National Gallery

And it just sort of stays with you.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of paintings that I like and I wouldn't want to choose my favourite, but I think one of the most impactive paintings is in the National Gallery.

It's enormous.

It's very famous.

true.

I did do my show at the Edinburgh Fringe in a bin bag when I left my dress at the National Gallery.

Oh, yeah, you did.

Yes.

The names of paints are so familiar in the world of traditional art materials, but what do they actually mean? Where do they come from and what can they reveal about the history of colour? Evie is a pigment specialist and art historian who writes and presents the hugely popular Jackson's Art Supplies pigment stories.

She also lectures and has talked for the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery on colour and pigments.

Yes, this is a conversation about colour names, but it's really about so much more.

It's about people, mysteries, accidental discoveries, feuds, poetry and secret recipes.

really, like, it was really, really lovely.

Yeah.

And I have also done various work with the National Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has been...

So cool.

Where there was power, there is art.

Yeah, there's a National Gallery here in London.

And you can go and see every painting.

And then you can go and research each painting.

But it's often geared towards the shop.

I fancy going to the Tate or the National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery and seeing like a talk or a guide where I have something explained to me because I don't know much about art, but I like it.

Do you know what you should do, Tom? What? Come down to Brighton, go to the Royal Pavilion.

That sounds like a nice day out.

These conclusions were reached independently by two archaeologists.

Recent excavations in Covent Garden adjoining have uncovered an extensive Anglo-Saxon settlement covering about 150 acres, stretching from the present-day National Gallery site in the west to Aldwych in the east.

As the presumed focus of the city, London Borough was moved back within the old Roman wars.

The old settlement of London Vic gained the name of Eald Vic, Old Port Eald and the softer form of Vic transposed to Old and Witch in Middle English The street was created in the early 20th century in a project that saw a new street layout destroying Wych Street, which was full of overhangs and projections, and the construction of Australia House and Bush House .

I think the most formative thing about that period, I mean, there are so many things, but if she's talking about someone's sort of teens and twenties book, a real sort of strong line was, and if we think about how different it is to have someone getting to that point in their life would experience trying to start life as an artist or painter now.

It was just immediately after the Second World War and there was a sense in the country and more broadly of... kind of state funding for the arts and there being that sort of you know despite living in an entirely sort of shattered continental world that was kind of massively indebted in all sorts of ways that there were you know there was a newly founded arts council alongside you know an NHS and a but also kind of nuclear weapons research campaign but the sense that John started life well he was an art student and then he was called at the military service and then he was did his short period of military service and then became an art student again and that was funded with an ex-serviceman's grant so he had it wasn't an enormous amount of money but he could start out like that and then when he started making money separate to that it was on the bbc the sort of predecessor of the bbc world service um and so that was also another state funded thing and he was this was the time of the um the festival of britain and so the sense of what uh art being produced on behalf of uh in a kind of democratic way on behalf of the people and the idea that the patron of the future was uh was the state or was that the people who had voted who had voted for that government um was i think struck him particularly powerfully because he around this time he met a uh a hungarian jewish um emigre called uh frederick antole who in some ways becomes the subject of his first book his first novel sorry um who who um wrote about uh the renaissance and about how patronage worked in say renaissance florence no he wasn't you know sort of uh early modern florence and how their artists had been considered um kind of craft people who worked to a commission and their sort of individual hand was in how they served that commission that He, John, sort of would have first seen in these paintings when they came one by one as part of the National Gallery, as part of the Picture of the Month thing during the war, alongside works made by the War Artists Advisory Committee.

So suddenly the sense that people were making work to commission again rather than as an art for art, in the sense of art for art's sake or their personal kind of whims.

So I think that was probably the most formative thing.

Yeah, just as a sort of, uh, nice piece of trivia saying ken clark not vmp uh funnily enough uh ken ken clark's son alan clark uh who wrote a book about the first world war is actually in the the footnotes of g so there's a there's a both kenneth clark's into the story but um ways of seeing i mean there's so many sort of potential angles there i mean ways of seeing comes out of a sort of

it it

that very complicated relationship between Kenneth Clark as in the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Culture, Clark, because he is a really formative figure in a different sort of way for John in that he sets the sort of artistic culture because he's obviously a bit older and he's quite established by the time John's coming up as an art student.

He sets the artistic culture into which John becomes a... uh an adult um who is looking at art and you know to the extent that when he's when john is trying to make his way as a painter he's clark he's writing to saying would you come and see my exhibition i could do with your um you know your sort of uh uh, you giving my career a boost.