>> Lord Crathorne: A beautiful picture, a beautiful work of art, like a beautiful piece
of music, is something that's very inspiring. It's quite difficult to say why one work of
art is greater than another, it's just that enough people think it is,
which makes it so.
I'm Lord Crathorne and I am really speaking to you now because when I was chairman of
the Works of Art committee, I was able to bring the Armada paintings into being.
>> Lord Crathorne: Just to explain briefly what the Armada was about, it was really Spain
and Philip II of Spain, a Roman Catholic country, wanting to attack England and Elizabeth I,
a protestant country. And the scenes depicted the Armada ships coming through the English
channel.
And you can see the coast of England in all of them, because the Armada sailed pretty
close to the South coast of England. And the Spanish had an enormous number of troops waiting
in Calais to be ferried over to the English coast to invade England.
The English sent in fire ships, which literally meant you ignited some ships and pushed them
towards the enemy and the enemy then scattered.
In the final picture, that you can see quite clearly, the fire ships in the middle of the
picture being sort of launched against the Spaniards and the turmoil that you see in
the bottom right hand corner is Calais.
>> Lord Crathorne: Out of this commission which should have been finished in 1860, one
picture was created and that of course was a great help to Anthony Oakshett in creating
the other ones. But this was much the biggest project he's ever tackled, these five pictures
all fifteen foot long.
And he created them with a series of, there were at some moments, six artists working
on this. With the computer work, literally the canvas was divided into blocks and it
almost became painting by numbers. Young people, I think, create wonderful art
actually because they are happy to do bold lines and use bold colours and create really
wonderful things.
Probably at a young age more memorable images, more memorable things, than they perhaps do
when they're double that age. Let your imagination flow onto the paper and onto the canvas, that's
the big thing.