Hello everyone,
Tom Holland here and I am joined by the great Laura Cumming and we are looking at painting in history for paintings that reflect a particular period in history.
We'll be looking at the history of the painting itself,
the life of the artist and teasing out the mysteries that shadow all four paintings.
And today we are looking at the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck.
early 15th century and here is a short extract from that episode and you can access the entire thing by going to therestishistory.com and signing up to the club there and it will be waiting for you.
Enjoy!
Hello everybody and welcome to another series of bonuses for you our beloved club members and this time we're going to be doing four episodes each one on a famous painting and we're going to be situating it in the context of the age looking at what it's all about who the painter was and generally with a lot of the paintings there is a sense of mystery there's a puzzle And we have the perfect person to tease out the possible solutions to these puzzles
because my guest today is the great Laura Cumming.
She's the art critic of The Observer.
She was on the show a while back talking about William Knottman, the Scottish Canadian photographer.
And Laura, a lot of your books resolve around a kind of mystery and a puzzle.
don't they?
And you kind of offer up solutions.
And that's essentially what you're going to be doing today and in our next three episodes.
So welcome back.
Thank you.
And what painting are we looking at today?
We are looking at the first of our paintings and it is the Arnolfini portrait,
otherwise known as the Arnolfini betrothal or the Arnolfini marriage.