The National Gallery is home
to the nation's paintings, over 2000 works of art owned by you.
During the Masterpiece Tour, the paintings leave their walls and travel
the length and breadth of the country to visit communities face to face
and create new relationships with centuries-old art.
And this year's painting is an intimate portrait by Rembrandt.
And in this short film, we'll explore some of the stories contained within it.
But before we do, let's take a moment to just look.
What do you see?
A young woman with light red hair gazes
out not quite at us, but perhaps to a person to our right.
Her elaborate green dress is embroidered
with gold, her cream satin petticoat beneath edged with lace.
In her left hand an overflowing bouquet
of flowers, and her right grips a stick entwined with plants.
Two things loom large in this painting.
One is that it's by Rembrandt,
one of the most renowned painters of the last 400 years.
And the other is that this is a painting of his wife, Saskia.
To help us find out more about this
painting, I am joined by Laura Llewellyn
from the Curatorial Department.
Hello, Laura.
Hello, Ed.
So who was Saskia?
Saskia was the cousin of Hendrick [van] Uylenburgh,
in whose house Rembrandt lived and worked during his first years in Amsterdam.
Uylenburgh was a dealer and helped
Rembrandt to really establish himself on the Amsterdam scene.
Saskia and Rembrandt spent just under
10 years of their life together before Saskia's untimely death in 1641.
And in many ways,
these were the most exhilarating years of Rembrandt's entire career.
There was clearly enormous love between
the two, but that being said, there was also great heartbreak.
The pair lost three children before they reached the age of two months.
During their years together, Rembrandt painted and drew Saskia continuously.
We have drawings of her in domestic
settings, having her hair brushed by a maid, convalescing in bed,
reading a book, or even just staring out to meet the painter's gaze.
We have more formal portraits of her dressed in the height of fashion or even
in kind of fancy dress with big wide- brimmed hats and feathers in her hair.
Some people think that there's
an inconsistency from one to the next in terms of her features and the likeness.
And that really what is happening is
that Saskia is kind of pervading Rembrandt's understanding of womanhood.
So every time he paints a woman, he somehow includes Saskia.
This painting was very likely painted in 1635.
Saskia is about 21, and the couple around
this time find out that they are pregnant for the first time.
The title of the painting says that she's in 'Arcadian dress'. What is that?
Arcadia is actually a mountainous region
on the Greek mainland, which was mythologised by Greek and Roman
poets of the classical era as a kind of earthly paradise.
And during Rembrandt's time,
the idea of Arcadia was enormously popular among elite circles of the Dutch people.
And we can really see this in the poetry,
literature, stage plays, and, of course, art of the day.
The garments that Saskia is wearing
in Rembrandt's picture really chime with images of shepherds and shepherdesses
that you see in slightly earlier representations of Arcadia.
But I think it's worth pointing out
at this moment in time that the title that you've just alluded to is ours.
We have applied it to the painting here at the National Gallery
and in the 21st century.
When the painting first arrived at the Gallery, it was called Flora.
Flora is the Roman goddess of spring.
And still to this day, there is a tussle between scholars about
really what Rembrandt is trying to depict here.
Does the actual way in which Rembrandt has
painted this give us some ideas about what he was really interested in in this
painting or what he wants us to focus on in particular?
Yeah, well I don't know about you, but for me,
when I look at this painting, I always find my eye being drawn back time
and time again over the costume elements and the flowers.
And really, I never focus on her face for any length of time.
And it's fairly simply painted compared to other elements of the painting.
In the costume and also in the bouquet
of flowers, Rembrandt is really showing off his brush strokes.
And in areas you've got this lovely impasto, which is just thick paint where
the surface of the painting almost has texture.
I love this flash of light which hits the front of her dress,
which really helps our eye to move up towards this wonderful bouquet of flowers.
Okay, so flowers are a huge feature of 17th-century Dutch art,
and in a lot of the still lifes each individual flower has a very specific
meaning. Is that the same with this painting? Does each flower have
a particular meaning, or would that be us reading too much into it?
Some of the flowers have been identified, but not all of them.
In the wreath in her hair, for example,
we can see forget-me-nots and scarlet pimpernels.
Down in her staff, you've got these wonderful tendrils of ivy which kind of wrap around it.
And in this fabulous bouquet we can see carnations, cuckoo flowers,
marigolds, buttercups and, of course, tulips.
And the painting was, in fact,
painted right in the middle of the moment that historians have now dubbed
'Tulip Mania', which is when the Dutch developed a veritable obsession
with tulip [bulbs]. They were traded and sold to collectors as luxury items.
So certainly the tulip had a kind of currency for Rembrandt and his peers.
But I think the flowers here are depicted more as a general celebration of nature's
beauty and bounty and the associated themes of fertility and youth.
So is this idea that she's in Arcadian
dress or is personifying Flora really important to what Rembrandt is trying
to get across here, or is it more an excuse for elaborate fancy dress?
I think that in Rembrandt's time there was a real taste for dressing up in fancy
dress. A bit like today when everyone gets excited on Halloween.
Rembrandt really enjoyed using fanciful costume in his paintings.
I think for him it was about removing the individual.
With a portrait you might find yourself restricted by the concerns of capturing
an exact likeness or really getting the physiognomies exactly right.
By placing the figure in this kind
of historic dress and therefore sort of removing them from our times, Rembrandt
has more of an opportunity to explore an idea or a psychological state.
And in this case I think it's
that of strong female self-assuredness.
And there's an added poignancy knowing
that there are difficulties and heartbreak ahead for Rembrandt and Saskia.
Despite the hundreds of years between us
now and when this painting was made, it's still very clear that this is
an image of someone who was very much loved. And it's rather wonderful that idea
persists even though all the people involved in creating it have now gone.
And I suppose it makes you think about
the power of the images we can create of our own loved ones.