," said Gleyre to him one day," ""you're very talented, very gifted," ""but it looks as if you took up painting to amuse yourself."" "So Gleyre was an insightful old bird." "Renoir had a nose for pleasure." "And it led him to the Seine, which he liked to explore with his new painting buddy," "Monet." "Monet and Renoir would spend their summers sniffing out modern places by the river, where modern people were having fun in modern ways." "That's how they found a notorious riverside hot spot called La Grenouillere, which means "the frog pond"." "La Grenouillere was a floating bar or on the river where people came on Sundays for a bit of swimming and a lot of a flirting." "So infamous La Grenouillere that even the Emperor and his wife turned up here in 1869 to see for themselves if all the stories were true." "In that same summer, 1869," "Monet and Renoir turned up as well to change the story of art." "The two painting buddies, that's Monet on the right," "Renoir or on the left, set out to capture the interaction of people and light and water." "To do that, Monet and Renoir needed this little beauty here." "It doesn't look like much, but this shiny piece of metal made Impressionism possible." "It's called a ferrule." "It is a tiny tin sheath that appeared on the ends of paintbrushes halfway through the 19th century." "Before these metal ferrules were invented, all brushes were basically round." "The clusters of hairs would be tied to the shaft with string or binding." "Being able to use a flat brush like that instead of a round brush like that, revolutionised art." "It completely changed the story of painting." "The brush strokes you can make with a flat brush are much more expressive." "They're better for capturing the choppiness of the water, the ripples, the flicker of the light on the surface." "And you can cover much more of the canvas quickly." "If you're in a hurry to record an elusive effect before it disappears, as the Impressionists often were, what you need is one of these." "The paintings they made here are the first raw attempts at Impressionism." "Quick, fidgety, responsive." "It's not just the look of La Grenouillere that's being captured here, but also its spirit." "It's all changed now, the Seine was re routed and what was previously river, is now dry land." "You can still see this little island that Renoir and Monet painted." "It was called the Camembert because it was round and small." "It's all gone now, thank God Monet and Renoir and their new types of brush came here and painted it before it disappeared." "Before you can paint a riverside pleasure den, you need to get to it." "That hadn't previously been easy." "Particularly for those old-fashioned painters who still relied on old-fashioned painting equipment." "This is a typical studio easel of the time." "What most painters were using before the Impressionists." "As you can see, it takes two big blokes to manoeuvre it in." "Painting outdoors with this would have been impossible." "What you need instead is one of these." "The new, portable, fold away, easy to use travelling easel with built-in painting kit." "With one of these, getting to La Grenouillere was a doddle." "You just hopped on board one of these new-fangled iron horses that had recently appeared in France and you steamed there at speed." "The various design subtleties in these new, portable easels made them the perfect tool for outdoor painting." "So practical, so easy to use." "The flat brushes, the ones with those new ferrules, they all went in there." "Tubes of paint had replaced the big pigs bladders, they all go there." "There's a handy, fold away palette on top." "Just a few clicks of the box and you're a fully prepared, outdoor Impressionist, ready for any landscape the train can take you to." "Sundays at La Grenouillere were exciting and fun." "The train was always heaving with eager pleasure-seekers." "Not all the crucial pioneering of the Impressionists was undertaken on Paris's doorstep." "Sometimes, the iron horse needed to make a longer journey." "Montpellier in the south of France." "Classy, civilised, conservative, and a long way from Paris." "Montpellier is famous for its ancient university, and for these sun-drenched lovelies." "Southern grapes grown by the barrel-load for producing the cheap and cheerful local wine." "Among Montpellier's richest wine families there were the Bazilles." "Who ran this posh establishment, the Domaine de Meric." "The Bazilles had a son, Frederic Bazille who was exceptionally tall, exceptionally shy and exceptionally talented." "So talented, that he might have become the greatest of all the Impressionists if the Germans hadn't killed him first." "Bazille is the fourth of the key Impressionist Musketeers." "Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Bazille." "He died in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war." "Too young to see through the Impressionist revolution, but he was there at the beginning and he was crucial." "The Bazilles wanted Frederic to become a doctor." "But he failed all the exams and ended up instead with Monet and Renoir at the Academy Gleyre." "His parents were generous enough to give him a full allowance which his fellow students were happy to help him spend." "But what is fascinating about Bazille, what makes him stand out, apart from the fact he was nearly seven foot tall, his most interesting pictures weren't printed in Paris with Monet and Renoir around, but here in Montpellier," "outdoors in this hot, dry luminous landscape." "This is his masterpiece." "A haunting picture showing the whole of his family arranged on a terrace at the Domaine de Meric." "Mum and dad, sisters, cousins and their beaus." "With Bazille himself squashed uncomfortably into the corner." "They're supposed to be looking relaxed and informal." "They've all come together on a sunny Montpellier terrace for a quiet afternoon of family bonding." "So why do they all look so stiff and anxious?" "Because Bazille is more interested in capturing the light of the south than in being nice to his family." "Bazille and Monet were close." "Bazille had money, Monet didn't." "So, it was useful for Monet and Renoir to use Bazille's studio." "And occasionally to move in there, rent free." "One day, Bazille suggested they should form a group of artists with similar ideas." "Monet agreed and then forgot about it for a while, as students do." "It was also Bazille who suggested painting some life-size figures in the most difficult place there is for figure painting, outdoors, in the sunshine with the figures in front of you." "Bazille himself never tried it, but Monet did, in fact, he decided to paint an outdoor scene in which the figures were double life-size." "It was the height of a London bus." "And most of the width of one, as well." "In the past, pictures of this huge historic size had always shown us events of huge historic importance - wars, coronations, massacres." "But all Monet shows us is a group of his friends on a picnic, having fun outdoors." "Monet's mistress, Camille, posed for all these interestingly backlit women." "Bazille is all the chaps in bowler hats." "It was so expensive to paint that Monet ran out of money and couldn't pay his rent." "The landlord kicked him out and kept the giant painting as security." "When Monet finally got it back much of it had rotted away." "He could only saved two big bits." "Since the whopper hadn't worked out, the following summer, in 1866, Monet decided to have another go." "Sensibly, the new picture was going to be much smaller, only around 8ft tall this time." "But his chief ambition - to paint a scene of everyday life out in the open air, in the sunshine - that ambition remained." "He painted some women in a garden, lounging around in the sunshine, wearing lovely dresses and not doing much." "Painting outdoors is difficult for all sorts of reasons, particularly if you're painting a whopper." "How, for instance, do you paint the top of a picture that's much bigger than you?" "Monet's solution was to dig a trench in the garden and to have the canvas lowered into it on pulleys." "But the biggest challenge he set himself was to paint sunlight directly, exactly as it was." "It's actually one of the hardest tasks in art - combining strong sunshine with strong shadows." "Have you watched one of those games of football on the TV when the sun's shining and throwing big black shadows on the pitch?" "The camera just can't handle it, the contrasts are too great." "But the human eye can." "No one in art had previously painted sunshine as bright as this." "He nearly gets it right, but not quite." "Some of the passages of painting and women in the garden are stunning." "Look at the way he's captured the light on that white dress." "But overall, there's a strange air of unreality to the picture." "It's got a frozen quality, as if all these modern people have been preserved for posterity in a very sunny ice cube." "Unreality was never an issue with Pissarro." "He was too poor to be unreal." "I know artists always go on about how tough things were for them in their youth, before they were discovered, but in Pissarro's case, the hardships were never exaggerated." "He really was exceptionally poor and put-upon for most of his career." "It made him extra sensitive to little things, to places the rest of us might walk past, to people the rest of us might ignore." "Where the other painters in his gang were attracted to the countryside for the lunching and the boating, Pissarro avoided all that." "His countryside is somewhere you grow things and work hard, connect to the earth and do your bit." "So why was he so poor, so put-upon?" "I'm afraid it was that old devil love that brought him down." "Pissarro's mistake was to fall in love with one of his mother's servants, the cook's assistant." "Julie, she was called." "This Julie turned out to be one of the great artist's wives - loyal, dogged, resourceful." "But she wasn't Jewish." "She was his mother's servant, a practising Christian, and pretty quickly she got pregnant by him, none of which went down well with the family." "Pissarro's mother, who controlled the purse-strings, wrapped her fingers tightly around them and ensured that Pissarro, Julie and their quickly multiplying number of offspring would never be comfortable and often poor." "They moved out here to Louveciennes on the outskirts of Paris, not because the river out here is especially pretty or any of the usual Impressionist reasons but because, in those days, the rents here were much lower than they were in the city." "They rented the cheapest house they could get, and while Julie - who was born in the country and who was excellently practical and resourceful - grew what she could in the garden," "Pissarro continued to paint his sensitive landscapes and set about fathering enough children to populate several families." "I don't usually come south of the river in London - it's not my manor." "But when you tread in the footsteps of the Impressionists you end up in some unlikely places." "Welcome to Upper Norwood, where the suburbs of London turn into more suburbs." "I could have put this sign up in Croydon or in Dulwich, or Sydenham because Pissarro painted in all of them." "Amazingly, South London was a crucial location in the story of Impressionism." "Important things happened here at a very important time." "In 1870, France started a war with Prussia." "Big mistake." "The Prussians charged across Europe and quickly surrounded Paris." "A few brave Frenchmen fought back, but most of them didn't." "Monet and Pissarro, both of whom had children and mistresses to look after, fled here to London, where they soon settled into a modest but fruitful lifestyle." "London inspired Monet to paint the Thames on a warm summer night with the Houses of Parliament looming in the distance, looking mysterious and misty." "Pissarro, however, avoided the obvious landmarks and sniffed out a London that was quiet, modest, suburban, a London that struck a chord with him." "Pissarro painted this view." "This one, too." "And this one." "It isn't dramatic art but it is sensitive and responsive." "These quiet English greys, the sooty air, the damp joylessness of living here." "It takes great sensitivity to enjoy a place as ordinary as this, and great pictorial talent to paint it." "Something else happened in London which, in the end, was absolutely crucial, because it was here in London that Monet and Pissarro discovered Turner." "Britain's finest landscapist was to play a big role in the creation of Impressionism." "It's an easy fact to prove." "Here is a typical Turner." "And here a typical Monet." "Case closed." "Weirdly though, for some complex French reason," "Monet would later insist that Turner had no influence on him at all." ""I never looked at Turner," he said." "Even though the two of them traipsed keenly round the London galleries examining the art." "And Pissarro's name was actually in the visitors' book at Dulwich Picture Gallery." "Of course, Turner influenced and inspired the Impressionists." "It could hardly be more obvious." "And when the Franco-Prussian war was over, and Monet and Pissarro scuttled back to France." "They took back with them Turner's glorious certainty that landscape was a route to the emotions." "Whether it was noisy or it was subtle, it always spoke to the heart." "Une baguette." "Merci..." "You know what the French are like about bread, the entire country runs on baguettes." "This crusty little beastie has played a key role in the creation of the French identity." "Bread played a big role too in the story of the Impressionists." "When Pissarro returned to France from England, he found the invading Prussians had turned his house into a stable and spread his pictures across the muddy ground, so their horses wouldn't get their hooves wet." "Disillusioned, traumatised, Pissarro decided to move and to start again here in Pontoise in 1872." "He began to think seriously as well about that idea that Bazille had had a few years earlier - to assemble a group of like-minded artists, an association of some sort, to work together and beat the system." "Pissarro looked at various options before setting up his new organisation." "In the end, the rules for the new group of painters were based on the Charter of the Bakers' Union here in Pontoise." "Mind you, this wasn't any old Bakers' Union, this was the oldest Bakers' Union in the world." "The Bakers of Pontoise were granted their charter by Louis VII as long ago as 1162." "So they had a particularly long history of making trouble." "Remember, bread in France is powerful stuff." "The French Revolution was triggered by bread strikes, so was the Paris Commune of 1871, the world's first workers' takeover." "So by using the Bakers' Union as the model for this new group of artists," "Pissarro was hoping that they'd inherit some of the revolutionary fire of these dangerous bakers." "By the winter of 1873, the plans were complete." "15 artists would form a joint stock company, a co-operative of equals." "Their plan was to operate entirely outside the salon system." "No academies, no prizes, just the art itself." "Degas, who we haven't talked about yet but who we're talking about a lot later in the series, wanted to call the group "La Capucine", The Nasturtium, after that bright red flower that Monet planted in his gardens." ""We could put nasturtiums on the posters," he said." "But he was overruled." "Instead, the new gang lumbered itself with the long and unsnappy name of the Societe Anonyme Des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, which doesn't trip off the tongue, does it?" "So they had the organisation, they had the name, but where were they going to show?" "Monet knew the photographer Nadar, the most fashionable photographer in Paris, who had recently moved out of his studio in the glamorous Boulevard des Capucines." "So it was empty, and he offered it to Pissarro and his friends for free." "So this is where they had their show, in Nadar's chic studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines." "It opened on April 15th, 1874, and changed art forever." "What you're about to see is revolutionary, too." "I've been trying to get in here for three decades." "It might be the most famous art exhibition of all time, but these days, they prefer to keep the doors closed." "Pissarro and Monet rounded up all their friends and persuaded them to join." "They were a higgledy-piggledy bunch." "The one thing that united everyone here was a shared hatred of the salon system." "Although this was a photography studio, do you know, not a single picture has survived of the first Impressionist exhibition." "All we know is that Nadar had painted the walls a tasteful blood red..." "..which has survived." "And that Renoir, who did all the hanging, arranged all the pictures." "There were 165 of them, by 30 artists, in two democratic rows, small ones at the bottom, big ones on top." "Renoir showed seven pictures and found his Venus in a box at the theatre, with his brother, Edmond, at the back, getting an even better look." "Pissarro had five pictures, all of them devoted in a quiet but revolutionary fashion to real places and real sunshine." "Degas, meanwhile, painted the ballet." "No one had ever done that before." "There was a woman artist too - Berthe Morisot." "Sensitive?" "Yes." "Revolutionary?" "Very." "How about this for a brush stroke?" "Monet showed four paintings, one of which was actually painted from up here, from Nadar's balcony." "The shimmering view of the Boulevard des Capucines in action, teeming with modern life." "But it was the darkest Monet in the show that had the biggest impact." "It was painted in Le Havre, in the harbour, in misty and mysterious conditions." "A glowing red sun hovering over a black sea, casting a mysterious orange reflection." "Renoir's brother, Edmond, who was editing the catalogue, pushed Monet to come up with a catchy title for it." "Monet casually suggested Impression Sunrise, and thought no more of it." "But a waspish little art critic called Louis Leroy was much amused by this deliberately ambiguous title." "In a nasty review of the show," "Leroy giggled that this new gang of painters were just impressionists." "He was trying to be sarcastic, but the insult stuck." "From now on, Monet, Pissarro and the gang would always be known as the Impressionists." "In the next film, the revolution continues, with some of the most famous outdoor art ever painted." "And with me half killing myself trying to find out how it was done." "Argh!" "So you think you know the Impressionists?" "Well, here's 100 Francs that says you don't." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk" "# And it hardly looked like a novel at all" "# And the city treats me, it treats me to you" "# And a cup of coffee for you" "# I should learn its language and speak it to you" "# And 70 million should be in the know" "# And 70 million don't go out at all" "# And 70 million wouldn't walk this street" "# And 70 million would run to a hole" "# And 70 million would be wrong wrong wrong" "# And 70 million never see it at all" "# And 70 million haven't tasted snow. #" "If I asked you what the Impressionists were best known for, you'd probably say, "For painting outdoors."" "And you'd be right." "Who doesn't love Monet's delightful fields of poppies, with their unmissable smell of the summer?" "Or those dreamy water lilies of his?" "So delicate, so thoughtful." "Or his sunny moments by the river, with their perfectly captured weather?" "It's as if Monet's art hasn't got a care in the world." "Everything in it is relaxed, sleepy... ..happy." "Renoir's the same." "All those gorgeous scenes of dancing... ..and lunching at Bougival." "Pretty girls flirting... ..and jumping on swings with the handsomest chap in the restaurant." "Pissarro's the same." "Fields of golden corn, sunny orchards, happy peasants, merrily at work in the fields." "Even when he paints the winter, he makes the cold look so welcoming." "All these famous Impressionist images will be very familiar to you." "You've seen them before on chocolate boxes and the postcards people send you from Paris." "And even if you don't recognise the actual pictures, you'll certainly know their mood." "That relaxed, optimistic, typical mood of Impressionism." "So naturally you're going to assume that achieving these pleasing moods was pleasant as well and that the life of the Impressionists was relaxing and contented." "And that's where you'd be wrong." "Very wrong." "Because the outdoor art of the Impressionists, their most famous contribution to painting, the stuff we all know and love..." "..was a bitch to paint." "Achieving that pleasant sense of outdoor relaxation... ..was so much harder than it looks." "In the last film, we saw the Impressionists come together for their first show, in 1874." "Over the next decade they had seven more exhibitions." "That's eight shows in all, eight shows that changed art." "And from the beginning, they wanted to paint outdoors." "To paint what they could see, what was really there." "In Monet's case, that usually involved water." "Monet spent his entire life living next to water." "It was as if he was born with two umbilical cords, one connected to his mother, the other connected to the Seine." "It started in Paris, where he was born in 1840, and where the Seine is all twisty and urban." "In Le Havre, where he grew up, the river pours itself into the Atlantic in a messy industrial puddle full of elusive glimmers and shimmers." "His final days, of course, were spent here at Giverny by his famous lily pond, which he created from scratch, specifically to paint the water from every angle, with every watery nuance." "So the whole of Monet's life was spent by the water, and water was the main obsession of his art as well." "This was just a bog when he got here." "All this had to be created." "But it was worth it because it brought him closer to this stuff." "The problem with painting water, the difficulty, the challenge, is that it's constantly changing." "Everything affects it." "Every moment is different." "Water... ..is sort of there and sort of not there." "I mean, how do you paint... that?" "Monet's answer was to get right on top of it, as close as he could." "To live it, breathe it, all day long in a special boat he had built for himself, a floating studio, custom-made for exploring the river." "We know exactly what it looked like, because he was painted working on it by his fellow boat lover, Edouard Manet." "Manet himself never became a proper Impressionist, but he shared many of Monet's Impressionist ambitions, as well as most of the consonants in his name." "Manet and Monet were always getting confused." "Manet shows Monet painting the Seine at Argenteuil, just up the river from central Paris." "He's in his special boat, hard at work, dressed from head to toe in impeccable white boating gear." "Not, you'd have thought, the most practical clothes to work in, but Monet was a bit of a dandy." "He had all his shirts hand-made and was famous for his frills and his cuffs." "Besides, on every French river, the rowers were obliged to wear a different colour." "Here on the Seine, they had to wear white." "There's something of the Hercule Poirot about him, don't you think?" "The neat little dandy dabbing away tidily at his view of the Seine." "And if you look at the back of the boat, in the cosy home-made cabin, you'll find Monet's wife, Camille, stored away neatly like a useful sack of provisions." "Camille would sit placidly at the back of the boat, singing for Monet, feeding him, organising his picnics." "I bet they had other kinds of fun as well in that cosy-looking floating love-nest of theirs." "In his earlier years, when he was still trying to make it the official way, Monet painted Camille in a gorgeous green dress and sent his portrait to the Salon, where, not surprisingly, it was a big hit." "It's not a revolutionary image or a painting that does anything very new." "But it does show how talented he was and how much he liked clothes." "So does this other famous portrait of Camille, in a blonde wig would you believe, done up as a Japanese geisha." "Is this really the same sack of provisions at the back of the boat?" "Amazingly, yes, it is." "Including your lovers in your art like this, painting your family, your girlfriends, dressing them up, was new." "Michelangelo would never have done it, or Turner, or any of the posh predecessors of the Impressionists." "But the Impressionists were trying to be true to life, to paint things as they were, to make everyday life a suitable subject for art." "Besides, when they started out, most of them were famously poor." "They couldn't afford other models." "Camille cost nothing and for Monet, one of the attractions of the river, I suggest, one of the chief reasons he kept coming back here to watch the paddling and the people, is that the river, too, was free." "TRAIN WHISTLES BLASTS" "Mind you, boating across France to reach all the landscapes they wanted to paint would have taken the Impressionists many lifetimes, and that's where the train comes in." "The French were actually very slow to take up train travel." "Water was more their thing." "They'd just engineered themselves the best canal system in the world, connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north of France to the south." "So when the train came along, all the water authorities and everyone who'd put any money into canal building - which was an awful lot of people - felt almightily threatened and wished the train would just go away." "In fact, until 1842, even building a train line in France was illegal." "In that year, though, the law was changed." "And the conquest of rural France by the iron horse could begin in earnest." "In 1842, there were no miles of national rail track in France." "By 1892, there were 30,000 miles of it, a crazy expansion connecting Paris to its suburbs, the capital to the coast." "But it's no good just getting to places quickly." "You also need the right painting gear when you get there." "All sorts of gadgets were invented to make artistic travel easier." "The entire painting kit was rethought and miniaturised, so it could all be carried around in this handy little box." "A few clicks of the latch and hey presto, one minute you're this." "The next minute, you're this." "Now when you see pictures of the Impressionists in their full painting gear, you might think they look a bit silly and they're just trying to achieve a fashionable, painterly look." "But actually, all this has a purpose." "The silly smock is obviously handy for carrying your brushes and things, but the really important thing about it, is its colour." "It's deliberately dark, black or blue." "That's because if you're trying to catch subtle nuances in the landscape, the last thing you should be wearing is bright coloured clothes, which would throw bright coloured reflections." "If this smock were pink, it would throw pink reflections back on to the picture." "And these big hats they all wore and the twee parasols, they weren't there just to keep the midday sun off your head." "More threatening to the committed Impressionist than sunstroke was the damage done to your colour values by direct sunlight." "It just messed them all up." "If I paint something bright green in the hot sun and then take it home afterwards, it'll look completely dark." "So the very worst time to paint an Impressionist picture is on a hot and sunny afternoon." "That really is a challenge." "So the parasols and the wide brimmed hats were to ensure that when you took your Impressionist masterpiece home at the end of the day, you could still see the glorious field of poppies you'd spent all afternoon painting..." "..or that sunny, boating view you'd worked on so sweatily by the banks of the Seine." "Painting landscapes outdoors is hard enough, but for really problematic outdoor painting there's nothing quite as tricky as painting people." "Unlike landscapes, people need to be persuaded to sit for you." "They get bored, fidgety." "One day they turn up, the next day they don't." "You know what French girls are like!" "Renoir had developed a fiendishly difficult ambition." "He wanted to capture the mood of modern Paris." "The bonhomie, the relaxation, the laughs." "And he wanted to paint it all outdoors, as it was happening." "To do that, he got himself a studio up here in Montmartre at the top of the hill." "In Montmartre, nobody watched what you were doing, so you just did more of it." "This was where the poor people lived and where the most fun was had." "Away from the authorities, away from the old rules." "Renoir's new studio was along here in the Rue Cortot." "It had a handy garden... ..in which he persuaded some of Montmartre's prettiest girls to pose for him." "Renoir needed to be at his most dangerously persuasive to charm this 16-year-old Montmartre blonde," "Jeanne Margot, into his garden." "She was up for it." "But her mother, a wise old bird, wasn't." "Perhaps she knew that Renoir was deliberately trying to update this risque old master," "The Swing by Fragonard, painted in the naughty days before underwear was invented." "Renoir was stealing himself for something big, a statement, an encapsulation of this new Parisian mood." "And this big picture was going to be painted outdoors, in situ, with all the models around." "So he ordered himself an extra large canvas and every day for the whole of the summer he lugged it around Montmartre with a pal." "Down here." "Along here." "Up here." "And finally over here, to the infamous Moulin de la Galette." "The Moulin was Renoir's favourite playground." "It was everyone's favourite playground." "A bar, a restaurant, a dance floor, it really came to life on Sunday afternoons at the end of the working week, when the flirting and the dancing reached its climax." "This is a galette, by the way." "It's a cheap and popular cake they sold in there." "But people didn't come to the Moulin for the cakes." "They came for the opportunities, the adventures, the joie de vivre, and that's what Renoir set out to paint as well." "He worked on it for months inside the Moulin, on the dance floor, using the Montmartre girls and their friends as models." "Jeanne Margot's in there somewhere having fun." "So is her older sister, Estelle, the girl at the front." "Renoir's Moulin was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, where everybody noticed it." "It's a fabulous, fabulous picture." "But to see it only as a record of fun and frolics in Montmartre would be a mistake." "The Moulin de la Galette is also a big Impressionist statement, about social change." "The new heroes of Renoir's art aren't priests or emperors or generals, though there's probably a few of those in there somewhere, everyone came to the Moulin." "But the real heroes here are the working girls and the young chaps with attitude, the modern Parisians in whose boisterous grasp the future now lay." "Something else revolutionary about the Bal at the Moulin de la Galette is the way it's painted." "It's often true of Impressionist art." "The closer you get, the more revolutionary it seems." "All Renoir's art, all Monet's art, and Pissarro's, is a tribute to the crucial contribution to art history made by this fine animal here." "This excellent brush in waiting." "Porky, the pig." "Brushes were the key to Impressionism." "Without the latest brushes applying the latest colours in the latest ways, Impressionism couldn't have happened." "Traditionally brushes were made out of this little chappie here." "Out of different members of the weasel family." "Various types of weasel hair were used, the most precious of which came from the kolinsky sable, which lived in Siberia, and to protect itself from the cold the kolinsky had developed this special fur that trapped the air bubbles." "And when it was used in artists' brushes, it kept the paint very well and released it slowly, so artists who wanted to use glossy surfaces, shiny surfaces, they used the sable." "In the 19th century, however, a crucial switchover occurred." "In techniques, ambitions and animals." "Instead of smooth, silky, sable hair, landscape artists began to use the hair from little piggy here." "Hog's hair was stiffer, thicker and in the wrong hands, clumsier and messier." "But in the right hands, the hands of the Impressionists, hog's hair made your brushes sing." "Hog's hair brushes didn't glide around the canvas, they dug and scraped across it in exciting furrows of paint and colour." "A new language is being invented and its ambition isn't to fool you or pretend something is there that isn't, its ambition is to speak to you, through paint." "And excite you." "So that's the superb contribution to progressive art made by this fine creature here, the best friend the Impressionists ever had." "The River Seine is 776 kilometres long." "It flows all away from the Swiss Alps to the English Channel, but as far as art is concerned it only really gets interesting when it gets to Paris." "In Paris the Seine grows complex and devious, twisting back on itself, toying with the geography." "By the time it comes out the other side, it's become such a fascinating river." "Apparently the word Seine comes from the ancient Celtic and actually means "sacred river"." "The Impressionists certainly worshipped it." "They kept painting it and repainting it, until they'd made it the most painted river ever, anywhere." "They saw it in all weathers." "In summer and in winter." "In mysterious mists and terrifying floods." "And the Seine was much too useful as a watery motorway from Paris to the sea to remain pretty for 776 kilometres." "Sometimes the new satanic mills cluttering its banks coughed horrible things into the air and filled the sky with darkness." "But most of the time it was delightful." "All these happy Parisians enjoying their new leisure time in new outdoor ways." "Boating, sailing, having fun." "And one thing you can rely on in the story of Impressionism, is where there's fun, there's Renoir." "In the old days in France, Sundays were for going to church, for communing with your creator and feeling guilty." "But in these new secular Sundays that Renoir paints, the weekends are for fun." "And Sundays are now for relaxing and looking beautiful, for parading in your finery, for flirting, lunching and above all, for dancing." "Apparently Renoir was a fiend on the dance floor, a really good mover, marvellous dancer, and his love of polkas and waltzes is unmissable in his favourite paintings of mine, Renoir's dance pictures." "Come on, how can anyone resist these twirling evocations of couples having fun?" "Renoir's joie de vivre is surely contagious." "The most ambitious of Renoir's dancing pictures," "The Dance at Bougival, features Suzanne Valadon, an outrageously gorgeous Montmartre model, who turned many a fine artistic mind to jelly." "Valadon pops up here and there in Renoir's art, sometimes with her clothes on." "Often without them." "She's the modern girl as the new Venus, elbowing out the imaginary goddesses of the Greeks and elbowing in the living, breathing girls of Montmartre." "Even Renoir, who was hardly a prober of people's character... ..found something deep to notice in Suzanne Valadon." "He painted her dancing, here, at Bougival." "Renoir saw something far away in Valadon's eyes, a doubt, a dream, a regret." "As characterisation, it's not in the Rembrandt league, but it is deeper than we usually expect of Renoir." "These sensuous pleasure pictures of Renoir's painted on location outdoors are deliberately blowing raspberries at the Old Masters." "Their message is that the modern world and the things modern people do are a fitting subject for great art." "Today, we tend to look down on Renoir's party paintings and accuse them of superficiality." "As Renoir himself once complained, people don't take you seriously if you smile." "Bravo." "SCATTERED APPLAUSE" "The world was opening up." "Places that had been so difficult to get to were now easy." "This place, Etretat, in Normandy, was just a train ride from Paris." "The difficulties here started after you arrived." "Monet knew Etretat from his youth." "He grew up in Le Havre, just up the coast from here, and he was, of course, a beach bum by instinct." "When Monet returned here a full-grown Impressionist, he'd stay in a hotel just back from the beach." "Sometimes he was content to paint the view from the hotel window." "But most times he wasn't." "Painting in Etretat was anything but simple." "In fact, it was damned difficult." "Monet would have to lug his gear across all these treacherous boulders to get to the best rocks." "And then he'd have to clamber up there to that spooky tunnel you can see..." "..to his favourite beach on the other side." "These days, it's even tougher to get down there." "The sea's completely cut it off." "If he was in the money, he'd get some of the local kids to carry his gear for him, so you have to imagine a procession of small children, overburdened with canvases, easels, parasols," "slithering across the rocks to get to Monet's secret beach." "One day, he was so engrossed in painting the sea that he lost track of time and forgot the tide." "As the tide rushed in, he was trapped out here on the rocks." "His paints scattered, his pants ripped, his new canvases floating out into the Atlantic." "He made it back, but only just." "These are some of the few original fishing boats left in Normandy." "Exactly like the ones Monet painted and went out on when he was feeling particularly reckless." "The tide is high, so you can go all the way to those big rocks out there and float right underneath them, but you have to be pretty brave to do that and a bit stupid!" "Another of the great Impressionists we'll be looking at in this film," "Cezanne, made a famous quip once about Monet." ""Monet," said Cezanne, "was just an eye." ""But what an eye."" "Cezanne was trying to say that Monet was really good at looking, which he was." "Monet watched the sea more intensely than anyone else, but you don't come all the way out here and float under that thing if all you are is an eye." "To do this, you need to have a big heart as well." "And a mighty set of cojones." "Dry land, though, isn't always a relaxing alternative - not when nature decides to make it tough for you." "The Impressionists were very partial to snow." "They all painted it." "Monet, Renoir, Pissarro." "The snow picture became an Impressionist speciality." "Part of the attraction of course was the beauty of snow scenes." "Snow brings crispness and drama wherever it falls." "But there were also scientific issues to consider, as there usually are with the Impressionists, because the one thing you get more of in the snow than in any other natural conditions, is coloured shadows." "Look deeper into any Impressionist's snow scene and you'll usually find some brave experimentation going on, with vivid blues and livid purples." "Scornful reviewers looking at these bright purple shadows would sometimes burst out laughing and accuse the Impressionists of hallucinating, but of course they weren't." "They were just painting what they saw, because snow shadows are never black." "They're always full of colour, and I'm going to show you why." "First, I have to build myself a projection screen." "Somewhere to show you the natural magic we're dealing with here." "The Impressionists did it on their canvases." "I'm going to do it... ..on this." "So that's my projection screen." "Now, these two torches are basically artificial versions of the natural light you get around here in the winter." "This is the sun shining down from the sky." "This one here, that's all the ambient light that you get reflected up off the snow." "That's why the snow is so good for showing this, because there's so much ambient light reflected off it." "So sunlight, snow light, but to show you how these two come together to create coloured shadows, I need to switch off all the other lights." "That's better." "Now, these are two typical Impressionist figures, a man and a woman, bourgeois types of the kind you see strolling around so much Impressionist art." "And I've also got this coloured cellophane." "So think of this yellow cellophane as an artificial version of a sunny day." "Imagine the sun up in the sky shining lots of yellow light down, and if I throw this yellow light at the Impressionist couple, and also this other light, representing the ambient light reflected from the snow, you'll see" "that the Impressionist couple are now casting purple shadows." "However, if I change the colours and make this a red light - imagine a red sky with the sun shining at sunset, and shine that at the Impressionist figures, then you'll see that the colours of the shadows" "change as well, and become greenish." "It's basic optical science." "Light is made up of all the colours of the spectrum, so if you block off some of these colours, the receptors in your eyes begin to see new things." "Interestingly, though, the Impressionist era wasn't just an important era for scientific experiment, it was also an important era for shadow puppets." "Puppet shows were an immensely popular entertainment in the bars and cabarets of Montmartre, and huge crowds would flock to see the best ones." "And any nosy Impressionist in the audience couldn't have failed to notice the intriguing colour issues that were being raised by these puppet shows." "If we jump ahead in this series to the Seurat story that's coming up, we'll see coloured shadows and the magic of the puppet show combined so adventurously and brilliantly." "Bonjour, Madame." "Bonjour, Monsieur!" "Vous etes tres belle!" "Oooooh!" "The Impressionist who was most fascinated by coloured shadows was Camille Pissarro, who loved Christmas scenes and winter frosts." "He found plenty of both here in Pontoise, where he moved in 1872." "Pissarro didn't just look like Father Christmas, he behaved like him as well." "One of his best qualities was his generosity." "Most French artists of the time had egos the size of the Eiffel Tower and thought only of "moi, moi, moi"." "But not Pissarro." "If you keep watching this series, you'll see him helping Gauguin become an Impressionist, and then promoting Seurat, the genius of the dots." "He even made sure poor old Van Gogh had somewhere peaceful to die, by bringing him here, to Auvers, just up the river from Pontoise." "Back at the beginning of our story, in the early days of Impressionism, Pissarro even took in an interest in an artist that no-one else would touch with a barge pole." "A particularly stubborn and selfish and downright weird painter called Cezanne." "Cezanne's early work, the pictures he showed in the first Impressionist exhibition, are still challenging today." "So imagine what people thought when they saw these things in 1874." "A peculiar self-portrait, with a bearded Cezanne leching over a shivering nude in a half-mad brothel scene." "A portrait of Cezanne's father painted with a palette knife, and looking as if it's been carved out of tar." "Never before has anyone produced art as deliberately dark and crude and tough as these strange pictures." "Cezanne called these early works "couillarde", which is not a word you find in most French dictionaries." "It seems to mean something like "ballsy"." "An art made...down there." "Rapes, mutilations, big, hunking nudes." "The art pouring out of Cezanne when he fell in with the Impressionists was so black and strange." "It was Pissarro who changed all that." "He invited Cezanne to Pontoise and persuaded him to stop the darkness - to get out of himself more, out of his black head, and to start painting outdoors, before the motif." "Somewhere just about here." "It was like throwing a switch." "One moment, Cezanne is the creator of this." "The next, he's gone all sensitive and rural, and he's painting this." "When Cezanne became a landscape painter, his darkness seemed suddenly to evaporate into sunny shimmers." "Cezanne showed in three Impressionist exhibitions and then fell out with Pissarro, which was typical." "Cezanne fell out with everyone." "Returning home to Provence, he cut himself off from the Paris art world and devoted himself to painting the landscape he knew best." "This is the Cezanne family house, the Jas de Bouffan." "It appears in lots of paintings and hasn't really changed that much." "Cezanne's father was a rich banker." "The family home was big and bourgeois." "Cezanne enjoyed painting this posh pond here." "And when he finished with the grounds, he started on the workforce." "In real life, everyone at the Jas de Bouffant was constantly bickering and arguing." "But in the eternal game of cards that Cezanne turns into one of his greatest subjects, time stops still and peace takes over." "BIRDSONG" "This is the studio Cezanne built for himself just outside Aix, so he could paint out here in the countryside with no distractions." "It's been kept more or less as he left it." "Inside here, Cezanne produced some of the most revolutionary pictures in the story of art, using only the simplest ingredients." "All he needed was a bag of apples and a new way of looking." "The middle of the 19th century was THE great era of optical discovery." "All sorts of remarkable things were found out about vision." "What actually happens to the eyes when we see something?" "What does looking actually involve?" "It was an Englishman, Charles Wheatstone, who first described stereo vision in 1838." "Until then, no-one had bothered to ask themselves why human beings have two eyes." "Why don't we just have one big eye right here in the middle?" "Wouldn't that be more practical?" "More visually economical?" "No, actually." "Because the reason we have two eyes is that with two eyes, we can see in stereo and judge distances more exactly." "That's why people who lose an eye have difficulty in the beginning driving." "They can't judge distances as well." "This had huge artistic implications." "Particularly for Cezanne." "If you stare hard at these apples I bought in the shop down the road, you'll notice that each eye sees them differently." "The left eye sees them from over here." "The right eye from over here." "If I now combine these two views through the magic of television," "I'll get a crude Cezanne-ish blurring." "An optical tipsiness that's so Cezanne." "Cos what Cezanne realised was that traditional, single-point perspective, where everything is arranged in a line in front of you, was wrong." "What we actually do is see in stereo, through two eyes, each of which sees things from slightly different angles." "The brain then combines these two images into a single view." "It's a momentous discovery." "Traditional perspective was under attack." "Outside Cezanne's studio, just up here, a short climb away, he painted one of his famous views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire and explored another fascinating optical phenomenon, discovered by the under-rated Charles Wheatstone, who invented this contraption here " "the pseudoscope." "What this thing does is swap around all your optical information so what you usually see in your left eye is moved to the right eye and vice-versa." "As a result of swapping your eyes around, concave shapes become convex and convex shapes become concave." "Everything is reversed." "Unfortunately, it's totally impossible for me to show you that." "There is no way I can feed separate information to both your eyes." "So what you have to imagine is that with one of these, the human face becomes a mask, which you see like that." "Backgrounds and foregrounds swap places." "The entire relationship of far to near is challenged." "A Cezanne also challenges it in his superb tussles with the mountain that obsessed him." "The Mont Sainte-Victoire." "So did he actually use one of these?" "I don't think so." "He wasn't a man for gadgets." "But he'll definitely have known about it." "Optical discovery was in the air and everything the Impressionists did was informed by it." "And if you stare at this landscape as intensely, as relentlessly as Cezanne did sooner or later, it'll start to shimmer and coalesce." "Until it reveals its deeper truth." "This is the Pont de l'Europe." "Ugly as sin, I think you'll agree." "But this was one of the most inspirational art locations in Paris." "Great Impressionist things were done around here." "Manet, the grandfather of Impressionism, had a studio up here on the Rue Saint-Petersbourg." "At number four, up on the first floor." "Notice the window up there." "That pops up again in the smoky background of a very curious Manet painting set on the Pont de l'Europe." "It shows a Parisian nanny with a little girl, who looks out across the railway tracks like a prisoner staring through the bars of a cage." "Remember, when Manet was living here, all this was brand new." "The entire area had just been dug up and laid out by the infamous Baron Haussmann, rebuilder of Paris." "And the Gare Saint-Lazare down there, at which the little girl in the picture is staring, that was the first railway station in Paris." "And to emphasise the city's new connectivity to the rest of the world," "Haussmann had given all the boulevards radiating from the Pont de l'Europe the names of European capitals." "London." "Madrid." "Constantinople." "Edinburgh." "Yes, Edinburgh." "Rome!" "Saint Petersburg." "All these roads that lead out of Paris." "That's what the little prisoner in Manet's painting is dreaming of as well." "The new freedom that she can't get to." "And neither can her nanny, trapped sadly on the wrong side of the tracks." "Who says Impressionism never had a message?" "But the busiest Impressionist around here was Monet." "He was less interested in the Pont de l'Europe and more interested in what was going on down there - in that smoky hell of the Gare Saint-Lazare." "The Impressionists were frequent visitors to the Gare Saint-Lazare." "It was from here that trains left the city for the suburbs and brought all those sunny views of the Seine within easy reach." "But in 1877, Monet had a Eureka moment." "Instead of painting the sunshine and the river banks, why not paint the station itself?" "The fog, the steam, the apocalyptic belching?" "Now that would be modern." "Renoir told him he was mad." "Besides, he'd never get in." "Then, as now, you don't just waltz into a mainline station and paint it." "There were rules to be followed." "Forms to be filled in." "Jobsworths to be dealt with." "It should have taken months to organise." "Monet fixed it in a day." "Putting on his poshest clothes, he demanded to see the director of the station because he was Monet, the great painter." "The director had never heard of him before, of course." "His thing was trains, not art." "But this posh chap turns up and tells him he wants to close down the station, to delay the train to Rouen and to fill the space with extra smoke." "The director is just about to tell him no when Monet piped up," ""I went to see the director of the Gare du Nord the other day" ""and he was very welcoming." ""Do you know, I can't quite decide" ""whether to do this at the Gare du Nord or here." ""What do you think, Monsieur le directeur?"" "The next day, he was in." "It was actually very dangerous to fill the station with all the smoke from all the engines of all the delayed trains." "But that was the effect Monet was after." "He'd set out to paint the foggiest sight he could imagine." "A vision that out-Turnered Turner." "A train shed full of smoke." "A dozen quickly painted canvases record his battle." "They were unveiled at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 and are among his most dramatic achievements." "Man giving nature a good run for her money in the production of clouds and fogs and apocalyptic thunder." "Monet could have died painting his station pictures." "choking on carbon monoxide and smoke." "But he was an Impressionist and Impressionists don't take shortcuts." "These guys were determined, hardcore, and did whatever it took." "Why they tramped through fields of the coldest cold, just to capture the colour of shadows." "They trekked up mountains." "Wherever nature impressed them, the Impressionists went after it and tried to capture it." "Fogs." "Floods." "Rain storms." "And treacherous coastal black spots." "They were after the truth and went where it took them." "And that's never been an easy journey." "Mind you, not all the exploring the Impressionists did was done outdoors." "Sometimes the most interesting sights are right there under your nose." "As we'll find out in the next film when we investigate the Impressionists indoors." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk" "# Though it hardly looked like a novel at all" "# And the city treats me, it treats me to you" "# And a cup of coffee for you" "# To learn its language and speak it to you" "# And 70 million should be in the know # 70 million don't go out at all" "# And 70 million wouldn't walk this street" "# And 70 million would run to a hole" "# And 70 million would be wrong, wrong, wrong" "# And 70 million never see it at all" "# And 70 million haven't tasted snow. #" "Because this is a series about Impressionism, you probably expect me to spend most of my time outdoors, enjoying rivers and gardens and boating parties." "Because that's what most people think Impressionism was about." "Some of it was, of course." "And we certainly saw a lot of sunny days in the last film." "The one about the Impressionists outdoors." "Remember Renoir by The Seine?" "GENTLE WATER SPLASHES" "Ah!" "And Monet at Etretat?" "SURF CRASHES" "Ooh!" "Nature, observed and recorded." "The new way." "But to think that Impressionism was mainly concerned with painting rivers and gardens is a mistake." "Because it wasn't." "For the Impressionists, staying indoors and watching the people was just as important as going outdoors and watching the landscape." "You'll spot many a migrating bourgeois in Impressionist art." "In couples and in singles." "APPLAUSE" "And it can get bleak." "Monet sits in on a family lunch and notices how gloomy it's got." "Yes, this really is Monet and not Ibsen." "The fact is, Impressionism is packed with people." "They're everywhere." "I don't think any society anywhere in art has been watched, categorised and judged as intensely as the inhabitants of France in Impressionist times." "Behind every banquette, in every Parisian cafe, there lurked an Impressionist twitcher, spotting the clients." "You couldn't hide from them in the bedroom either, because they were under the bed, watching you get dressed." "The Impressionists witnessed the theatre of life unfolding before them with unprecedented keenness." "And, like all the great portraitists in history, they weren't just interested in how people looked." "They were fascinated by their inner lives as well." "This is Degas' first masterpiece." "He started painting it in his early 20s and then faffed about with it for years, as was his wont." "They're all members of the Degas family." "The woman is his Aunt Laura, his father's sister." "She's married to the man on the right," "Baron Gennaro Bellelli, a posh Italian from Florence." "And these are their two children." "Julia, sitting down, and Giovanna, on the left." "Degas was very bourgeois." "He came from a family of bankers." "And here, at the back of the painting, is a picture within a picture of his grandfather, Rene-Hilaire Degas." "He was the richest of the banking clan, stern and grumpy." "The grandfather lived in Naples." "There's another picture of him here by Degas." "And all these other members of the family." "This is Degas' sister, Marguerite Degas." "Now, look at the way she spells her name." "Marguerite De Gas." "They did that to sound posh." "Their real name was Degas, as the painter signs himself here." "The family had no right to call themselves De Gas, but they were trying to sound better bred than they were, which was very bourgeois of them." "And this here is Degas himself." "Arrogant, surly, misogynist and bachelor, and a very clever painter with a cruel streak to him." "Degas was a very difficult man." "But he was also a genius and quite shockingly ungovernable and adventurous." "This is all his early work and it looks very traditional." "But even here... ..he could be so outrageous." "The portrait of the Bellellis, which seems so elegant and sedate, caused a big rumpus in the Degas family." "Laura here, Degas' Italian aunt, whom he probably had a thing for, detested her husband, Baron Gennaro." "They were deeply unhappy." "She's actually pregnant in this picture with their third child." "But look how unjoyous she seems and how far away from him she stands." "This is a painting that goes deeply, cruelly almost, into the realms of personal psychology and feminine unhappiness." "Degas, whom we're going to concentrate on in this film for as long as I can get away with, because he was such a genius, had the rebel gene in him from the start." "He was so ungovernable, it's really surprising." "Here's this haute bourgeois, a banker's son, whose art education was completely traditional." "Posh school, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, everything in his past should have made him this kind of painter." "But it didn't." "It made him...this." "And this." "And this." "Something went very wrong in grand bourgeois genetics when it produced Degas." "Something glorious and colourful, blurry and intoxicating." "It's a dynamic and inventive mutation, and there's not much in the story of civilisation we should thank the banking world for, but we do need to thank them for this." "HORSE WHINNIES" "As you know, the British and the French don't always see eye to eye." "They're not really natural buddies." "So, if I was to suggest to you that Britain's influence on Impressionism was crucial, it's probably best if I suggest it quietly." "Britain's influence on Impressionism was crucial." "It was the British who introduced horseracing into France, just as they'd introduced boating and bathing and rambling." "When it came to inventing new ways of not doing much on Sundays, the British were definitely the champs." "This famous racecourse at Longchamp was only opened in 1857 as part of the dramatic redesign of Paris by the infamous Baron Haussmann." "Haussmann created this entire park from scratch, the Bois de Boulogne." "It was based, I believe, on Hyde Park." "And inside, he placed this huge, rowdy racecourse of Longchamp." "Racing was an immediate hit with the French public, something else to do at the weekend." "And where the modern public went, the modern painter was quick to follow." "Manet captured Longchamp's frenzy in a flurry of speedy brushstrokes." "But among the Impressionists, it was Degas, the banker's son, who most loved the horsies." "Degas was looking for new, modern subjects to paint and he couldn't really miss Longchamp." "When the crowd in here gets excited, you can hear their roar all the way back to central Paris." "CROWD ROARS" "Eager Parisians would crowd in here on a Sunday and parade, strut, display." "Degas, though, was more interested in the jockeys than the punters." "The drama of their colours against the landscape." "Their sudden loomings above you." "HORSE WHINNIES AND SNORTS" "Now at exactly this time, another influential Englishman, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, was also investigating horses." "Muybridge was trying to solve the ancient mystery of a galloping horse." "How exactly does it move?" "Why, when artists painted it in the past, did it always look so wrong?" "HORSE GALLOPS" "To answer these questions," "Muybridge set up an experiment." "He arranged a row of cameras along a training field and tripwires stretched across the course and connected to the cameras." "The idea was that when a galloping horse passed by here, it would trigger a series of extra fast exposures, all the way along." "Flash...flash...flash." "CAMERA CLICKS" "Picture, picture, picture." "The moving horse in action was finally frozen, step by step..." "CAMERA CLICKS" "..secret by secret." "Degas bought Muybridge's book on the animal in motion as soon as it came out in France, and he studied it assiduously." "But I told you he was contrary, and what really seemed to fascinate Degas about the horse in motion was not how graceful it looked or how powerful, the usual horsey cliches, but how contorted." "Later, he made some sculptures which he never showed to anyone." "No-one knew he'd done them until he died." "But according to Degas's private sculptures, the true secret of the horse's movement is that it's awkward, strained and sinewy." "Not at all graceful." "This new way of understanding animal movement in Degas's art, this harsh new way of looking, didn't just apply to horses." "It applied to people too, particularly women." "WATER SPLASHING" "Muybridge had also photographed women, swirling and dancing, twisting this way and that." "Always in action." "Muybridge's images of moving horses and women had an impact on Degas's art that no-one could have predicted." "They inspired him to start looking at women from such awkward angles and inspired viewpoints." "A common reaction to these startling views of stretching prostitutes and actresses, twisting, leaning, drying themselves in their tubs, is that they show Degas deliberately humiliating his naked women." "Forcing them to take up ugly and graceless poses." "It's certainly true that he was a misogynist." ""I'd rather keep 100 sheep," he once snapped," ""Than one outspoken girl."" "Degas had plenty to hide in his feelings about women." "But I don't think that's what these great pastels are about." "I don't think these are about humiliation or cruelty." "They're about something else, something Degas discovered in Muybridge's horse book." "They're about true movement, about awkward twisting and ungainly leaning." "The human body in motion, brilliantly observed through the keyhole, when it thinks no-one is looking." "In his horse sculptures," "Degas seems to see the moving horse in a new kind of 3D." "And in his ravishing pastels of bathing prostitutes and stretching actresses, he looks down at the girls from extravagant, 3D viewpoints that art had never chosen before." "This is more than a new chapter in the story of the nude, this is tearing up the old script and starting from scratch." "Everyone knows the Impressionists reinvented the landscape, but they should also be credited with reinventing the nude." "Degas showed in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions." "He was surprisingly loyal and dedicated to the cause." "But he had the rebel gene in him and it led him astray, whatever he did." "I mean, look at this, his most audacious attempt to paint history." "What kind of a mind decides to put this into an Impressionist exhibition?" "We always imagine ancient Greece to have been the cradle of civilisation, a beacon of enlightenment." "But it wasn't always that, particularly where women were concerned." "When it came to the treatment of women, the ancient Greeks were as macho and unreconstructed as the Taliban." "Greek women couldn't go out, they couldn't be educated, they couldn't inherit or vote." "In most of the ancient world, women were treated appallingly." "Except in one great city state, where most things were done differently." "Sparta." "Spartan girls were treated as equals, brought up to be strong and independent, like the boys." "No-one is certain what this curious picture actually shows." "On the label, here at the National Gallery, they call it Young Spartans Exercising." "And it's also known as" "Young Spartans Practising Wrestling." "But when Degas finally put it into the fifth Impressionist Exhibition of 1880, he gave it the splendid title of Spartan Girls Provoking The Boys." "And I can't understand, for the life of me, why people don't believe him, because that's clearly what it shows." "The girls, on the left, provoking the boys, on the right." "To toughen them up, Spartan girls were taught to fight and wrestle." "They didn't wear much either, whatever the weather." "And Degas senses the sexual friction of these strange classical days." "The Spartan girls are taunting the boys, and the boys, like teenage boys everywhere, aren't sure what to do when the girls come on to them." "What a brilliant mix of bravado and gaucheness." "This boy here, the one on all fours, seems particularly in touch with his animal nature." "It's Degas' response, I think, to all the Darwinism that was in the air, these theories of evolution." "And this rock here is the rock from which Spartan babies were said to be thrown to their deaths if they were born weak or disabled." "But the battle between the boys and the girls isn't the only combat we witness here." "There's also a fierce struggle going on between the past and the present." "Degas is deliberately taking on one of the most celebrated paintings in the Louvre." "a masterpiece from the days of the French Revolution " "David's Oath of the Horatii." "BATTLE CRIES" "This is always held up as the ultimate piece of neo-classical propaganda." "The heroic Horatii brothers, over here, are pledging to give their lives to defend Rome." "But Degas, in this cheeky update, deliberately and cunningly echoes David's composition." "And everybody looking at this would have seen it immediately." "And they'd have noticed, too, how Degas' Spartan girls look exactly like the wispy, modern girls of Montmartre." "So much more contemporary and liberated and alive than David's frozen Romans." "In the battle of realities, it's ancient Rome, nil, the modern world, one." "You know that floaty, ethereal quality you get with Degas' art?" "The pulsing fogs of colour?" "There's a bit of it in the Spartan girls, and lots of it in the girls in tubs." "Well, that's the result of experimenting with these chalky little magic sticks..." "..pastels." "It's not just the nudes, all the women in his art - the laundresses, the milliners' girls, the ballet dancers, they all owe some of their intoxicating haziness to the pastel." "Pastels are rather mysterious." "You can achieve gorgeous things with them, particularly when Degas gets his hands on them, but the effects are elusive, dreamy." "So I want to find out more about them." "I want the facts." "'So I've come to Degas' pastel shop, La Maison Du Pastel." "'Still here, 'still selling pastels, still run by the same family.'" "I'm going to ask you a really silly question, but I'm going to ask it because I thought I knew the answer, but don't really." "What exactly are pastels?" "What makes them specifically these lovely things here?" "Pastels is essentially pigment." "It's pigment to which you add a binder, and different types of white powders, clays, to make the different gradations." "So you have the pure colour, the pure pigment, with a little binder, and what makes Roche pastels specific is that they have very, very little binder, so you have almost colour in its purest form." "So, this is a beautiful yellow, what's the actual colour?" "Is it cadmium yellow or...?" "This is a cadmium yellow, yes." "So, to make the gradations, you just add a little bit of white, and it's almost pure pigment." "All that is is essentially either colour or clay, mixed together in different amounts, to make the gradations." "Could you show me some of the colours that Degas liked to use?" "Sure." "The colours that stick in my mind from his work are, of course, blues." "The blues..." "So, in the blues, you indeed have these types of blues, which you would find in the Blue Dancers, for example." "Those are ultramarines." "Oh!" "See, if I was an artist, I would just put loads of it on." "Cos look..." "look at the depth of that colour, it's so exciting." "You also have a colour which to me is very specific of Degas, which is the vert vif." "Which is this one." "Ah, yes, the gorgeous green." "That you do find in his work." "There's one missing here, which is the pinks, right?" "The pinks of all the Ballet Dancers." "The pinks!" "Yes, the brilliant pinks." "You have them here." "Ah." "See, when you see them in this form, you see a pile of pastels like this, you can see how the colours in pastels seem to sing in a way that they don't with other media," "don't they?" "Yes." "Actually, that's what I often hear, that the colours sing." "It's essentially because compared to other types of media, you have the pigment in its purest form." "Look at that, you see, it's just pure pigment, it's just gorgeous." "I'm going to try that blue there, that's Degas blue, isn't it?" "Look at that!" "Try this one as well, that has a really specific texture." "Oh, my God, look at that, oh!" "It's got this intoxicating quality, hasn't it?" "Mmm." "FOOTSTEPS" "Degas's most intense examination of women, his most productive voyeurism, took place not in a bathtub or in Sparta, but from a box in the theatre, from where he loved to watch the ballet." "Degas was a regular here at the Paris Opera, the Palais Garnier, which opened in 1875 and quickly became THE place to go." "It was built chiefly from crystal and mirrors, or so it seemed." "There was enough baroque ornament in here to furnish the Vatican." "Bonjour, messieurs." "Bonjour." "The typical bourgeois male would be at the Opera a couple of nights a week, and they didn't just come for the singing and the dancing." "These elegant balconies and plush foyers were designed for parading in and being seen." "Bonjour, monsieur." "Bonjour." "While the auditorium itself, which could seat 2,500 people, well...that was for voyeurism." "The ballet was one of the few places where the 19th-century bourgeois male could admire lightly-clad feminine beauty without making it obvious." "He'd just sink back into the darkness and peep." "Degas had a season ticket to the Paris Opera." "He was an obsessive ballet-goer and theatre groupie." "Some of his most inventive art is set in the stalls of the Palais Garnier." "Sometimes, he'd look up through the orchestra to the stage beyond, where the lights would work their nocturnal magic." "More often, though, he'd be up in the boxes, looking down at the dancers - the shimmer, the spectacle." "Interestingly, Degas never painted the stars of the ballet - the prima ballerinas, the famous beauties." "Instead, he preferred the everyday dancers, the also-rans from the corps du ballet - the students, or ballet rats, as they were disparagingly called." "And he didn't just paint them." "In 1881, at the sixth Impressionist exhibition," "Degas astonished everyone by showing a sculpture." "It was called The Little Dancer, Aged 14." "And it was shockingly realistic." "He'd made it out of wax, painted to look so lifelike, with real hair, real clothes." "He'd even tied her hair with a real ribbon, given to him by the model." "These days, in museums, you can only see bronze casts of it." "They're very beautiful, but they're not as spooky or as revolutionary or as lifelike as a hand-painted waxwork ballet dancer must have seemed." "The model was a typical Parisian rat, called Marie van Goethem." "She was originally from Belgium, and when Degas began sculpting her, as the title says, she was just 14, a ballet student at the Opera." "Marie lived around the corner from Degas, literally around the corner." "This was her street, the Rue de Douai, and this was his, the Rue Fontaine." "Like most of the ballet rats, she came from a poor and disreputable family." "Various rumours circulated about her behaviour." "She was slovenly, they said, coarse." "Marie would pop round to Degas' studio and pose for him." "She had beautiful long hair that she was very proud of and when she danced, she'd stick out her chin so that her hair fell down her back." "You can see her doing that in a couple of his paintings, as well." "There's Marie with the hair and the chin." "Now this position he forces her into in the sculpture is very difficult and unnatural." "He'd pull her hands back as far as they'd go and tell her to stick her chin up even higher." "And her feet were planted weirdly, just so." "Now, this isn't a dance position, it's not a practice position." "So what is it?" "The critics reviewing the sixth Impressionist exhibition were baffled too." ""This opera rat has something of the foetus about her,"" "mooned Ellie Dumont in La Civilisation." ""And one is tempted to enclose her in a jar of alcohol."" "The Gazette Des Beaux-Arts was even nastier about the sculpture." ""This poor little girl," it spat, "is like an incipient rat," ""who thrusts her little muzzle forward with bestial effrontery."" "Now there's a startling thought." "Was Degas deliberately trying to make his little ballet rat look like a rat?" "Is the Little Dancer a cruel Darwinian pun motivated by harsh and disparaging evolutionary views?" "I hope not, but I can't shake off the suspicion that it might be." "Degas was a haunter of dark and private bourgeois spaces - the bedroom doorway, the box at the theatre." "What you don't get with him is the theatre of the streets." "For that you need to turn to another of the keenest people watchers among the Impressionists, Gustav Caillebotte." "Caillebotte painted this." "And this." "And even this." "So he really ought to be much better known than he is." "Caillebotte was unusual because he was so rich." "Most of the Impressionists came from the petit end of the bourgeois scale." "Monet's father was a grocer," "Renoir's a tailor." "The Degas' of course were of higher stock, but not as high as they pretended when they began calling themselves De Gas." "Caillebotte, however, didn't have to pretend." "He was VERY wealthy, VERY bourgeois and VERY progressive." "That's him on the right, in the vest and boater, having fun by the river in Renoir's Boating Party." "That's how Renoir saw him, but it's not how he saw himself." "This is how he saw himself." "The Caillebottes made their money supplying blankets to the French army." "The more wars there were, the richer they got." "After that, they moved into property and owned that big house on the corner, which they bought directly from Baron Haussmann, off-plan, as it were." "Caillebotte's studio was up on the top floor, where that balcony is." "He was the eldest son and tried being a lawyer first, then an engineer." "But the art bug bit him and he became an Impressionist instead." "Degas smelled out his money and introduced him to the clan." "Caillebotte was so rich and pampered, he'd have himself transported to his painting locations in a specially designed horse and carriage - a kind of travelling studio which he'd load up with canvases and footmen and off he'd trot." "Just a few hundred yards down here, to the Pont de l'Europe where he painted some of Impressionism's most inventive views of the new city." "This was Paris's new gateway to Europe, a railway crossroads that leads everywhere." "Caillebotte shows the new bourgeoisie strolling across the new bridge, taking in the new possibilities." "Over here, a posh chap in a top hat notices a passing woman." "She's actually a prostitute and he's a prospective client." "Over here, a thoughtful workman dreams of another life somewhere else." "Everything was possible on the Pont de l'Europe, but only in your dreams." "Caillebotte's greatest painting of the area was done just up here in the Place de Dublin, Dublin Square." "It's called Rainy Day At The Pont De L'Europe." "The new rich stroll around the new Paris in a new spot of rain." "And how crisp and clean their city now looks." "How open and airy and thrilling." "The perspective in that picture is deliberately exaggerated to make it more dramatic." "Caillebotte is trying to make Paris look taller, bigger than it really is, so he looks up at it in a wide-angled way." "The camera can do something similar." "Oh, and if you go down lower, look up at me... ..and there you have it." "The Caillebotte effect." "Caillebotte loved unusual viewpoints and deep, dramatic perspectives." "His pictures tease your eyes and stretch them." "What difficult positions he found to perch in." "I have this image wedged in my brain of Caillebotte being transported luxuriously from location to location in his pimped-up painting carriage." "100 yards here, 100 yards there." "But some of his most radical art was painted without going anywhere." "Back here in the house itself." "One of Impressionism's most striking pictures was made in here." "It was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876." "And people weren't at all sure what to make of it." "They're still not sure today." "It's called The Floor Scrapers and it shows three chaps with their tops off scraping away at a wooden floor." "It's a tense, puzzling picture with its plunging perspective and these wiry, dramatic poses." "Caillebotte's father died in 1874 leaving his son a huge fortune, so Caillebotte junior, our Caillebotte, set about altering the house and The Floor Scrapers probably shows the refurbishment of his new studio, the one on the top floor with the balcony." "What's actually going on?" "Well, one of the men is scraping off the old varnish with a cabinet scraper." "One of these." "A simple tool." "This edge here is sharp and you scrape it across the floor, smoothing it down." "The other guy has one of these, a plane." "He's planing down the joints between the floorboards, leaving a stripy floor." "Now this is just about the first portrayal in art of the urban workman." "Artists had shown peasants in the fields before, but not city workers." "This was new." "However, a couple of things about this picture have always puzzled me." "For instance, why do they need to make the floor so stripy?" "Why don't they just clean the floor... ..in big patches?" "I found the answer on YouTube, preserved in full shaky YouTube vision." "Here's a chap in California preparing a hardwood floor." "I emailed the company, and asked them, why do you do the floor in stripes?" "They wrote back that it was to make sure the whole floor was even." "If you did it in patches, you might plane down more of the wood over here, and less of it over here." "So the whole floor... would undulate." "My other question was even more pressing." "Why is the floor being scraped at all?" "The old varnish looks fine, doesn't it?" "It's almost new." "The floor's in good condition." "So why is the varnish being removed?" "I just couldn't work it out." "Till I asked my wife, who's an artist, and she said, if it's his new studio, he'd want the floor to be as light as possible." "Studio floors are never dark." "Artists always want as much light in there as they can get." "This isn't just a painting of the new heroes of modern life, the urban workman throwing off his top and flashing his torso." "The Floor Scrapers has a hidden meaning, too." "Caillebotte is trying to say something about art itself." "The new art of the Impressionists." "The old art was artificial, dark and covered in thick varnish." "But the new art - Impressionist art - is natural, truthful and filled with light." "Caillebotte's indoor masterpiece isn't just a tribute to the urban worker." "It's a call to arms." "The catalogues for the Impressionist exhibitions." "Humble-looking things, aren't they?" "But don't be fooled by their modesty." "These are records of a revolution in behaviour as well as an artistic revolt." "And see here." "Mademoiselle Berthe Morisot, a woman." "That in itself was rebellious and different, to have a woman in the ranks." "You can always tell a Morisot painting, because it'll definitely be the wildest and bravest thing in the room." "Just look at her crazy brushstrokes, zigzagging across the canvas like lightning bolts." "These flickering, darting paint flashes are some of the bravest markings of the Impressionist revolution." "So new, so quick." "Unfortunately, Berthe Morisot had a problem." "She looked like this." "Stunning." "She turned men's heads, and when they painted her, as Manet often did, the poor, besotted chappies would imagine her to be a dark-eyed femme fatale." "And they'd ignore what a serious and instinctive and insightful painter she was." "Morisot was particularly good with white." "Such a difficult colour to dramatise and differentiate." "It's so hard to look deep when your work is as crisp and fresh as a wedding dress in the snow." "But if anyone imagines Berthe Morisot's work to be docile or domestic or pretty, then I'm afraid you're standing too far away." "The best place to look at her art is from about here." "About two inches away." "From this close, the sense of revolution here thwacks you between the eyes." "Another female painter who appeared in these shows, Mary Cassatt, was an American." "To be honest with you, I didn't rate Cassatt's work that highly, until I started filming it for these programmes." "I thought it was too sweet, too obviously feminine." "But how wrong I was." "Look how spooky she is, how psychological." "That air of emotional blankness which Cassatt captures, that sense you get with her sitters that they're on a far-away journey deep inside themselves." "These are insights into the emotional states of women that Virginia Woolf would be proud of." "Today, Cassatt and Morisot are highly regarded." "But there was a third woman artist who played an interesting part in Impressionism, whom you never hear about, though she, too, was a revolutionary." "Her name was Marie Bracquemond, and she made Impressionist pots." "I bet you didn't even know there were any." "Finding out about Marie Bracquemond has been tricky." "She showed in three of the Impressionist exhibitions, but has largely disappeared from the story of art." "And that's wrong, because Marie Bracquemond was really good." "Her pots are luscious and stirring." "She has just having a go at transferring the joie de vivre of the Impressionists from the field to the plate." "From the garden to the mantelpiece." "But it's Marie Bracquemond's paintings that intrigue me most." "They're deceptively intense and have an edge of loneliness to them." "Here's one of her picnics, to which Impressionism's joie de vivre was clearly not invited." "Where no one talks and everyone frets." "Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt." "This is the first group of impressive women in art." "Of course, there had been women artists before, but they'd been one-offs, who appeared here and there." "Impressionism was progressive enough to welcome a gang of them at once." "An important new voice has arrived in art, with different things to say and different understandings." "Some people think Impressionism was shallow, but it never was." "Not in the hands of its women." "Do you know who made that?" "I'm going to cover up the label." "Have a guess." "Which famous Impressionist made that?" "Monet?" "Pissarro?" "Renoir, perhaps?" "It is very elegant." "Actually, this was made by Gauguin." "It's a portrait of his wife, and he showed it at the fifth Impressionist exhibition of 1880." "This is probably the first carving that Gauguin ever made." "He was one of those annoyingly talented people, who could turn their hand to most things." "And for the first half of his career," "Gauguin turned his hand to Impressionism." "People always get Gauguin wrong." "They've heard these stories about him deserting his wife and children, running off to Tahiti and taking up with the native girls." "And they forget that Gauguin was already 43 when he left for Tahiti." "A big chunk of his career was behind him." "And during that big chunk," "Gauguin was an Impressionist." "He showed in five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, which is more than Renoir, and the same number as Monet." "This is his first ever self-portrait." "Painted on the back of an Impressionist view of Pissarro's garden." "Gauguin's Impressionist landscapes are so subtle, modest." "Too modest, almost." "They're easy to overlook." "You'd hardly know they're by him." "But this isn't a film about landscapes, this is a film about people." "And Gauguin, the people painter, is a very particular and intimate presence." "Loving father, family man, caring portrayer of those he was close to." "Particularly his wife and his children." "Gauguin's paintings of his family are so tender and atmospheric." "This one's called The Little One Is Dreaming." "It's his four-year-old daughter Aline, asleep in her cot." "Now, I'm a dad, too, so I know exactly what he's trying to capture here." "The little girl is sleeping, far away in the land of nod." "While her dad looks down at her so protectively." "You can almost sense him pulling up her blanket to cover her legs and trying to imagine Aline's dreams." "He showed it at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882." "And it stood out, because it was so atmospheric and personal." "No-one had ever painted a sleeping child like this before." "The floaty wallpaper seems to stand in for the peaceful dream she's having." "A beautiful bird dream." "But this Punch figure here, dangling by her cot, he has something threatening about him." "He's a nasty gnome of the night, waiting for his moment." "But it doesn't matter, Aline, because your dad's here." "And he's watching over you." "What tenderness, what warmth, what obvious family love." "This marble bust of Gauguin's eldest son, Emile, was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1876." "And here's another son - the long-haired Clovis, asleep again, next to his dad's favourite tankard." "Dreaming, perhaps, because he's had a sip." "And this is Mette, Gauguin's Danish wife, painted in a gorgeous evening dress she couldn't afford." "And which she bought on the never-never, without telling him." "But he still turns her, so lovingly, into his fairy princess." "Mette was from here" " Copenhagen." "She was in Paris working as a teacher when she met Gauguin." "And he was a successful stockbroker." "A good catch." "What Mette didn't know was that he'd already been bitten by the art bug." "And what Gauguin really wanted to be was an artist." "Poor Mette thought she was marrying a respectable businessman who'd keep her in the beautiful dresses she wanted and the beautiful homes." "Instead, she'd ended up with a repressed Bohemian who was desperate to become an artist." "Mette put up with him for years and watched him throw away his career." "She bore him five children until eventually, unable to face up to any more of this artistic poverty he'd wished upon her, she left him and came back here, to Copenhagen, with the kids." "Gauguin was devastated." "His wife had deserted him and he missed her terribly." "And the children, even more." "So he followed her here to Copenhagen and tried to put things right by getting himself a job as a tarpaulin salesman." "Selling French tarpaulins to the Danes." "There are so many things that Gauguin was good at." "Sculpture, painting, ceramics, printmaking." "But not at selling tarpaulins." "In his downtime, of which there was plenty, he started painting again." "And with frozen fingers, he recorded the cold but pretty local landscape." "A first attempt at Impressionism in Denmark." "This is the first place they lived, with Mette's mother." "But he didn't like her, and she didn't like him." "So the Gauguins moved on." "This is the second place they lived." "Mette had to start teaching again here, to make some money." "And this is the third place." "It's quite posh now, but this used to be the bad bit of Copenhagen, with the cheapest rents." "And it was about now, in the grim spring of 1885, that Gauguin painted his first proper self-portrait." "A deceptively colourful study in alienation and forlornness." "No-one was sure where it was painted until I came up here a few years ago and found this flat, right at the top of the house." "When Gauguin was living here, this used to be the attic." "And he'd come up here to paint and to worry." "He even wrote a letter to Pissarro, telling him things had gotten so bad in Copenhagen that he was thinking of hanging himself up here in this attic." "And the self-portrait was painted by this window, just here." "What rotten, rotten times these were." ""I'm without a penny and up to my ears in shit,"" "he wrote to a friend." ""So I console myself by dreaming."" "He lasted six months in Copenhagen before Mette's family turned around and asked him to leave." "He wasn't respectable enough for her, or reliable enough, or rich enough." "Gauguin hurried back to Paris." "Back to being an Impressionist." "Having been kicked out by his family, he was now free to become all sorts of things." "But never again a loyal husband or a caring dad." "Back in Paris, the Impressionists were preparing themselves for their eighth and final exhibition." "Gauguin was hoping to make an impact with his new Danish paintings." "And he would have done, I'm sure, if THIS hadn't been in the show as well." "But you'll have to wait till the next film to see what happened, when we voyage to the end of Impressionism and beyond." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"