Original subtitles

I'm Joshua Pell.

I'm a retail assistant at the National Gallery.

Being at the gallery was the main reason

I applied for the job in the first place.

My dad brought me here once

when we visited London when I was maybe 11 or 12.

I love the memories of being here.

My favourite painting at the National Gallery

is The Adoration Of The Kings by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

And he could have just maybe shown a nativity scene,

that you would want it to look like.

I love that he's chosen not to do that.

The first time I saw it was

during a lesson with the Royal Drawing School,

where I had to choose a picture to draw for five weeks.

The building just leaped out at me,

and I thought it was beautiful.

I think it reminds me a lot of buildings

that I've seen around Hull, where I grew up.

And Hull, given that it is a kind of post-industrial town in the North,

has a lot of that kind of urban decay.

I was always fascinated with those buildings

that felt like they'd been forgotten about.

I grew up there in a working-class environment,

and my love of art really came from my dad.

He worked in an industrial estate near where I grew up.

He would drive through there to get to work.

We would go with him,

and I would just stare out of the window

at these buildings every day.

And I still have very vivid memories of that.

When I saw this picture,

it gave me that feeling -

and I think I've been looking for it since I was young.

I'm led in to this painting by the sheer presence

of the building first

and all of this indulgent detail

of the flaking plaster and straw on the roof.

And then I see this amazing thing happening underneath.

The building kind of acts as an umbrella

to the whole composition.

And, of course, there's the beautiful landscape

in the background too.

It has so much busyness and excitement

that you can look at this

and just enjoy indulging in these little details

and these tiny narratives that are going on,

and you really want to spend the time to figure that out.

And I think maybe that's something

that's kind of been lost a little bit in media

or the kind of forms of entertainment

that we have and rely on now,

that, a lot of the time, you don't make your own decisions

about what's happening.

You don't have to do any work to find it,

it's all kind of just given to you.

I like this as a form of entertainment.

It's fun. It's fun to figure these things out.

My name is Alan Allison.

I'm a security officer and gallery assistant,

London born and bred.

I've been at the gallery ten years in September.

I always used to come past here at night-time, in my clubbing days.

I always used to wonder at the beauty of the building

and what is inside.

But it wasn't until I started working in the gallery

that I realised, "Wow!"

I was captivated by the paintings.

From day one, I was going home,

reading up on them and extending my knowledge.

I like to show the visitors the beauty

of the paintings in the gallery,

the magic behind the paintings, the hidden secrets.

But I haven't seen, really,

many paintings that represent myself.

It does make me feel quite sad, in a way,

because it doesn't really reflect society.

They're very much still in this bubble,

focusing on colonialism, the slave trade.

You want to see portraits which reflect Black people

who have contributed massively to society,

part of the fabric of this nation and making it great.

So, the National Gallery does feel like my gallery.

However, when you're looking at representation,

I feel that the gallery can do a lot more.

My favourite painting in the National Gallery

is Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1601.

Ah, so, the first time I saw it, oh, it just won me over.

It spoke to me.

It's almost cinematic.

The way the characters are portrayed in the painting,

you can almost visualise what they're actually saying.

It's three days after Jesus was crucified,

and then he was resurrected,

and he turned up in the town of Emmaus.

He was walking through Emmaus,

and he stumbled upon a few of the disciples.

They were kind of pouring out their grief

about Jesus being executed.

And they said, "Oh, would you like to attend a meal with us?"

So, it was only when he attended the meal in the evening

that they realised who it was, when Jesus broke the bread.

And this painting is that moment.

The character on the right -

who possibly could be Cleopas, one of the disciples -

he's almost gesturing as if to say to Jesus,

"The last time I saw you, you were on the cross!"

And then the character on the left, he possibly could be Luke,

and he's almost springing out his chair in wonderment.

You can imagine, if you was to look at him face-on,

his eyes would be almost popping out from their sockets.

It's almost as if the viewer,

when they're looking at this painting,

they're part of being at this dinner table,

almost joining in with the conversation.

Caravaggio is absolutely amazing.

It's the way he uses light and shadow.

When you look at the vase, for instance,

you can see that beautiful reflection

on the table that's cast from the shadow.

Also, above Jesus's head,

you can see a halo, using the shadows.

And then, sticking out from the side of Jesus,

you can see an angel's wing.

And lastly, there's a basket of ripened fruit,

and, sticking out from the side, you can see a fishtail,

which represents the feeding the 5,000

with the bread and the fish.

So, it's deciphering the codes,

and then you will get the true meaning of the painting.

I'm Helena Fitzgerald,

and I'm a corporate development manager at the National Gallery.

My connection to the gallery goes way beyond my job.

Most summer holidays, when I was little,

I was brought here by my nan.

My nan knew everything about London.

She knew where to go, she knew what was free,

what was interesting, what was exciting,

and how to engage her kids and her grandchildren.

My favourite painting in the gallery is The Ballet Dancers by Degas,

which was painted around 1890.

And it's my nan's favourite painting.

I know this was about finding my own particular piece,

but I admired her so much.

She had a print of The Ballet Dancers in her bedroom,

so that's probably the first time I saw it, actually.

It was there, before we even came to the National Gallery.

One of the things my nan used to do when we were in an art gallery

was to figure out what is interesting to you

and what makes you tick,

rather than giving her opinion on a specific thing.

I used to be obsessed with dancing, and I went to theatre school,

and I had the pleasure of learning ballet.

So, when I look at this painting,

this is everything I thought I was going to be.

I thought I was gonna be a ballerina.

I'm looking through a window into a classroom, into a studio,

into that moment of them stretching, of them practising,

of them rehearsing.

I remember that feeling,

I remember stretching, I remember the hard work.

I remember the, like, painful toes.

I feel emotional, I think, because this has so many depths for me.

But that's what art is, right?

It's about feeling loads of different things at once.

So, every time I look at this painting,

it reminds me of my nan.

My name is Ann. I'm Helena's grandmother.

I'm 87.

And I think I was about 15 when I first came to the gallery.

When I first came, I thought it was a gruesome place

because there seemed to be lots of pictures of crucifixions.

And I was a bit bewildered, but I've grown to love it.

It's changed really immensely.

It's not that quiet place where you crept about

and you were careful what you said or if you even spoke very much.

There's more people here now.

Also, different age groups now, there's more younger people come.

It's full of what I call "real paintings"

of places and people.

It brings to life a different age.

My favourite painting is The Ballet Dancer by Degas.

I love him. I love his paintings.

You can really feel that they are moving.

It's just so clever.

The more you look at it, the more it comes alive.

It's almost like you can see the layers of the tulle.

And those lovely shoes, you can see the satin.

Can you see how they shine?

And all of that amongst all that dull floor.

But I think that painting...

When Helena told me that she had a job in the National Gallery,

I was thrilled to bits.

I knew she would love talking about it,

and she would have lots to tell me.

And I thought, "I'd probably get in there a lot more now."

LAUGHS

The National Gallery was founded in 1824,

really in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

Having won the war, there was a strong impetus

to try and win the peace

by creating the kind of cultural institutions

which Napoleonic France had had

but which Britain had been very slow in developing.

It's also a time when other European states

are setting up their national galleries.

What's different in the case of our National Gallery

is that, in this case, it's not a nationalised royal collection.

The real founding father of the National Gallery

was a private collector and Tory landowner

named Sir George Howland Beaumont

who was himself a painter,

which was unusual for the aristocracy at the time.

A friend of Constable, who hosted him in his own home.

And, as he had no children,

he was beginning to think, in the 1820s, about what he would do

with his very fine collection of paintings.

The original home of the National Gallery wasn't

in Trafalgar Square.

It was a good couple hundred yards to the west

at number 100, Pall Mall.

This was the residence of John Julius Angerstein.

And until 1838, for the first 14 years,

the National Gallery was in a series of different terraces

on different sides of Pall Mall.

Large paintings having to be squeezed into rooms

that were clearly intended to be domestic in scale.

And so, early paintings of the National Gallery

really do show pictures having to be hung frame to frame

in what must have been quite a tight and constricted hang.

My name's Michael Palin.

I'm a traveller and an actor and a general hack.

And my favourite painting was painted in 1844 by Turner,

and it's called Rain, Steam, Speed.

I think Turner's a genius, and I love his work.

It's also a favourite painting of mine because of the subject.

I've always been rather interested in railways

and the history of railways.

And this is so significant

because it is about the birth of the railway.

It was still a new thing

and a thing that, you know, frightened so many people.

They thought it was going to destroy the countryside

and make cows lose their calves

because of the noise and the steam and all that.

But he's painted that for another reason,

which is, I think, this is the future.

This is his sort of science-fiction painting.

The steam is very, very important.

But the focus is this machine.

He's using the countryside

and the beauty of the countryside and the river

but counterbalancing it with the power of the train,

this man-made thing, which is black and rearing up and coming,

charging towards you.

So, I think he must have been excited by it, maybe a bit alarmed.

But there is a real narrative here.

I think he's saying this is a new world

that's been opened up by the railway,

and it's got enormous possibilities,

and people are going to have to adapt to it.

The train emerges at a certain angle.

You just feel it's coming towards you quite fast,

breaking through all the cloud.

And what I think he's also done is contrast

the kind of static life around.

You know, there, the little boat there,

the little skiff in the river.

And I do love these people here.

"Wow! Yeah!" What are they saying?

SCOTTISH ACCENT: "Go away! Go away, you naughty work of Satan."

Or they're saying, "Hey, where can we get a ticket?"

And then over in the background there,

I think there's a man ploughing.

Tiny little figures, but they're very, very important

cos they contrast the activity and the dynamism

of the train that's coming towards you.

I love all the people in... you can see them in the coaches.

And they're completely uncovered.

There they are, all sitting there,

and obviously, they're getting a bit wet.

They're going rather fast, there's a lot of noise.

It looks terribly dangerous to some people.

And yet, there they are.

It's like a wonderful fairground ride.

And there's a hare - it's very, very tiny -

running away from the train.

It's almost like the natural world is running away

from something that may destroy it.

Hares are very fast,

so there's this sort of competitive thing together,

you know, "Who's gonna get there first,

"the Old World or the New World?"

And obviously, the New World is gonna win.

My name is John Wilson.

This is my sign name.

I work at the National Gallery as a BSL tour guide and lecturer.

BSL is British Sign Language,

so I deliver information using the Deaf community's language.

I talk about paintings.

I was born deaf, and I've been deaf my entire life.

When I'm giving a presentation to deaf and hearing audience members,

there's a difference.

Deaf people seem to capture more details.

They notice things in a very different way.

My favourite painting is called

Exhibition Of A Rhinoceros At Venice,

and this was painted by an artist who was born in Venice -

Pietro Longhi.

He was famous for painting everyday life in Venice,

usually in domestic scenes.

But this painting is of a rhinoceros named Clara.

When you look around the room,

most of the paintings here are from Venice,

and they were painted at similar times.

Most also are outside scenes,

but this one is an interior scene.

So the painting really has an impact, I think.

There is a wall with people looking on at the rhino.

They're definitely wealthy - you can tell that by their clothing.

Some of them have masks on,

and the reason for that is

that Venice always has a carnival January, February time.

It was traditional to put on masks and costumes.

I've chosen this painting

because I've always enjoyed paintings of animals,

and I have great respect for animals.

It's not a painting that shows abuse of the animal.

It's not for sport.

It's not being hunted or being killed for food or clothing.

There are very few paintings that actually respect the animals,

so this is very different.

And it also shows that science had started to develop,

and natural history was becoming a serious subject.

People wanted to know more about the animals,

and they started to respect them

and saw that they were worthy of study.

I have some empathy with the people then.

When I was a little boy, I was deaf.

People would sort of want to research my deafness,

teach me how to speak.

The people back then wanted to research Clara

to try to get knowledge of the animal,

just like people wanted to have knowledge of my deafness.

So that's it for me - I have empathy.

The National Gallery's a collection of around 2,400 paintings,

which date from the early 13th century

to the early 20th century.

I think, in the early decades of the National Gallery,

there was a sense that it wasn't supposed to be representative

of something we might call "art history".

It was simply to have the aesthetically finest schools

and the greatest masters

without any need to be representative

of a particular time or a particular style.

So, the National Gallery is trying to work out what its job is,

what it's supposed to collect.

And it's trying to do so

against a background that's constantly shifting.

Roughly half the National Gallery collection

is a result of private donations and especially bequests.

The other half was funded by general taxation.

In other words, there's a tranche of money

given by the Treasury every year to buy works of art.

By around 1900,

as the British aristocracy started to feel the pinch

of falling agricultural revenues and death duties in 1894,

they start selling their great, old master paintings.

It's at that point that the Americans, Gilded Age oligarchs,

are on the market, trying to hoover up these paintings.

As a result, the art market for old masters goes through the roof,

and this annual purchase grant is now nowhere near enough money.

This is why we get what's now the Art Fund,

the National Art Collections Fund,

being established in the early years of the 20th century

to try and save, as they would put it,

some of the, in a sense, already the people's pictures.

The public at large does look to the National Gallery

and expects it to contain works of art that speak to them

and give them a shared sense of the potential of human creativity

beyond anything narrowly patriotic or nationalistic.

My name is Saffron Bowdler,

and I am a marketing executive here at the National Gallery.

My favourite painting here is Bacchus And Ariadne by Titian,

which was painted in 1520 to 1523.

The sheer size and scale of the painting

is the first thing that drew me to it.

And I think, if anyone was to walk into this room,

it's really hard to ignore.

You've got this beautiful young man, or god, Bacchus,

flying from his chariot,

frozen in a moment, in mid-air, staring longingly

at this beautiful, slightly dishevelled Cretan princess,

which is Ariadne.

Ariadne's outstretching her hand, looking quite upset

because there's a tiny little ship sailing into the distance.

That is her lover, Theseus.

So, she's awoken,

she's realised that she's been abandoned.

While this is happening on the left-hand side,

Bacchus storms in with his musical followers,

crashing, making noise.

There's a lot of hedonism going on, a lot of kind of ecstasy and frenzy.

He stops instantly when he sees Ariadne

because he's literally so struck and overcome with the sensation

of love at first sight.

So this painting basically shows

that exact moment where love happens.

This is what Titian was trying to portray,

the moment when their eyes first lock.

I was very fortunate enough to have grown up in a very artistic family.

My father was a cavalry officer but also an artist.

And my whole childhood,

we would create and paint together all the time.

My parents sadly split when I was quite young,

and my father would have me on weekends,

and it was always the case of... INHALES SHARPLY

Not a lot of money, what does one do with a little girl?

He didn't see me that much,

so I think he wanted the time to be quite precious and to make memories.

We would go and look at art.

And the National Gallery was the first one he ever took me to.

I was probably about five the first time I came here.

And he would always ask me, "What do you like about it?

"What don't you like about it? How does it make you feel?"

And I remember feeling such... pride

in the fact that my father, who was this trained artist,

was asking me what I thought about them.

On one of our first trips,

I saw Bacchus And Ariadne for the first time,

and I remember the feeling that that painting brought out in me.

It took my breath away.

It was the colour, it was the fact that she was a princess.

It was quite an epic tale of abandonment and woe and love,

and I remember just sitting

and feeling very connected to my father

and also our mutual enjoyment of art.

So, the relationship between me and this painting

has actually taken quite a few different turns.

My father sadly passed away when I was 12.

And obviously this painting, for me, is so much of him.

So for a while, I actually didn't look at it.

I then went to university.

I did History of Art, and we had to write a dissertation,

and I actually wrote about it.

At the time, I was a new-found woman in her early 20s.

I was reading a lot of feminist literature

and basically took the stance of,

"Of course he falls in love with her instantly.

"But did Ariadne want this?

"Is it the male gaze that we see this picture through?

"Did she love him?"

So when I then explored it through that lens,

it was really fascinating.

This painting has travelled with me through my whole life.

I've looked at it from many viewpoints.

Now I see it in a context of just human life

and the complexities of what it is to be human.

When I look at it, there's two sides to it.

I see my father in particular,

and that to be a human is to have both sides.

He was a beautiful man,

charming, charismatic but a bit of a Peter Pan,

and he did suffer with alcohol problems and dependencies.

So, again, this picture has so many layers for me.

Bacchus, this beautiful young man, who was the god of wine,

so probably excess and ecstasy and hedonism.

But there's so much love there.

They're not bad. It's just bad decisions.

Then, on the other side of the canvas,

you've then got this stillness and this kind of desire for purity.

And I think my father for many years found solace in his art.

It's about both of those sides, which is lightness and dark,

to come together and be what it is to be human

because we are complex creatures, we are not perfect.

Artists have brought onto their canvases

a unique perspective of human existence.

That's what I just find so fascinating.

If people say art isn't for them, it's just very much human stories.

And how can that not be for you?

I'm Kasper Pincis,

and I'm an art handling supervisor at the National Gallery.

The art handling department

is essentially just the arms of the gallery.

We're in charge of all the moving and installation of the collection.

We install the permanent displays,

and we move the paintings between store, display,

conservation, photography.

And if we're lucky, we get to travel with them

when we lend them to other institutions.

I've taken some Tintorettos to Venice, a Monet to Texas,

and I brought The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

back from Tokyo.

One of my favourite paintings, and it's from 1668,

is called Birds, Butterflies And A Frog Among Plants and Fungi

by Melchior d'Hondecoeter.

It's not been on display much, maybe a year,

but in the last 20 years, it's been in storage,

apart from that one year.

Some paintings that we have in store

are probably gonna be there for a long time

because the collection grows,

things are bequeathed, and fashions change as well.

So paintings that everybody loved 100 years ago

are no longer in fashion.

Space is at a premium,

so the curators really have a tough job choosing what to show

and how to make it fit into a bigger story.

This painting is slightly dark, but it's also a bit like a jewel.

It's kind of gleaming there.

The moths and butterflies are flying away,

and these mushrooms have been uprooted somehow.

It's trying to show maybe an unsettled mood

cos these birds seem to be aggravated by this frog.

But quite nice that it's just like a microcosm,

and it's a lot of drama in a small space.

We've got very few paintings like this.

It's not a still life, but it's not really a landscape.

There's nothing else really like it in the collection.

To have something like this which not only paints animals

but gives them a sort of agency and makes a little story...

It's just quite fascinating to imagine

this kind of microcosm existing in all the landscapes,

just in the corners that you don't see.

So it feels quite appropriate

to be sort of in the undergrowth of the gallery.

I'd love to see it up on the main floor,

and, like, we probably will again before too long.

It's nice when you see something that hasn't been up for ages

and having its moment in the sun.

My name is Tracy Jones,

and I'm Head of Communications here at the National Gallery.

Privileged to work here for 18 years.

One of my favourite paintings here

is Witches At Their Incantations by Salvator Rosa,

and it's tucked away in a slightly dark corner of room 32.

Cos it is just so strange, scary, spooky and weird,

and I absolutely love that.

People hanging, people resurrecting corpses,

strange monsters,

people cutting toenails of people hanging in trees.

I can't work out what's going on,

and that's why I absolutely adore it.

You have to really step up close and look at it to get the detail.

It's a very dark painting.

There are brief splashes of colour,

but it's all those different variations of darkness.

This night-time on an Italian hillside,

where these acolytes and witches are gathering

to try and summon Satan.

And that's, I think, what makes it quite exciting.

I like to look at the painting from left to right.

You start with the pair of men exhuming a corpse.

There is a really weird, veiled figure behind

that's holding onto candles.

Then you move into the centre of the painting.

You've got these witches with their cauldrons.

One of them is wringing out a rag. It's probably blood.

And then you get to the corpse hanging in the tree

with this really strange angle of his neck.

What's really great about the painting

is the mythical monsters that are in there.

There's this, like, little, squat, froggy-type character

with a red mouth with lots of teeth.

And you think, "Where the hell did he get that idea from?"

That's the whole fascinating thing of this,

is this melting pot of Salvator Rosa's mind

and what was going on around him in Florence at that time.

We're talking the middle of the 17th century.

People were still being tried

and executed for witchcraft at that point.

It was very, very real,

this fear of the devil, of Satan, of witchcraft.

A secret pleasure of mine is I love horror films,

and I'm actually on the committee of a horror film festival.

So, once a year, I sit and watch about 150 short films

and help select the 30 or 40 that go into the festival.

And I think this is why this painting particularly speaks to me

cos you've got all the tropes of a great horror movie

in this one static image.

My name is Rosy Akalawu-Ellman.

I'm currently studying Art History at Cambridge in my first year.

In this country, history of art is kind of presented as something

that's for public schools and private schools,

and it's constantly dismissed as a subject for the elite...

..when, in reality, it's a really important subject

that empowers people to understand the world around them.

I saw you having a really, really, good look

about things we noticed.

Would anyone like to share with the rest of the group,

why do the people in the paintings not have clothes?

The National Gallery does a really great job of outreach

to primary schools and secondary schools

and teaching people that this is a space for them.

So, it's not great, the lack of representation on the walls.

There is an issue with the collection not keeping up with us

as we're so rapidly developing,

and Britishness becomes a far more complex and multi-layered identity.

There's a lot of scholarship that has been made and is emerging

that we can use to rethink

what the gallery is actually capable of doing,

about the importance of exploring representation within art

and erasing monolithic narratives

of Black people just being slaves and servants.

My favourite painting in the National Gallery

is The Execution Of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche from 1833.

It kind of links back to my little, young Rosy obsession with the Tudors

and fixation on Lady Jane Grey as this nine-day queen.

It's a painting of her execution,

where Bloody Mary came and decided

that it was her time to take her rightful throne.

Lady Jane Grey was 17 when she was murdered.

She spent more time in prison building up to her execution

than her actual time on the throne.

It's the melodrama and the emotional vulnerability of the painting.

Her fingers blindly reaching out for her final moments.

It's her most vulnerable state that she's gonna be at.

One of the things that I always think about

is the fact that she's blindfolded.

And throughout the whole of art history,

there's an obsession with the gaze, especially the female gaze,

in the way that an artist presents it

as, like, an act of submission or a confrontation

and the way that, as a viewer, you're interacting with a gaze,

the emotional connection that you're building with the subject.

And she is gaze-less. She is blindfolded.

You'd expect it to kind of create a distance between you and her,

where you're not able to connect with her, you can't see her eyes.

But, instead, it brings you even further towards her

as you realise that horrible stumbling that she's going through.

It's almost like you're seeing it for her

in a way that she never could.

You're feeling it.

And it's an emotional thing, her lack of vision,

and you're sharing those emotions.

JONATHAN CONLIN: We really owe the magnificent site

of the National Gallery

to King George IV's architect John Nash.

In the 1810s, there are very ambitious plans being developed

to reconfigure the Crown Estate lands

to the west and to the north of what's now Trafalgar Square.

John Nash clearly felt that having, as in a sense, started in the north,

there was a need for a grand public space or piazza.

Before the creation of Trafalgar Square,

there were already some fine buildings on the site.

One of them was William Kent's stables,

which had been redeveloped in the 1730s,

a very impressive facade.

And then there was also James Gibbs' St Martin's-in-the-Fields.

The original brief for what became the National Gallery

was to combine room for the Public Record Office,

room for the Royal Academy, room for the National Gallery.

So there was a sense in which they were trying to get

as much as they could out of this really rather thin building

designed by William Wilkins.

After the National Gallery moves into its new building in 1838,

there is this open space which is as yet unnamed in front of it.

And it's only in the mid-1840s

that we see Nelson's Column being created.

If you stand outside the National Gallery,

you can look south over Trafalgar Square

and see the Houses of Parliament.

You also have Canada House, symbol of the British dominions.

If you look the other way, you head down the Strand,

one of the major streets linking the Cities of Westminster

to the City of London.

So it really is the heart of the nation's capital,

indeed the place from which

distances across the kingdom have, for centuries,

before the foundation of the gallery, been measured.

Hello, my name is Claudia Winkleman,

and I read out loud on the television,

but I have a secret love and history with art.

My love of art came from my brilliant dad

who decided that he would bring me

to the National Gallery every weekend.

And the only rule was

that we were only allowed to look at one painting.

And we would stand in front of a painting

and really talk about it -

sometimes for 40 minutes, sometimes for half an hour.

The brilliance of that one painting rule

is it leaves you wanting more.

And I'm now 52, and I've used art as a soother.

Some people have a teddy,

some people listen to music, some people go for a walk.

I like coming here and just looking at one piece.

So, the painting I've chosen

is Leonardo da Vinci, and it's Virgin Of The Rocks.

What strikes you first

is the atmosphere of it, the feel of it,

which is otherworldly yet entirely human.

The figures are otherworldly because of who they are.

So they can't look like us,

but their expressions are unbelievably human.

I think it's the adoration of the young Jesus,

and he is blessing John the Baptist in return.

And it is a beautiful triangle.

Mary stands over it like the top of the pyramid.

I love her right hand on John the Baptist,

which is firm but also kind.

And she is in the presence of the most beautiful

and most ethereal and serene character in maybe all of art,

the Archangel.

You're watching a moment.

You're really privileged to be able to see it,

whether you are religious or whether you're not.

Leonardo is the king.

What a brain, what a man. He was desperate for information.

He was curious. His drawings are so beautiful.

And I should come out with it and say I like the big hitters,

and I think that's why I was drawn to him.

What's extraordinary about Leonardo, and I also love this,

is he didn't paint a lot.

But you know it's him when you see it.

And that alone is pretty breathtaking.

I love the fact how it's just so dark.

Look at Mary's face, how much is cast in shadow,

and the angel's face.

And the two children,

you see them perfectly, but it's not cut-out.

It's not crystal clear.

Not every piece of fabric or a face is given the same amount of light.

What technique. And it changed the history of art.

It's the boldness.

I like the fact that he's like,

"Yeah, do you know what? That's just gonna be in shadow.

"Deal with that, guys."

Extraordinary in 1508. Revolutionary.

So the fact that it's mysterious is what I love most.

The fifth character in this painting is the landscape.

There are huge spaces on that canvas made up of landscape,

and that feels brave.

It's like the best writing.

You don't need all the flowery words.

We'll just have that.

So it draws you in.

This is how I feel about beautiful works.

There is an awful lot of chat

about how we feel about the world and ourselves,

a growing obsession with the self,

people endlessly questioning how THEY'RE doing.

But I think the thing you can do

to make yourself feel much better about all kinds of things

is take yourself out of you.

Stand in front of a painting,

and you will breathe a little deeper,

and you will feel a little happier.

There is nothing like standing in front of a work of art.

The minutiae is swept away

when you are faced by true skill and beauty.

My name is Stacey Smith,

and I'm a membership and commercial services assistant.

My favourite painting in the National Gallery

is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger,

painted in 1533.

The first time I saw The Ambassadors,

I was with my grandad.

I think I was about 12.

In the middle of the painting was just a big ugly blob,

and I couldn't understand what it was, why it was there

and why someone would paint something so detailed and beautiful

and then do something seemingly so strange.

And then my grandad took hold of me

and just dragged me all the way round to the right.

And I was like, "It's not a blob, it's a skull."

And it just popped out.

I remember, I look around the room,

and other people were looking at the painting straight on, and I'm like,

"Oh, my God, I know something you don't.

"I see something you can't see right now."

And it was the most thrilling moment.

I didn't see the painting again until I started working here,

and I have learned a lot about it

in the years since seeing it with my grandad.

Hans Holbein the Younger, at the time,

was the court painter to Henry VIII.

The whole reason for this painting is a message to the King of France

that there was religious strife in England

because Henry had separated from Catherine of Aragon

and married Anne Boleyn.

And in doing so, he had declared himself

the head of the Church of England.

He has painted two men.

On the left is Jean de Dinteville, who was the French ambassador.

And on the right is Georges de Selve,

the Bishop of Lavaur, who was a very good friend of Jean.

Jean could not write to the King of France

and tell him what was happening

because his correspondence was being opened and read.

So he had to figure a way around it, and this painting is how he did it.

One of my favourite ways to describe the painting is like an escape room.

There are clues that can unlock it, and each clue unlocks the next.

I think Holbein included the crucifix in the top left

as a signal that spiritual difficulties were being revealed.

And there is a lute that has a broken string,

to signify discord.

The music that is in the book cannot be played

because the string that would play that note is broken,

and the note appears several times,

so it would become immediately obvious

to anyone who could play music.

The attention to detail in the clothes is just absolutely stunning.

I could put my face into that fur on his coat

and know exactly how it feels on my cheeks.

Jean's motto was "memento mori".

Remember, one day you will die.

And the skull was a way of including that motto.

The reason this is my favourite painting

is because it is a painting my granddad and I bonded over.

When I come here, it's like he never left,

he never passed away.

And if I stand, and I look at my blob...

..it's like he's right behind me again.

JONATHAN CONLIN: One of the exciting things about the National Gallery

is, I think, when it was first created,

it was such a novel idea to have a collection created and housed

at the expense of all taxpayers

that when it opened its doors in 1824,

I really think the trustees had no idea who was gonna show up.

They wanted it to be open for free to everyone,

as the British Museum had been.

This is the time when there's a good deal

of hunger and political unrest.

So there really was a great fear

that the public might attack the paintings on display.

There was therefore a great deal of relief

that not only that lots of people were visiting

who were not just of the elite,

but that those members of the middle class and some working class

were recognising that these paintings

were their property in a sense as well.

And certainly, when we look at guides to the National Gallery

provided for the working class,

there's a strong emphasis on going there in your own free time

to educate yourself and to improve yourself.

But it's only really in the mid to late 19th century

that something that we might call art history,

to understand how styles or how tastes

or how human creativity has evolved over time.

That really wasn't there in the early decades.

For artists, the National Gallery was a particularly precious resource

in that it was a place where they could go

and copy original works after the great masters.

That, I think, changes by the late 19th century,

where the copyists are really producing copies

of popular paintings for people to hang on their walls.

We know the most copied painting in the late 19th century

was Dignity And Impudence by Edwin Landseer,

which is now in Tate Britain,

which was, among a large proportion of the National Gallery's public,

the most important painting, the most popular painting.

I'm Gracie Divall,

and I was an exhibitions manager for National Touring.

It's about getting these amazing paintings

that belong to absolutely everybody in the entirety of the UK

out of London and making them accessible

all across the United Kingdom for people to come and enjoy.

My favourite artwork in the National Gallery's collection

is Artemisia Gentileschi's

Self-Portrait As Saint Catherine Of Alexandria,

and it was the very first artwork

that we took out on a National Gallery Visits tour.

This painting is really special to me,

partly because it is one of only 21 artworks by a female artist

in the National Gallery's collection.

It's not for a lack of wanting to collect work by women

that the gallery is so poor in these artworks.

But in the collecting period, you know, of going up to 1910,

women were not given these opportunities,

and women were not able to be artists in this way.

So for there to be these artworks

by women who completely broke the mould,

who had this passion and this drive,

and they were able to do things

that they might not have been supported to do,

it's just absolutely fantastic.

Although this is a self-portrait,

Artemisia has painted herself as Saint Catherine,

who was a young Christian girl put to death at the age of 18.

But when they went to put Catherine to death,

they strapped her to a Catherine wheel, the torture device.

And when they strapped her to it, the wheel broke,

and so they had to move forward and behead her instead.

Saint Catherine was made then a saint by Joan of Arc.

So Artemesia is presenting herself as this resilient woman.

She's being someone else,

but there's so much of sort of her back story

that parallels this idea of a woman breaking the mould,

of a woman standing up for what she believes in.

We know of Artemisia as this amazing artist,

but she also overcame great adversity.

Aged 17, she was raped by a friend of her father's,

and really unusually for the time, this was taken to court.

During the court case, she was tortured

to try and get her to say that she was not telling the truth.

She still stuck completely to her story.

And her rapist was convicted, but not of rape,

but of deflowering of property of her father.

But throughout all of this, she carried on painting,

and she believed in herself as a person and as a painter.

And that sort of resilience really comes through

in her artwork as well.

She's looking directly at us.

In some ways, it's quite a defiant glance.

She's present. It's not a demure woman.

It is somebody who is ready to engage with us.

That could be my friend Artemisia.

And we did, we've travelled the country together,

meeting different people everywhere we've gone.

We placed her in a GP surgery, in a school and into libraries.

And there we were able to tell

completely different stories about this artwork,

as a saint, as a resilient woman

who did things at a time that no other woman could,

as a woman who'd been let down by a justice system,

who had confidence in her own ability

and how she can really inspire people today.

One of the most unique places that we took Artemisia

was to a women's prison.

And it was absolutely amazing to see this artwork there

and to see the inmates interact with this artwork

and be inspired by Artemisia's story.

One of the comments that has stayed with me forever is a woman saying,

"I'd like to say sorry to Artemisia that so little has changed,

"that women still don't have the opportunities."

And her story, 400 years later,

was still so poignant to these women.

That is just something that art can do.

It can bring us together across those time gaps.

I really think the women there were so inspired,

and hopefully they will carry

a little bit of that resilience with them.

I'm Terry Gilliam.

I'm a film director, but before I was a film director,

I was the animator on Monty Python's Flying Circus.

MUSIC: 'The Liberty Bell'

Back in '69, when Python began, I was here quite often.

I mean, at least every couple of weeks, I think,

because I was always desperate for inspiration

for things I could steal.

If I found a character that I wanted to use,

I would go down to the gift shop

and buy, hopefully, a poster or a book with them in

and then photograph it, blow it up, manipulate it in my own way,

and, bingo, off we went.

My favourite painting in the gallery

is Bronzino's Allegory Of Venus, Cupid And Folly.

It became very quickly the Python foot

right from the moment I first saw the painting.

My eyes drifted down to that bottom left corner,

and the little dove,

and the foot is about to crush it, it looked like to me.

But I thought it's a great punctuation for my animations

to bring to a halt whatever was going on. Boom!

And I love the idea that the foot belonged to Cupid, to love.

And what a better way to be crushed, than by love.

The painting itself just pops,

and it pops with a great, beautiful naked woman.

You realise, "Wait, this is not a normal nude painting."

Most of them are lying gracefully and languorously, beautifully.

This, there's action going on there.

Then you realise the little boy is Cupid and she is Venus.

This is son and mother.

This is very strange, what's happening here.

And I think it's very erotic.

I had to become older before I realised

that "venereal disease" comes from "Venus",

it's all based on her.

And that's what this painting is also about.

Syphilis was ravaging Europe.

What Bronzino is doing is playing a kind of a game,

a little puzzle, a riddle.

What is going on? Because everything there means something.

Venus is love, the goddess of love.

Cupid, I suppose, is the messenger of love.

Then there's this lovely face.

And she's offering honeycomb in one hand,

and the other hand is holding her scorpion sting.

It's like, "OK, I'm here, aren't I sweet? But watch out."

And that is syphilis.

In fact, medically, it's quite accurate.

Teeth are falling out, the knuckles are enlarged,

which is what syphilis does.

Now, the question is, has she got Cupid's arrow

to stop him from spreading her disease?

He spreads love with shooting his arrow

into the hearts of young couples.

So that's the thing.

Is this a warning about the dangers of syphilis?

Everything is hinted at.

And I think that's a very special, unique painting.

I'd like to be able to make cartoons that look as good as that.

CHUCKLES

In World War II, most museums in Britain

simply evacuated the collection, usually to a Welsh slate mine,

and closed their doors.

The National Gallery is one important exception to that.

The then director, Kenneth Clark,

enthusiastically welcomed a suggestion

by someone who wrote in to the editor of The Times,

proposing that a then recently acquired Rembrandt

be temporarily placed on display at Trafalgar Square

so that the people could admire

their latest addition to their collection.

And, as a result of that, the so-called "one picture shows" began,

in which every two months,

two paintings would be sent down from the Welsh slate mine,

where the collection had been evacuated,

and one work a month was put on show.

Every time there was an air raid warning,

the painting would be taken off the wall

and rushed downstairs to a special safe

where it would be protected in case the gallery was bombed.

And at the same time,

Myra Hess had organised a series of free lunchtime concerts.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

So the rest of the gallery already, in a sense,

had a captive audience - people who were starved of concerts

because the musical life of the nation had also come to a halt.

So the National Gallery became the one place

where, as it were, the guttering flame of culture was still burning.

And so many of the thousands who came to the concert

would also admire the one work of art that was on display.

I am Eugenie, and I work at Hauser & Wirth,

a contemporary gallery in London.

I did art at school. I always wanted to be an artist.

I remember going to the National Gallery

and just sitting and drawing, and now when I go around a gallery,

I see all the young people doing that,

and I'm like, "I used to do that."

And I wish I could find my drawings from those moments

where I was a student right in the front,

studying and looking and learning all about history in art.

I found myself in rooms in the National Gallery

with all these stories and all these artists

who put a piece of themselves out there

and a piece of history and a bit of life.

But you don't need to have learnt the history of art

to understand art.

Art can be anything. Art can mean anything to you.

Like the painting we're gonna talk about.

It means something to me because of where I am in my life now.

I've chosen Correggio, Madonna Of The Basket,

and it's from 1524.

Madonna and child has been painted a million times

and we've seen it everywhere.

This one stuck out to me

because of the very relaxed and ethereal nature

of this beautiful mother-and-child bond.

I see a lot of similarities with this and my life.

I've just had a second child, and my little baby's ten months.

Correggio is painting a very domestic scene.

This is a normal domestic family.

It's something so personal and so beautiful

to see them like this rather than in opulence

or really heralded as these figures that transcend history.

She's just looking after her child,

and she's struggling like a mum would, putting on his little jacket.

And I know how that feels.

He looks like he's about to take on the enormity of his task

with his hand and his gestures, but he's also with his mummy.

At this moment, it's a mum having put down her tools in the basket

and picked up her baby.

She's laid down her job for a minute to look after her baby

and I think, looking at this now,

it's like women, they have babies, they go to work.

She's kind of representing that, but in 1524.

I think it's interesting to note Joseph,

sort of in the shadows in the background,

and she's the protagonist,

and she's always been the protagonist.

This painting is a very intimate, very beautiful moment

before the world overtook Jesus and everything that went on.

So it resonated with me in that sense.

It's just incredible to understand

that this painter did this painting all those years ago,

and now it stands in front of us,

and who knows the journey it's been on and how it got to us.

But it's here, and we are able to admire it.

I'm Gabriele Finaldi, and I'm the director of the National Gallery.

My favourite painting in the National Gallery

is Bartolome Bermejo's Saint Michael Triumphant Over The Devil.

It was painted in 1468.

The opportunity arose to acquire it in the mid-1990s,

and it was the first really significant

medieval, Early Renaissance Spanish picture that entered the collection.

It's a scene showing Saint Michael,

this sort of dancing, beautifully lithe and elegant angel,

with these multicoloured wings spread open,

and he's about to strike this demon.

Also, you have the donor of the painting,

that's the person who has basically paid for the picture.

He's Antoni Joan. He's a wealthy military leader.

And he's the lord of a little town called Tous,

which is where the picture comes from.

He's at prayer.

And Bermejo has worked very, very carefully

so that we can actually see what it is he's praying.

They're penitential psalms.

And clearly, Antoni Joan is thinking about what's going to happen

at the end of his earthly life.

And he's turning to Saint Michael, who will offer him protection.

Bermejo wants to represent the devil

in as terrifying a way as he possibly can.

It's very difficult for us to put ourselves

into the mind of the 15th century.

There's no electric light, so when darkness comes,

darkness can be very frightening,

and you live in a town where there are wild animals,

there are wolves, there are bears.

Life outside of the warmth of the centre of the village

can be very terrifying.

People saw a lot of dark forces at work in the natural world.

So what Bermejo does is he brings together several elements.

The teeth of a wolf, the wings of a bat,

which sort of mix up with the wings of a butterfly.

There are snakes. The big glowing eyes.

All this is brought together to create a sort of chimera.

I think there's a glamour to the way the picture is painted.

I think anyone can appreciate the extraordinary invention,

the enormous technical skill.

I mean, if you look at the way he does the gilding

and the toolwork on the gilding,

the way he represents reflections on the surface of the armour.

And if you particularly look at the breastplate,

you'll see that there are areas

where the pearls are reflected on the breastplate itself.

But also, you'll see a reflection of a city.

It's very likely a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem,

of which Saint Michael is the sort of guardian.

So there's an element to the narrative there

that the artist has very skilfully introduced

into the representation of the armour.

That ability to represent shine and reflection

in a way which is totally convincing,

but also to use it to say something

about the sort of divine subject matter, is absolutely brilliant.

And you think, "Goodness, this painting is,

"you know, nearly 600 years old."

It is astonishing that across time, these works can still appeal to us.

They can still mesmerise us, they seduce us.

We want to know more.

When you look at the presentation of the collection,

people often think it's relatively static,

and it's not static at all.

It changes all the time.

And often, it's around how you can best engage with the art.

All of those changes, I think, over the years

have been about how do they balance

the art historical narrative of the whole gallery

with the experience that you might want to have

with an individual artwork.

Originally, the National Gallery was organised by school.

So the idea was there would be a section of the building

for the British School,

starting with the early works, ending with Turner.

You then, as it were, jump back

by moving into the start of the French School,

through to the impressionists and postimpressionists.

Then you would enter the Dutch School, again jumping back in time.

That really changes under Neil MacGregor in the 1990s.

It became much more about bringing different European schools together

so that you would have all the works from the Early Renaissance,

whether they were produced north of the Alps

or south of the Alps, displayed together.

The other big change that there has been

is in the way the signals, the cues,

that the decor and the layout of the institution

is giving you on how the pictures are to be enjoyed.

In the 1960s and '70s,

there was a real turn away from the Victorian idea

of the National Gallery as a palace.

And we see the very high ceilings

having suspended ceilings placed in there

or, indeed, having buttresses

visually divide up a large gallery into a series of smaller spaces.

So the thinking here was, really, that experiencing a work of art

was quite an intimate, personal experience,

that visitors needed to be given quiet spaces

where footfall was muted.

Under Neil MacGregor it became much more an idea

of visiting as a social activity,

that we should be aware that even when we're enjoying the work of art,

that we are doing so as member of a public.

And certainly, that's involved bringing back a lot of the marble

and the more magnificent spaces

that have now led some -

and this is a pendulum that will swing forever, I think -

to argue that it's too intimidating a space for people

who will never otherwise encounter

an environment quite as apparently opulent and perhaps alienating

as this revived Victorian splendour.

People were coming into the gallery space,

they were not seeing a reflection of their lives.

What they were seeing was a reflection

of the lives of the elite.

However, I think what we are trying to do now is trying to say,

"Well, actually, though, there are different stories that can be told

"around these paintings,"

not necessarily one version of this history.

'My name is Fiona Alderton.

'I am a gallery educator and storyteller

'here at the National Gallery.

'I work in the learning department with all audiences,

'from very small children,

'right up to delivering talks and lectures

'for the public programme.'

As educators, we want people to find their way

as well as giving them information about a painting.

But it's really important that people inform their own ideas

of what the painting might be about.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to who that might be?

CROWD MEMBER: Diana? Diana. And who was Diana?

'You walk into a gallery space, you can look at something,

'and it really is about how something makes you feel.

'You may never have seen it before.'

You might know nothing about the artist or the time it was painted,

but something about that painting speaks to you,

and that's really powerful.

My favourite painting in the National Gallery

is a work by French artist Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun.

It was painted in 1782, and it is called Self Portrait In A Straw Hat.

I think it was really just looking at her expression, at her face,

the way that she's looking out to us, the viewer.

And there was really something about that

that really just drew me in.

I just wanted to know more and more

about who she was and why she painted it.

Vigee Le Brun was born in 1752, in Paris.

Her father was a painter,

and he really encouraged her to draw and to paint.

She was painting herself

because she's wanting to perhaps market herself.

She starts getting a name for herself at quite a young age,

and she does come into the realm of the courts of Marie Antoinette,

the Queen at the time.

And she creates around 30 portraits of the Queen and her children.

We have to think about the context of this, the time,

this is pre-French Revolution.

So part of Vigee Le Brun's task

was to really think about softening the image of the Queen

for the public there.

Because she's so involved with the court,

with the queen, et cetera,

she really is a bit of a target for the revolutionaries.

And she managed to flee France

before the King and Queen are hauled off to be executed.

She's in exile for 12 years.

She's travelling around, and her reputation really has preceded her.

When we think back to other periods, women were creating art,

but they were excluded from, perhaps, creating the big history

or mythological or religious paintings

because they were excluded

from going to life drawing classes, for example.

So then women were painting still life paintings,

or perhaps portraiture, and then maybe using themselves,

as Vigee le Brun does, as a model herself.

She's looking out to us.

She really wants to engage with the viewer.

And she absolutely is telling us that not only is she a woman,

but she's also an artist, quite literally.

She's holding her palette,

and she's holding her brushes in her hand.

I think when people walk in

and they might notice some of the bigger paintings,

or they're looking at perhaps the seascapes,

and they move on because I think they just look at it and think,

"Yes, a beautiful woman."

They don't even have any thought about the fact

that she may have painted it herself.

And you start giving that little bit of story

about her as a woman, as an artist,

people are really keen to look her up further

or to find out where her other paintings are.

She's absolutely one of my favourite artists.

I'm Robert Raynard.

I'm a visitor assistant at the National Gallery.

My favourite painting is

A Girl At A Window by Louis-Leopold Boilly.

It was made in 1799.

The first time I saw A Girl At A Window,

it was my very first day

as a visitor assistant at the gallery.

I was struck by the colours, or the lack of colours.

I was unsure whether I was looking at

a black and white painting or a print.

I still find the character quite powerful,

in the sense that I don't know what's on her mind.

I don't know how she's feeling.

Sad, upset or curious.

I also find her slightly unsettling because she does not really smile.

There are many questions that we can ask.

Do the characters and the fish and the bird echo one another?

The fish in a small bowl, trapped, caught in this limited environment.

And the birds?

I'm not sure whether it's one or two birds.

If there's two, the other one is in the shadow.

The boy also seems to be in the shadow.

So possibly an echo of the bird.

It seems to me that they could all be prisoners in their own space

and may be eager to get out of this space.

This is my favourite painting because it makes me ask questions

and discover a new world in art.

One question we have today when we live so much of our lives online

is to imagine if we were given the brief

that the founding generation of trustees and parliamentarians had

to bring together great works of art

and share them with as wide an audience as possible,

would we even build a building?

Might we go straight to building a website

or some other interactive virtual space?

However, it's not a substitute

for the actual experience of works of art.

It's really a way in which people can be primed,

can become curious about the experience of encounter

with a real work of art.

I certainly think while we do spend a lot of our times

in virtual spaces,

there's a greater emphasis now on experiences.

I think we recognise that the kind of authenticity,

the kind of intensity that we demand from those experiences

is something that artificial worlds and digital worlds

can't fully provide.

My name is Jacqueline Wilson, and I write children's books.

I've written over 100 books.

I absolutely love the National Gallery.

I first went there as a very little girl.

My dad took me on a day trip,

and we looked mostly at the Canalettos.

And I think that was because he'd been a draughtsman,

and he rather liked the detail of the buildings.

Later on, when I was in my early teens,

I had a unfortunate accident with my front teeth

and I had to keep going to the Royal Hospital of Dentists,

which was in Leicester Square.

And so I thought, "I'll go over the road to the National Gallery

"and just wander round and look at some paintings for comfort."

And I adored the impressionists

because, you know, what could be easier,

more pleasant, so bright colours?

I've chosen The Umbrellas by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

painted in the 1880s.

I love that era because women are becoming more able to see

that there are other things to do in life

other than be the angel of the house,

or mother's grown-up, dutiful daughter.

I loved the fashion.

I loved the expressions on people's faces.

I liked the pattern of the umbrellas.

It was just a joyful painting,

but it seemed to be telling me a story.

The young woman without the umbrella is staring out,

and she's got this expression on her face.

It's mysterious, as if she's got a secret.

And as if you, the viewer, are going to be let in on it.

I do like there to be a strong narrative in a painting,

and, if there isn't one, I make it up.

I thought everybody else seems quite intent

on putting their umbrellas up or being under their umbrellas.

And then I imagined a gale.

The wind actually starts lifting under their umbrellas,

and then they all fly away over the rooftops of Paris.

And the girl is left with the viewer

sort of smiling at each other, you know, completely safe.

I certainly feel that this working-class young woman

is the one I identify with,

and interestingly for me,

I see that she's got wonderful sort of dark red hair.

Perhaps a little tiny snapshot of this woman stayed inside my head

till many, many, many years later, I invented my Hetty Feather,

who was a girl of a similar social status.

And it's hard to identify

with the posh little girls, all prettied up.

I think if you're a girl like this one, you have far more fun.

I know there's a whole movement against Renoir.

And I found a quote that he said,

when accused of painting rather luscious young nudes or whatever,

he's saying, "I like pretty things.

"Why shouldn't I paint pretty things?"

And, yeah, I agree. Why not?

I'm Peter Murphy. I'm currently a piano teacher.

I used to be a television producer,

but then I got a dreadful drug habit,

and that changed my life dramatically.

I'm passionate about coming to the National Gallery,

and looking at pictures played a huge part

in my recovery from addiction.

There's nothing more exciting

than walking into this extraordinary space,

and it's something I didn't understand

when I first started coming to galleries

and realising that there was this secret world

that I could come and discover for myself.

You don't need to be posh.

You don't need to be highly educated and bookish.

These pictures are ravishing. They're gorgeous.

The painting that has most significance for me

is Bellini's Madonna Of The Meadow.

Painted around 1500 to 1505.

And it's the most lovely picture of a mother and a child

sitting in a field

in a translucent spring morning and a lovely landscape behind it.

I'll never forget the first time I encountered

the Madonna Of The Meadow.

I had finally faced up to the fact

that I was in big trouble with drugs and I couldn't stop.

And I went to my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting

and after the meeting, I was completely confused, emotional,

and I found myself here, at the National Gallery.

I was drawn to this Bellini.

And I stood in front of this picture,

and it was the oddest sensation.

I was so struck

by the sheer enormous stature of this woman.

She towers over the baby. She towers over the landscape.

The first thing you notice is this pyramid shape

that the Madonna makes, and a pyramid is very stable.

I was really intrigued.

I couldn't get the picture out of my mind,

and I thought, "Am I going mad?"

Is it something to do with the drugs, coming off the drugs?

But I knew there was a meaning.

And the more I looked, the more it gave up its secrets.

I was deeply touched by the tilt of her head.

She's holding her hands like this.

And it's almost like prayer,

but she looks like she's holding the baby's head.

And I suddenly realised, she's holding the baby's mind.

And I knew this was a picture of secure attachment

between a mother and a baby.

The attachment that means that you can develop,

you can grow up, you can be anything,

if you're safe and loved.

That baby lying in her lap was safe and loved.

It really began to dawn on me that that was something I never had.

I'm the eldest of four children, and my mother couldn't mother.

She gave me to her sister.

I was brought up by my aunt for the first years,

and I was always very confused as to who my mother was.

I've never felt loved,

and it was seeing this vital connection

painted all those centuries ago.

I stood in front of the picture and I cried.

I was so ashamed at having got into trouble with drugs.

And I realised, looking at the picture, that I wasn't bad.

It wasn't my fault.

And I think that's the amazing thing about pictures.

That's a religious painting, but for me, it was a human painting.

I am fascinated that the painting

can speak to me so personally after all these years.

I don't think Bellini

could have been that different from us, people then,

and I'm fascinated by that link between the past.

And I think that's something that art shows us,

that we've got more in common with each other

in our very basic humanity.

I'll tell you something.

I would not have uncovered the secrets of that Bellini

had the National Gallery not been free.

Because I came every day for months and months and months,

and I stood quietly in front of the picture,

and that was a real luxury.

Can you imagine if you had to pay 15 euros or something,

or £25 to go into the gallery?

You wouldn't do it.

It's my club. LAUGHS

It's my National Gallery, and I belong here.

I feel like I've come home.

TANNOY: 'Hello, this is a visitor announcement.

'We hope you've enjoyed your visit today.

'The gallery closes at 6pm,

'and our cloakrooms, gift shops, cafes and toilets

'will be closing shortly.

'The National Gallery will be open again tomorrow at 10am.

'Thank you, and have a lovely evening.'

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