The Art of the Night

# The night, the light

# The long

# The long and lonely night. #

The night. Shakespeare called it "The Witching Time".

It's when the ghosts come out, and the imaginings begin.

The great American writer Mark Twain noted once

that the human race is never quite sane in the night,

which is perhaps why art is so interested in it.

# Here comes the night

# Here comes the night. #

This is a film about the edgy relationship

that art has with the night.

It's edgy because art is generally about things you can see.

And the night is not, generally, a good time for looking.

Not in the traditional way, at least.

Actually, night has turned out to be

one of art's most productive times of day.

Yes, you can't see as much in the dark,

but what you can see has extra drama to it.

Mystery, poetry,

and even madness.

# Here comes the night. #

As Byron once put it,

"Oh, glorious night! Thou wert not made for slumber!"

Night is too good to sleep through.

# Here comes the night. #

Various excellent artists over the ages have tussled

with the demanding light conditions of the night and its weighty implications.

And they've done it in different ways.

This remarkable desert sculpture here is called Sun Tunnels,

and it was made in the 1970s by the American land artist Nancy Holt.

Land art is very American.

It's always really big, and seems to have, as its underlying ambition,

the artistic conquest of the West.

To find Sun Tunnels, you have to walk through the desert in Utah.

Until eventually you stumble across them.

Here in Utah, the desert seems to go on, and on, and on.

There's no focus, no punctuation, except Sun Tunnels.

Each of these huge tunnels points to a different direction

in the story of the sun.

So this one here, that points at the big summer sunrise.

And this one at the winter sunrise, the winter solstice.

You can see the sun coming down in the winter here.

So this is good around Christmas time.

But the one that interests us the most is this.

The summer sunset.

From here, you can see the coming of the night.

The sun is setting.

The witching time has arrived.

For some, that means it's time for bed, but not for you and me.

We are off exploring,

because there's so much we need to clear up

about art and the night.

Why was this painted, for instance?

And what in hell's name is going on here?

Why did this happen?

And this?

Or this?

The big problem with painting at night, obviously, is that you can't see what you're doing.

In the days before electricity, artists who wanted to paint in the dark

had to rely on candles, and flaming torches.

And the light you get from a candle or a torch is flickery and unreliable.

However, if clear observation isn't actually what you're after,

that's less of a problem.

If you're trying to imagine things rather than look at them,

to see them with your mind's eye,

then darkness comes into its own.

And the night becomes your ally.

The first pictures that human beings ever made were night pictures.

Cave art, after all, was night art.

Down in the caves, there was no natural light to rely on.

You needed fiery torches to help you see.

And when these torches flickered and spluttered in the dark,

they cast mysterious shadows on the cave walls.

Shadows which suggested things.

Deep under the ground, there were no real horses or rhinos or antelopes to model for you.

All this had to be imagined.

So from the beginning, art had a relationship with the night that was crucial.

Darkness, art, and the mysteries of the unknown seemed, from the beginning,

to form a particularly productive threesome.

The dark brought drama and intensity to our divine imaginings,

and made them feel real.

It blurred the divide between the religious dimension and the earthly one.

One of the trickiest of the big religious scenes that art had to imagine was the Nativity,

the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.

It was tricky because there's no description of it in the Bible.

Just one line in Luke's Gospel about there being "no room at the inn",

and Jesus "sleeping in a manger".

And that's it.

All the information we have about the most important birth in Christendom.

Nobody anywhere mentions a stable.

According to Matthew, Jesus was born in a house.

The other gospel writers ignore his birth entirely.

No one tells us what baby Jesus looked like,

or how we knew it was him.

With no description to help,

art was faced with the enormous responsibility

of imagining it all from scratch.

It wasn't until the 15th century, a millennium and a half after Jesus' death,

that a Nativity began to emerge we can all recognise.

The dark stable, the shepherds gathered round,

an ox and an ass looking on,

and the baby Jesus, at the centre of the action,

glowing brightly like a brazier.

This classic Nativity,

the classic birth of Jesus,

was described first by a woman.

St Bridget of Sweden.

St Bridget was a 14th century religious mystic who had visions.

And in one of these visions, she saw the birth of Jesus, the Nativity.

And what she saw was Mary giving birth to Jesus as she was praying.

Not lying down, as you'd expect, but kneeling and praying.

But the most interesting thing about Bridget's vision of the Nativity

was what was happening to Jesus himself.

According to Bridget, he was glowing, giving off his own light,

just like this campfire here.

The Bible doesn't say Jesus was born in the night.

But the image of him glowing, giving off his own miraculous light,

suggested a surrounding darkness.

And thus, the Nativity became a night picture.

Bridget's visions were amazingly helpful to artists.

Not only did they have an image at last of what the Nativity looked like,

but they no longer had to come up with clever ways of illuminating the baby Jesus.

Because according to Bridget, Jesus illuminated himself.

My favourite among the masters of the night scenes that followed

was Georges de La Tour, a 17th century Frenchman

with an appetite for candles and mysterious light effects.

But the lessons of the Nativity weren't confined to religious art.

Once the Nativity had been invented, it had a phenomenal impact.

This image of a group of figures hunched around a miraculous light source

seemed to infiltrate the artistic imagination,

and popped up in such unexpected places.

Look at this great Rembrandt, for instance.

The Anatomy Lesson Of Dr Tulp.

A doctor and his pupils are hunched over a corpse in the dark.

Dr Tulp is dissecting a body.

So why has Rembrandt borrowed the composition from a Nativity?

And why is this corpse glowing so spookily in the dark?

It's partly a way of getting round the lighting problems in the picture,

having a handy corpse as your light source in the middle.

But I think there's something more than that.

I think Rembrandt is also trying to convey

a sense of the miraculous taking place before us in this eerie nocturnal moment.

Because science and magic had not yet sorted out their differences.

And when Joseph Wright of Derby painted his famous family

of nocturnal scientists hunched over a deadly experiment

with a dying cockatoo and an air pump,

he borrowed from the Nativity too.

Another of the compelling things that happens at night, of course,

is that the stars come out.

# Catch a falling star And put it in your pocket

# Never let it fade away

# Catch a falling star

# And put it in your pocket

# Save it for a rainy day. #

Stars are irresistible, aren't they?

Shakespeare called them the "blessed candles of the night".

And since we are in America,

we should also quote that mighty Yankee poet,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote,

"Stars are the forget-me-nots of the angels."

"The forget-me-nots of the angels", what a lovely thought.

# Catch a falling star

# And put it in your pocket

# Save it for a rainy day. #

The most devoted painter of the stars was that hardened lover of the witching hour,

Vincent van Gogh.

# Save it for a rainy day. #

Van Gogh was obsessed with the night.

A large chunk of his art is set in it.

Mind you, not all of Vincent's night pictures look immediately like night pictures.

These famous chairs, for instance.

This one is Vincent's.

And this one is Gauguin's.

And both were painted at night.

You can tell they are night pictures,

because if you look above Gauguin's chair

you can see burning gas light

throwing strangely coloured shadows around the room.

Van Gogh and Gauguin had been smoking their pipes and reading.

And now, perhaps, they've gone to bed.

But their empty chairs are still full of their departed spirit.

Blunt and earthy Vincent with his peasant chair.

Smart and cultured Gauguin with his posh one.

The mood of the empty chairs belongs to the night as well.

It's an imaginative mood, contemplative, exploratory,

and not altogether sane.

Van Gogh's chairs were painted inside the famous house

he shared with Gauguin in the little French town of Arles.

The Yellow House.

Vincent also painted the outside of it.

And if you look carefully at the road in front of the house,

you can see a big mound going down the middle.

Roadworks. Van Gogh is painting roadworks.

Why? Because these roadworks are special.

They're putting in the gas.

Just after he arrived in Arles, the town was connected to gas.

And gas lighting was put in for the first time.

Suddenly, Arles was lit up at nights.

This twinkling cafe exterior shows the new gas lighting in action,

conquering the night.

Gas lighting was an interesting challenge to paint, of course.

But the most significant thing about it was that it allowed Vincent

to paint all night long if he wanted to.

Not that he was a practical man by inclination.

He wasn't that type.

What Van Gogh liked about the night is that it affected him here,

where it counts.

If you look up from this famous cafe to the sky above,

you'll see that it's full of glorious stars,

painted so deliriously, so excitedly.

That's where Van Gogh's heart really lay - up there, in the starry, starry night.

There are actually two paintings by him called Starry Night.

One is the famous one that Don McLean sang about.

You can find that in The Museum Of Modern Art in New York.

This Starry Night was painted in the asylum at Saint-Remy,

where he was sent after his breakdown, after he cut off his ear.

And there's definitely a sense of craziness about it,

a drunken feeling,

as if he's staring up at the stars and hallucinating.

But I like Van Gogh's other Starry Night as well.

The one in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

It's quieter, more romantic.

He painted it before the breakdown,

when the night was still full of dreams.

The river Rhone twinkling atmospherically beneath the gas lights.

And those blessed candles of the night.

Van Gogh didn't worship the stars only because they are so beautiful.

They had a particular significance for him as well.

He wrote about it in a letter to his brother Theo.

"The stars", wrote Vincent, "Are the souls of dead poets."

This is a portrait of the Belgian poet Eugene Bloch,

a friend of Vincent's.

And, as you can see, to show that he is a poet,

Vincent has surrounded him with stars.

When Van Gogh looked up at the night's sky,

his saw Shakespeare up there,

Byron, Milton, Longfellow,

all shining among the stars.

And he wanted to be up there with them.

But to do that, he had to die first.

So in this startling letter to his brother Theo,

Van Gogh announces that there's no point hanging around,

waiting for death.

The quickest way to become a star

and join the other poets is to commit suicide.

And, of course, that's what he did. He killed himself to get to the stars.

# Starry, starry night. #

Another of Van Gogh's finest night paintings

is this spooky cafe interior.

The Night Cafe At Arles.

The night cafe never closed.

The drunks and the prostitutes would hang about in there all night long,

and Vincent would often join them.

A grim little billiard table in a terrible red interior

that's throbbing with nocturnal anxiety.

Van Gogh stayed up three nights running to paint his Night Cafe.

But I don't think his neurotic cafe interior is the most famous all-night dive in art.

Not quite.

Even better known is this moody picture.

The Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper.

The Nighthawks is a view of an all-night diner,

somewhere to go when everywhere else is closed.

It's supposed to be a real place in Greenwich Village, New York,

near where Hopper lived.

But no one's ever been able to locate the actual diner.

So I suspect it never really existed.

I reckon it's an imaginary diner, thought up in the dark,

and based on the real ones that Hopper remembered.

Hopper was a voyeur by instinct.

He used to travel to work on the El train,

the elevated one that's high up in the street.

As it went past the buildings, he'd catch glimpses of people's rooms flashing by.

Offices, bedrooms, private spaces,

inside which complete strangers would be going about their daily lives,

unaware they were being watched.

I suppose part of it must have been erotic,

a Peeping-Tom atmosphere.

But by the time he painted Nighthawks, Hopper was in his 60s.

So I don't imagine there were huge erotic fires burning in him by then.

I think he was super sensitive to atmospheres and emotionally nosy.

Hopper admitted he was influenced by Van Gogh's Night Cafe,

and also by a spooky short story by Ernest Hemingway,

called The Killers.

The Killers is set in Chicago during Prohibition, the gangster era.

Two hit men walk into an all-night diner

and ask about a retired boxer who usually eats there.

They are obviously here to kill the boxer, but why, we never find out.

Perhaps the boxer didn't throw a fight he was supposed to throw.

Hemingway tells us nothing, so you start to imagine everything.

And that's what Hopper does in his painting as well.

We are on the outside looking in.

We are the voyeurs again.

Inside are four people in the diner -

three men and a woman.

Two of the men are customers, gangster types.

One has his back to us in a sinister fashion.

The other guy gave the picture its name.

His hooked nose reminded Hopper's wife of the bird of prey.

The broad, who looks as if she's seeing plenty of life,

is eating a sandwich, and behind the counter,

the guy who works in the diner is making the coffee or something.

In the Hemingway story, the owner of the diner is actually the hero,

because he knows where the boxer lives, but doesn't tell the two hit men.

Beak Nose over here seems to be with the broad,

and he's looking tough, smoking a cigarette.

But it's the other man, the one with his back to us,

who feels most sinister,

and dangerous.

Nighthawks is like a still from a gangster movie.

Even the shape of the canvas is cinematic.

But where films have beginnings, middles and ends,

this painting doesn't.

It's a movie still without the movie.

A screen grab that says nothing and everything.

Who is the broad? Who's the guy with her?

Who is the man with his back turned?

And what are they all doing?

We'll never know. And we'll never stop wanting to know either.

Hopper had a thing about architecture,

about American buildings and their moods.

In Nighthawks, the people are tiny,

but the setting is big.

And it's the setting that creates that disturbing atmosphere.

Hopper, as I said, was a late developer.

The first picture that got him noticed was painted when he was already 43.

The House By The Railroad, it was called.

The first picture ever bought

by The Museum Of Modern Art in New York, in 1925.

It shows an eerie Gothic mansion, standing on its own,

looming over a passing railroad.

It's just a building, but it's strangely unforgettable.

When Hitchcock, who very much admired Hopper's art,

was making his most disturbing movie, Psycho,

he modelled the spooky Bates Mansion, where all the slashing and murdering takes place,

on Hopper's House By The Railroad.

WOMAN SCREAMING

And then later, that classic TV ghost series, The Addams Family,

was also set in a house inspired directly by the Hopper house.

Architecture played a crucial role too

in the nocturnal imaginings of the Surrealists.

Surrealism is packed with spooky buildings and eerie brumes.

Really famous pictures, like that clever Salvador Dali interior

made up of bits of Mae West's face.

And look at Rene Magritte.

So much of Magritte's art is set in claustrophobic spaces

and mysterious, nocturnal houses.

All this dark, surrealist house symbolism

was inspired by this momentous tome,

The Interpretation Of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud.

According to Freud, our dreams are the doors to our unconscious.

Understand our dreams,

and you understand us.

And houses, rooms are particularly significant.

I'm a little shaky on my Freudian symbolism.

It's not a speciality.

But as I understand it, according to Freud,

the house represents us in our architectural form.

It's our little kingdom.

A surrogate womb in which we shelter from the world.

And in that house, the terrors and yearnings of our childhood

play out an endless game of hide and seek.

Freud claimed that specific bits of a house have specific meanings.

In a man's dream, a room always represents a woman,

because there's always an opening through which you can enter.

So Salvador Dali is having a whole lot of fun, isn't he,

imagining Mae West like this.

Fireplaces represent women too.

And, as for trains...

Well, what do you think?

Going up a staircase, meanwhile, in a dream

represents an unconscious yearning for sex,

with all this rhythmic climbing.

Heaven only knows, therefore, what's going on in this disturbing Surrealist masterpiece,

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,

painted in New York in 1943

by Dorothea Tanning.

Tanning was American.

She was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois,

a quintessential small town.

"In Galesburg, Illinois", she later complained, "Nothing ever happened, except the wallpaper".

Her childhood was repressed and tedious.

And it wasn't till she fetched up in New York and discovered Surrealism

that Dorothea Tanning found her real self.

This is her with the cavalier top and the tendrils and that pet monster.

You know, she's still alive. 101 years old.

Whatever it was she took to get in touch with her subconscious

should be sold in chemists.

But she's never spelt out what her art is about.

Never really explained what's going on in these disturbing night fantasies of hers.

Her masterpiece, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,

got its title from Mozart,

and its mood from a nightmare.

We're in a hotel corridor by the staircase.

Two young girls are on the landing.

Or is it the same girl, before and after?

Or maybe, one of them is a doll and the other one is real.

The only thing we can be sure of is that all the little girls

are Dorothea Tanning.

The entire picture reeks of subconscious anxiety.

That big sunflower at the top of the stairs is particularly sinister.

Somehow you know it's a masculine presence,

because sunflowers are so tall and looming.

Something dark is being remembered here.

Some traumatic childhood encounter.

These are mysteries from the deepest reaches of the feminine psyche.

And I'm clearly not qualified to understand them.

But I do know this is what the night brings out in art.

# There's a moon out tonight

# Whoa-oh-oh ooh

# Let's go strollin'

# There's a girl in my heart

# Whoa-oh-oh ooh

# Whose heart I've stolen

# There's a moon out tonight

# Whoa-oh-oh ooh

# Let's go strollin' through the park. #

There's a crucial component of the night we haven't dealt with yet.

I've been putting it off, because, like a lot of people,

I find myself affected by it.

It's the moon, of course.

When there's a big full moon, I don't sleep well,

my thoughts get anxious, and things feel problematic.

We've never quite decided if the moon is a good thing or a bad one.

On one side, you get the werewolves and the witches,

the moon that drives you mad.

WOLF HOWLING

The word lunatic actually comes from 'luna',

meaning the moon.

On the other side,

moonlight is the perfect accompaniment for romance,

famously magical and seductive.

# There's a moon out tonight. #

Art has been affected by the moon as well.

And art too has never quite decided which moon it prefers,

the dark and crazy one that turns us into werewolves,

or the delicate and magical one that goes so well

with an evening of romance.

Personally, I've had enough darkness for the time being.

Right now, I'm ready for some enchantment and beauty.

I'm ready for Velazquez's Immaculate Conception.

I don't know how well versed you are in the Catholic mysteries,

so the first thing I should clear up here is what the Immaculate Conception actually means.

It's an image of the Virgin Mary, Jesus' mother,

that's found in Catholic art, particularly in Spain.

A lot of people think the Immaculate Conception

represents Mary as a virgin.

Because Jesus was the son of God, he was conceived immaculately.

But that's wrong.

Mary is immaculate.

Not because she was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus,

but because she herself was born without sin.

Only the second woman in history to be born that way.

Mary was exempted from sinfulness

because she was the mother of Jesus,

and had to be born spotless, pure.

And that is what the Immaculate Conception represents.

That's a complicated idea, isn't it?

So imagine if you're a painter,

back in the 12th or 13th centuries,

who's been told to paint a picture of the Virgin Mary as the Immaculate Conception,

as a woman born without sin.

How do you represent an idea as abstract as that?

It puzzled art for centuries,

and it wasn't until the Baroque Age that a solution was finally found.

And it involved the moon.

SONG: "Moonlight Sonata"

This beautiful image of Mary was inspired by a passage in Revelation,

the last book of the Bible, written by St John the Divine.

"And there appeared a great wonder in heaven",

wrote St John, Chapter 12, Verse one.

"A woman with the moon under her feet,

"and upon her head a crown of 12 stars."

SONG: "Moonlight Sonata"

St John doesn't actually say his vision was the Virgin Mary,

but that's how it came to be understood.

And the first painter to popularise this image of the Immaculate Conception

was a Spanish artist from Seville called Francisco Pacheco.

And it was Pacheco's daughter, Juana,

who posed for the beautiful young Mary standing on the moon,

surrounded by stars.

The greatest of all Spanish Baroque painters, Velazquez,

was Pacheco's pupil.

Velazquez married Juana, Pacheco's daughter,

and when he too came to paint the Immaculate Conception,

he used her as his model as well.

You can find her today in the National Gallery in London.

And Velazquez's St John is there as well,

writing his Revelations,

and gazing up and seeing the Virgin Mary on the moon,

so enchanting, so beautiful,

so touchable.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Trains at night are so haunting.

My father worked on the railways.

And I can remember lying awake at night listening to the steam trains rattling past.

In art too, trains have played a huge part.

I can't think of a single artwork that involved a car,

but I can think of plenty involving trains.

# Train I ride is 16 coaches long. #

What is it about steam trains?

Why are they so haunting?

# Train I ride is 16 coaches long

# Well, that long black train

# Got my baby and gone. #

I think it's the fact they are such an all-round experience.

You see them, you hear them, you smell them.

And if you add the night to the mix,

that sense of mystery, of going somewhere,

you have something that sneaks into your imagination

and refuses to leave.

Here in America, the greatest lover of the train at night

was an obsessed photographer called O. Winston Link,

the Rembrandt of the locomotive.

Link trained as an engineer.

His father taught woodwork at a local school,

and when little Winston was a kid,

he'd make things with his father's equipment.

And he developed an emotional relationship with machinery.

Link loved the way that machines work,

and how they achieve things that human beings on their own never could.

In particular, he loved trains,

and the way they made possible the conquest of America.

TRAIN WHISTLES

He began photographing trains in the 1950s.

He'd trained as a commercial photographer,

specialising in difficult shots -

speeding jets, droplets of falling milk.

But his passion was steam trains,

and he set out to photograph the last ones in America.

The steam trains' final stronghold was the Norfolk and Western line.

Link discovered it just in time.

The five years he spent photographing the Norfolk and Western,

from 1955 to 1960,

were the final five years of the steam age.

Taking his photographs at night was hugely problematic,

but also very necessary.

"I can't move the sun," Link explained later,

"And it's always in the wrong place."

"But I can create my own environment through lighting."

Lighting a moving train at night was immensely difficult.

Link spent months and months working out how to do it.

In the end, he rigged up a complex system of flashbulbs,

which he triggered in multiple sequences when the train appeared.

Just one of these flashbulb rigs produced the equivalent

of 50,000 domestic light bulbs, all going off at once.

But that was what was needed to light a train.

Each light bulb could only be used once.

So every O. Winston Link photograph is a risk that's being taken,

and a risk that's paid off.

I met him once.

He came over to England for the first show of his work.

Such a lovely old boy.

A 70-year-old schoolkid in love with trains.

But, of course, the extraordinary thing about his work

is how strange it is,

how surreal.

A typical small town in America with a train going down the middle of it.

An old man fills up a car,

and there's the train.

# People get ready

# There's a train a-coming. #

A couple cuddle at a drive-in

as the train steams past.

In the daytime, all this might have indeed

added up to a record of a passing age.

But at night, in small-town America,

this isn't a record.

It's a haunting.

# You just thank the Lord. #

Matthew, Chapter 27, Verse 45.

"Now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land unto the ninth hour."

"And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice,"

"'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"

Pain, illness, suffering.

They are at home in the dark, aren't they?

When things always seem worse,

and the imaginings begin.

My own mother gave me some excellent advice once.

She said, "Never make an important decision in the middle of the night,"

"because you can't think clearly in the night,"

"and you start to imagine things."

This is the Isenheim Altarpiece.

It was painted in about 1515

by Matthias Grunewald.

It's one of the greatest of all crucifixions,

and, as you can see, it's set in the dark.

Christ on the cross,

surrounded by an impenetrable blackness.

Violated,

brutalised,

deep in pain.

This isn't actually night time though.

That passage in the Bible by St Matthew

about Christ's final moments on the cross

describes a darkness that fell

between the hours of six and nine.

So we are not looking at the night here,

we are looking at an eclipse.

Grunewald saw exactly such an eclipse in real life in 1502.

They say the memory of it haunted his art from then on.

And all this deep blackness gives his great masterpiece

extra scariness and intensity.

He painted it for a religious order called the Antonites.

The Antonites were monks who specialised in caring for the sick,

and particularly, for those poor, poor wretches

who suffered from one of the most terrible of all mediaeval diseases,

St Anthony's Fire.

St Anthony's Fire, or Ergotism, to give it its technical name,

is a wicked, wicked illness.

Caused by a fungus that grows on wet rye,

so it erupts when the world is damp and mouldy, and hungry.

The symptoms of St Anthony's Fire were really scary.

The victims would feel as if their skin was burning.

And sometimes the pain of this fire inside them was so terrible,

they'd chop off their own fingers to get rid of it.

Their flesh would erupt as well in mysterious sores,

like the ones that Grunewald depicts on Christ's body.

There's no mention in the Bible of Jesus suffering from St Anthony's Fire.

It's an invention of Grunewald's, added specially for the Antonites.

St Anthony's Fire didn't just attack your body.

The rye fungus that caused it got to your mind as well.

Its chemical composition was almost identical with LSD.

So you started to hallucinate with it and see things.

Some thought they could fly.

Others felt they were drowning.

Terrible monsters would appear before their eyes.

Burning flesh, gangrenous skin.

The darkest imaginings.

All this Grunewald sought to evoke here.

But he hasn't done it to scare us. That's not the point.

The thing to grasp about this momentous and darkly magnificent altarpiece

is that it wasn't produced to terrify all those poor sufferers

burning with St Anthony's Fire who came here to look at it.

This was painted to give them all hope.

Grunewald's message is that no one's suffering will ever be a match for Christ's.

No one, however ill they are,

will ever go through what Christ had to go through

when he came down to Earth and suffered so much

to save us from our sins,

and to give us hope.

It's a big, big message.

Any big messages always feel bigger still in the dark.

The morning sticks its nose above the horizon.

The witching time is nearly ended.

It's been a busy old night, but we're nearly there.

There's just one more thing we need to clear up before the day breaks.

We need to work out

when this picture was painted.

It's one of art's most iconic images.

Impression Sunrise, by Claude Monet.

The picture which gave its name to Impressionism.

I did a series recently about the Impressionists,

and this picture puzzled the hell out of me.

Not because it gave its name to Impressionism, that's all fine.

But because I was never completely certain

what time of day it actually shows.

In the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, when it was unveiled,

it was called Impression Sunrise, as you'd expect.

But in later exhibitions, where it popped up often,

it was called Impression Sunset.

A title which many believed was the right one.

So what do you think?

Sunset or sunrise?

Here at Sun Tunnels, the sunrise is just a few moments away.

So let's sort it out once and for all, shall we?

Did Monet paint a sunrise or a sunset?

It was painted in Le Havre, the French port where Monet grew up.

Somewhere on the docks.

And this is a map of the location.

So, obviously, that's East and that's West.

So it was either painted about here, looking that way,

or it was painted about here, looking that way.

To settle it, once and for all, I went back to Le Havre, down to the docks.

And I set up two cameras in the two places

from which Impressionism's most famous picture might have been painted.

So camera one over here recorded the sunset.

Camera two over here, the sunrise.

And then we watched it all unfold, as Monet must have seen it.

So let's see what happens.

6:30 in the evening,

and on the sunset camera, the port is closing down.

On the sunrise camera, it's 6:30 in the morning,

and a red glow tells you the sun is breaking.

Back at the sunset camera, the sun's descent has speeded up.

On the morning camera,

a great big ship has parked itself in the middle of the view,

but you can still see the sun rising behind it.

7:15pm, and on the sunset camera,

the poor old sun just about makes it round the big skyscraper.

Hurrah!

On the sunrise camera, it's 7:15 AM,

and the sun is pretty much where Monet painted it,

and everything here looks very familiar.

It was definitely the sunrise, wasn't it?

The colour, the proportions, that glow in the sky.

It all feels right.

So irrefutable TV proof at last

that Impression Sunrise actually shows a sunrise.

So here at Sun Tunnels, the moment has also arrived as well.

The night's finally over.

The day is upon us. Just look at it.

Someone once called this the "Stonehenge of the Aquarian Age",

because it's so elemental,

so basic and sacred.

You know that book, 1,001 Things To Do Before You Die?

Trust me, watching the night coming to an end at Sun Tunnels

should be one of them.

SONG: "Paint It Black"

# I see a red door and I want it painted black

# No colours anymore I want them to turn black

# I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes

# I have to turn my head until my darkness goes. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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