Aberdeenshire Britain's Lost Masterpieces

Britain's major galleries house some of the finest

collections of art to be found anywhere in the world.

But there are thousands of other artworks we know little about,

in the collections of smaller institutions -

government offices, local museums and country houses...

..many of them unrecorded and unknown.

But over 80% of this treasure trove remains locked away in storage.

Lost in this limbo, even works by the biggest names in art

can fall into obscurity.

The Art UK website was created

to shine a light into these shadows

and now has over 200,000 paintings online.

Using this database, we'll been travelling the country,

seeking out potential lost masterpieces

lying unrecognised and unregarded in dusty corridors and storerooms.

When we find a promising painting,

we'll attempt to uncover its hidden history

and true brilliance through a meticulous process

of restoration, research and scientific analysis.

We'll also investigate the stories of how these works

made their way into our public collections,

and what they tell us about where we came from and who we are.

But finding a painting is just the beginning of the trail.

Our search for lost masterpieces has brought us to Scotland.

We have several promising prospects from the Art UK website,

but they all have their roots in warmer climes.

MUSIC: Casta Diva by Vincenzo Bellini

They are all connected in some way to Italy.

And if our hunches are right,

we might have found an unknown painting

by one of the giants of art history.

During the 18th and 19th centuries,

the British developed a love affair with Italian art and culture.

It became a rite of passage for wealthy young men

to undertake a Grand Tour, to complete their education

by going to contemplate the roots of Western civilisation.

For many, this was also an opportunity to go shopping,

and they returned with mementoes of their trip

in the form of paintings and antique sculpture

to adorn their mansions back at home.

Some of the most enthusiastic shoppers were Scots,

who owned the largest landed estates in Britain.

Half of the private land in Scotland now belongs to some 430 people,

but these vast holdings were often unproductive,

and did not always make the laird a wealthy man.

Haddo House, 20 miles north of Aberdeen,

is on the same latitude as Moscow,

and this remote location has made life challenging at times

for the Earls of Aberdeen who lived here.

Today, the house is owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

-Hello.

-Good afternoon.

-Hello, there.

I'd like to welcome you here to Haddo House in Aberdeenshire.

My name's Alan, and I'll be your guide

around the house this afternoon...

Well, folks, this is the lower north quadrant...

Despite inheriting substantial debts,

George Gordon, the 4th Earl of Aberdeen,

managed to amass one of the greatest art collections in Scotland

in the 19th century.

I'll introduce you to the 4th Earl of Aberdeen...

George Gordon was a cousin of Lord Byron,

and the family resemblance is particularly noticeable

in this portrait.

Now, most of our lady visitors vote the 4th Earl

the best-looking male here at Haddo House.

And he is quite a hunk, Alan, I have to say.

Gorgeous George.

SHE CHUCKLES

I have the guide book here...

Fantastic, thank you.

..and a list of the paintings.

Splendid, thank you very much indeed. Lovely.

You're welcome.

The Haddo guide book is the usual mix of upstairs and downstairs,

royal visitors and loyal staff.

I love it - this is the Queen's bedroom,

because this is where Queen Victoria stayed on her visit,

but it was also the place where, during the Second World War

when this building was used as a maternity hospital,

apparently more than 1,000 babies were born in these rooms.

Haddo's Palladian design was inspired by

the 16th-century villas of northern Italy,

transported to Aberdeenshire

with very little allowance for the change of climate.

Orphaned at the age of 11,

George Gordon inherited the earldom in 1801 when he was just 17.

His childhood was spent in a string of grand houses and he grew

up learning to love the Classical civilisations of Italy and Greece.

George made his first visit to Italy when he was still a teenager,

a sort of gap-year Grand Tour,

and he developed a passion for the country -

in particular, for its art and architecture.

It's a theme that continues inside the house,

with frequent reminders of Italian sunshine in oil and watercolour.

George's enthusiasm for all things Italian wasn't unusual at the time -

but for some people a love of Italy seemed to go much deeper than that -

the poet Robert Browning would later write,

"Open my heart and you will see grav'd inside of it - 'Italy'."

The same could just as easily have been said of George.

This love affair was frustrated by a lack of funds -

his grandfather, known as the "wicked Earl",

had worked his way through the family fortune

with a string of mistresses and illegitimate offspring.

George was flat broke - unable to buy the Italian art he adored.

But somehow, over the next few years,

George managed to assemble a significant art collection -

thanks in part to the expertise he acquired on his travels,

as well as a shrewd nose for a bargain.

Many old masters once hanging at Haddo

are now in national art collections...

..but there are a few intriguing prospects still in the house,

that I had seen on the Art UK website.

And this is one of the most exciting.

It's currently listed as a work by a minor Renaissance painter

called Innocenzo da Imola, but this is a very recent attribution,

and it seems to me that there's little evidence to support it.

I think the quality is breathtaking

and it's far too good to be by Innocenzo.

But what gives me butterflies in my stomach is the label,

which says, "After Raphael".

-Oh, hello, there.

-Oh!

-What have you found?

Well, I'm slightly obsessed by this picture hanging over the door.

-Glorious thing.

-Ahh.

Seemingly tucked away in a corner

-Have a gander at it through the binos.

-Thanks.

These are essential stately-home viewing.

Very sensitively done.

Oh, she's gorgeous.

Having looked into it a bit,

I can tell you this is far, far too good

to be by Innocenzo da Imola.

We need to get up close, I think.

I wonder if they've got a ladder here or something.

Lovely.

Keep going.

Keep going.

You're in.

Is this what you use for changing the light bulbs?

Some of them.

Oh, thank you. Right.

All right, I'm in.

If there's one thing I've learned to mistrust over the years,

it's the label on the frame of a painting.

It's so often a bit of wishful thinking

by a less-than-expert owner.

-Raphael...

-It does almost look like it did say Raphael before

-and someone came in afterwards...

-Yes.

-Doesn't it?

"After" Raphael suggests that this is a copy by another artist.

Someone stuck in an "after" because they didn't rate the picture.

-I think they did.

-Can you imagine?

Today, we regard Raphael

as one of the greatest painters who ever lived.

Along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,

he was part of the holy trinity of the Italian Renaissance.

It's a picture that really repays spending a lot of time with it,

-actually, up close.

-I mean, it's incredibly beautiful.

-Yeah.

But it's a picture that certainly doesn't want to be hanging

-above a door in the dark behind a curtain.

-Certainly not.

I can just see a slight alteration to the right hand,

where the artist has had a change of mind, which is significant,

because it shows original creative intention,

and means it's highly likely that this is an original painting,

and not a copy.

This painting is a real puzzle.

Raphael was hugely popular at just the time George was buying pictures,

and there are many 19th-century copies of his works around,

but this composition is completely unknown.

Further investigation required.

Across the room is another painting that caught our attention online.

Quite interested in this landscape here,

which I have to say that when I first came in here,

I sort of glided past it. But I think it's really quite interesting.

Yeah, it's a bit dingy on first sight, isn't it?

The claim on the frame of this one says Claude Lorrain -

the father of landscape painting.

But the National Trust aren't sure about this attribution

because it's also a completely unknown work.

It's not mentioned in any of the books on Claude.

Quite unusual for a big-name artist like Claude.

I mean, this is a 17th-century landscape painter

who revolutionised the genre

and inspired everyone up to Turner and beyond.

And to find a new Claude composition, well,

that would be extremely exciting.

And the picture is so dirty.

There's so much yellow varnish.

You can't actually see at first sight

-that there is the sunset there.

-Oh, gosh, there it is.

-There's the yellow sun.

-Just dipping away behind the hills.

And there is another little detail here I like.

See our chap holding up a fish?

Do you see he was originally fatter?

Oh, yeah, you can see some flesh-coloured...

His stomach was coming out and then...

-They made him a bit more svelte.

-Yeah.

-More sexy, frankly.

Oh, well, I'm glad he does it for you.

But all these things add up. It's quite exciting.

I just find it extraordinary that in a great house like this,

you know, somewhere that the tide of art history

hasn't quite reached yet

because you've got pictures that no-one's published,

that might be by Claude.

You've got something that's called "after Raphael" that...

God knows what that might be.

George Gordon clearly thought this painting was by Claude.

But if he was right,

how has it been completely missed by art historians?

This is the catalogue raisonne of Claude's paintings, some 250 works,

recorded in a book published by someone called

Professor Marcel Roethlisberger,

a world-renowned art historian and Claude expert.

We might almost call this the Claude Bible.

Unfortunately, the painting here at Haddo

is not included in this book.

Perhaps more alarmingly,

the painting is also absent from Claude's own catalogue,

something he called the Liber Veritatis -

The Book Of Truth.

Early on in Claude's career, he was worried about other artists

faking his work, so what he did was he drew a little record

of all his authentic designs and kept those in a book himself.

However, I think the painting here could, in fact,

be a very early work by Claude, from the outset of his career,

which would make it an extremely rare and exciting discovery.

And it would also account for the fact

that it's not included in Claude's Liber Veritatis.

So, we've got two beautiful paintings from Italy,

neither of which have left any trace

on the recorded history of art.

A sublime Mediterranean landscape

and a very sensitively painted Renaissance Madonna.

What they have in common is that they were owned by a very canny man

with an expensive education who had spent time in Italy studying art.

He certainly believed

that they deserved the attributions he gave them.

Our mission is to reinstate the reputation of George Gordon

as an art collector by restoring the lost attributions

of these two paintings.

But one of our problems is the lack of provenance -

the history of the buying and selling of the paintings

since they left the artist's studio.

So we will need to rely only on the works themselves,

and the story of the man who owned them.

The National Trust for Scotland have agreed we can take both the Madonna

and the Claudian landscape away for a full clean and restoration.

There is one more painting I want to take a look at

in this corner of Scotland.

An hour's drive south of Haddo House,

just across the county border into Angus,

is the town of Montrose.

And there's a painting in the Montrose Museum that caught my eye

on the Art UK website.

In the storerooms, in a very sorry state,

is a portrait after Allan Ramsay.

"After" means it's a copy made by another artist.

Ramsay was the leading portrait painter of his generation,

a genius of the Scottish enlightenment,

and he would eventually become "painter in ordinary" to the King.

I have a hunch that this forlorn picture might not be a copy at all.

I think it could be by Ramsay himself.

On first impressions, this painting seems to hold little prospect

of being by a great painter like Allan Ramsay.

It's got a massive hole in it for a start,

almost as if someone has given it an angry kick.

Yet there's something about this face.

When you're looking for the work of a great portraitist -

someone like Allan Ramsay - you want to go beyond mere likeness.

You want to get a feeling of genuine human presence,

the idea that there's someone there.

The subject is someone of great significance to Allan Ramsay -

the man who sponsored his early career, Dr Richard Mead.

Dr Mead was the most senior medical man in Britain,

physician to the King and other celebrity patients

including Sir Isaac Newton,

who may have consulted him for a fruit-related bruise to the head.

Ramsay painted Mead many times, and there is an identical picture

to this one in the National Portrait Gallery in London,

albeit in rather better condition.

But which is the original, and which is the copy?

The collections officer for Angus Council, Dr John Johnston,

gave me a hand digging through the records.

According to the art historian George Vertue,

who was a contemporary of Allan Ramsay's,

there is in fact a lost original of Dr Mead which was painted in 1739

by Ramsay.

And in my game, I have to say,

there's no phrase I like to hear more than the phrase

"lost original."

If this version is by Allan Ramsay

where does that leave the one in the National Portrait Gallery?

Could ours be the lost original that George Vertue mentions?

The picture is in such a terrible condition

that it's difficult to deduce anything at this stage

and John agrees we can send it off for a bit of tender loving care.

Our two Haddo pictures have arrived in Edinburgh.

The National Trust for Scotland

wanted them to be restored in Scotland,

and at the conservation studio

of Owen Davison, the Madonna steps

into the spotlight.

You think the underlying condition is pretty sound?

There are various scattered old retouchings.

The worst is probably this area on her chin.

I've found a record from 1841 when this picture was exhibited

as a Raphael, and I think we can be fairly certain

that when George Gordon owned it, that's what he believed, too.

There are two battens that had been cut into the back of the panel

as supports and one has a very old label attached.

Raphael or after Raphael? That's the question we're facing here.

Is it real, or is it not?

The battens are oak.

The panel is poplar, so it's likely that these were added

after the painting had come north to northern Europe.

-Right.

-Because they don't use oak in Italy.

So far so good.

The materials seem to be historically correct,

but now it's time to start applying the restorer's magic solution.

I love watching this process.

I am fascinated.

Yeah, I don't usually have an audience.

And the yellow on your swab, that's just the old varnish?

That's discoloured varnish, yeah.

Are you able to get an idea of how old this varnish is?

The degree of discolouration would give you one indication.

My guess would be maybe 100 years or so for it to be this yellow.

So that would mean the picture has been restored

in the late 19th century or early 20th century, most recently.

I would say so.

Removing the varnish will help us to get

a proper look at the artist's technique.

But the subject, the Virgin Mary, was one we know Raphael explored

many times in paintings very similar to this

at the start of his career.

I have to say, it's looking quite encouraging.

You could say that Raphael had a bit of a thing for Madonnas.

And George Gordon certainly had a bit of a thing for Raphael.

George first fell in love with Raphael on his Grand Tour.

In 1802 when he made his trip, the itinerary was well established,

and the sights people came to see haven't changed.

It was at this time that the word tourist

was first used to describe these aristocratic young travellers.

When George arrived in Florence,

the sporadic diary he had been keeping just stops.

He obviously had too many distractions.

George spent several months in Italy,

and it fired his imagination.

For many men of his age and position,

a Grand Tour was little more than an opportunity for some fun

away from any disapproving eye,

but George took it all very seriously

and he came away with a real passion for the art he'd seen.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the Italian Renaissance

had already acquired the hallowed status it has today.

Singled out for particular admiration was the short period

at the beginning of the 16th century

when Leonardo and Michelangelo were both working here in Florence.

In 1504, the precociously talented 25-year-old Raphael

moved here from his native Perugia

intent on studying the two great masters he most admired.

His arrival marked the start of what we now know as the High Renaissance.

Raphael would remain in Florence for just four years,

but he quickly became as revered an artist as Leonardo and Michelangelo,

the men he came to learn from.

The pictures he produced

responded to a change in the art market at the time.

More intimate works,

focused on physical human perfection, became popular.

Duke Federico Gonzaga wrote to his dealer to order a picture

saying, "I don't want any saints,

"but rather something lovely and beautiful to look at."

Churches and religious orders still commissioned large paintings,

but now private citizens began to buy these smaller devotional works -

pictures just like the Haddo Madonna.

While he was in Florence,

Raphael began an almost obsessive exploration

of the Virgin and child motif.

He painted at least 17 small Madonnas that we know of,

and if our picture is by him,

this is the most likely place it would have been made.

The way Raphael explored the simple subject of a mother and child

during his time here suggests an interest that goes deeper

than just fulfilling his commissions.

He was searching for a beauty and serenity in his subjects

that became something of a personal journey of discovery,

and the Haddo picture

seems to fit into this sequence of paintings very comfortably.

The National Gallery own one of Raphael's most beautiful Madonnas,

a picture that was rediscovered in 1992

by their former director Sir Nicholas Penny.

The Madonna Of The Pinks was hanging in a corridor at Alnwick Castle

in Northumberland and its story has much in common with our own picture.

There's a great story that I found it in a dark corridor.

And I just want to make it quite clear that actually,

it was quite a bright corridor.

And I was invited to stay, and because I had breakfast there,

I went down this corridor.

And I thought, what is that picture doing in that frame?

And this was obviously an extremely expensive frame

and it said "Raphael" in raised letters.

A simple act of hospitality

was to end up netting Sir Nicholas's host, the Duke of Northumberland,

just under £35 million for the painting.

Was there a sort of light bulb moment where you suddenly thought,

"Crikey, this is a really good picture"?

I think I'd go a bit further than that, actually, Bendor.

I'd say that if something was called a Raphael

and given a very expensive frame by an extremely important collector

in the middle of the 19th century

who was buying on extremely well-qualified advice,

that picture has to be taken seriously.

This is all music to my ears,

as the Haddo Madonna ticks all these boxes.

It was believed to be by Raphael, it's in an expensive frame,

and when he acquired it in the early 19th century,

our George, the 4th Earl of Aberdeen,

was indeed a respected collector,

and he would certainly have taken very good advice.

So how do paintings lose their attributions?

On whose authority was George's good judgment called into question?

I'm hoping I can shed some light on this process back at Haddo House

where I have an appointment to see the archives.

George Gordon died in 1860, and almost at once,

his collection began to suffer from sceptical appraisals

and the loss of its big names when the family was feeling the pinch.

I met the current Lord Aberdeen

to look at the inventories of his great-great grandfather's paintings.

The earliest one that we have here is this one from 1867,

seven years after the 4th Earl died.

I mean, clearly the collection has some really stellar pictures,

that are now in national museums.

Top of the list,

we have The Adoration Of The Shepherds by Veronese.

Well, that picture, I think, is now in the Ashmolean Museum -

and here's Pope Paul II, Emperor Charles V,

and Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara by Titian,

which is now in The National Gallery in London.

£300, that was valued at.

And it was sold for considerably less than that, I believe,

by my great-grandmother in...

-..probably in the 1890s.

-Oh, right.

-How much for?

-I think...

-From memory, I think it was about 70 guineas.

-Oh, dear.

-Yes.

-Something happened.

There was a degree of fiscal naivete in the family from the 1870s,

for about 100 years.

Works by Veronese, Titian, and Canaletto

all went under the hammer,

and the Haddo Madonna would almost certainly have gone the same way,

had it not been deemed a copy soon after George's death.

Right, what did they make of the Raphael? Here we are.

"The Virgin, after Raphael." £80.

That's 1867.

And we have this one from 1899.

Here it is. Number 58.

"Head Of The Virgin.

"Small head size, fine copy, after Raphael."

That's just 20 quid here.

Well, if that was the real deal,

-there would be some change, wouldn't it?

-Mm.

I have no doubt at all

that if that picture had been attributed to Raphael

and known to have been by Raphael,

it would have been sold long before this exercise came about.

I see. Right.

-And probably for a bargain basement price.

-Oh, right.

'It looks like being valued at 20 quid

'saved George's possible Raphael.'

'But how about our other discovery? The possible Claude.'

'Owen is ready to start removing the old yellow varnish.'

A blue sky underneath an old yellow varnish

-would look like a green sky, wouldn't it?

-Yeah.

We are the first people to see it, hopefully, as Claude left it for...

..hundreds of years.

I'm hoping that the area round his belly,

the artist originally made him a little bit plumper.

Then changed his mind, and painted over the...

-extended tummy.

-Yeah.

-Do you think we dare have a look in the sunset for me, here?

-Sure.

There is the sun.

Just starting to dissolve the old varnish,

and so that allows us to start to look into the painting a bit more.

I like the look of that foliage in that tiny tree.

You can see the branches.

And a lovely soft light falling on top of the leaves. Wonderful.

Just in that one small window you've cleaned, there,

we can begin to see a much more subtle gradation of colours.

Absolutely, yeah.

And for a master of painting light, like Claude,

-that's just what we want to see.

-Mm.

Claude's success was built on the languorous warmth

that seemed to emanate from his pictures.

In a British drawing room,

you could almost warm your hands on them.

They are postcards from the past,

and at their most seductive,

his landscapes are a perfect memento of the Roman countryside.

John Constable described Claude

as the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw,

and said his pictures showed the calm sunshine of the heart.

This is the River Tiber,

north of Rome,

and this is where Claude came to find that calm sunshine.

Claude Gellee was from Lorraine in north-eastern France,

and, like painters from all over Europe,

he came to Italy to learn his trade.

Claude's landscapes were almost all imaginary,

but he created them using on-the-spot sketches

that he made out in the open air.

He travelled widely in Italy,

to Venice, Genoa and Naples,

but he decided that the Roman campagna,

the countryside around the city,

had the perfect combination of light and topography,

and I think he was spot on.

His first biographer described how

"he tried by every means to penetrate nature,

"lying in the fields before the break of day and until night

"in order to learn to represent very exactly

"the red morning sky,

"sunrise,

"sunset,

"and the evening hours."

What he was really good at

was creating a sense of incredible depth.

Your eye travels on a seemingly endless journey

from the foreground to the horizon,

with hints of hidden places, woods and glades, castles and ruins,

framed by a distant blue mountain,

or a tranquil sea.

For British Grand Tourists,

there was no better memento of their trip.

These were Arcadian visions of idyllic summer evenings,

and they could take one home,

hang it on the wall,

and remember.

George was a one-man cultural phenomenon.

Not content with seeing Italy,

he continued his travels through Greece, Turkey and Albania.

He visited every collection of art and antiquities he could,

even helping to excavate some archaeological sites himself.

When he arrived in Athens,

he found the Earl of Elgin at work removing the Parthenon Marbles.

George sent back some of his own finds

on one of Lord Elgin's ships,

and eventually returned to Britain through Germany and Austria.

But despite his wanderlust,

in the end, it was still Italy that George would find

"grav'd inside his heart".

His trip would lead to a career in the diplomatic service,

and his eventual appointment as Foreign Secretary,

and ultimately, Prime Minister,

despite, as one colleague commented,

"an almost ludicrous lack of experience".

It's somehow fitting that his artistic hero, Raphael,

is buried here in the Pantheon,

the only complete structure in the city to have survived

from Rome's Imperial past,

and, consequently, a building with an iconic status

for a classics nut like George.

Increasingly burdened with responsibilities,

his art collection became a solace to him,

and owning a Renaissance Madonna, and a Claude,

would serve as reminders of his gilded youth,

and those warm summer evenings by the Tiber.

We've found an auction record

which suggests that George bought his Claude in 1803,

immediately after he got back to Britain,

so it certainly fits the notion that he was seeking a reminder

of his trip to Italy.

When George bought his Claude,

the most successful and popular painter in Britain was JMW Turner,

and Turner's admiration for Claude

went far beyond anything George felt.

Hanging opposite each other in the National Gallery,

as Turner demanded in his will,

are two paintings that are part of a conversation

that went on for the whole of Turner's career.

Dido Building Carthage is an homage to Claude,

painted on the same scale,

and using the same composition

as Claude's Embarkation Of The Queen Of Sheba.

The first time Turner saw this painting,

he was such a fan of Claude that he burst into tears.

Turner marvelled at Claude's ability to paint light,

and he described it as "pure as Italian air."

He may have got all emotional at the sight of Claude's work,

but Turner was also a hard-nosed businessman,

and he was responding to market forces.

By this time,

around 150 pictures by Claude were in British collections,

amounting to half his entire life's work.

Britain was in the grip of Claude-mania.

Although Claude was a Frenchman painting in Italy,

in London, at the turn of the 19th century,

he was seen almost as an honorary Brit.

And such was his influence that country mansions

used to sit in landscapes inspired entirely by Claude's paintings,

and any landscape artists who wanted to be sure of selling their works

was obliged to mimic Claude's seductive mix

of warm Mediterranean light and classical myths and legends.

Turner painted this picture in 1815.

In the same year,

Britain finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo,

and found herself the world's first global super-power.

Now the British were assembling their own empire,

Claude's pictures, showing the serenity of empires of the past,

made it all seem like a terrifically good idea.

In all the excitement,

we mustn't forget our other challenge.

The portrait of Dr Richard Mead,

"after" Allan Ramsay.

The picture has safely made the journey to London,

to the studio of Simon Gillespie,

who will be restoring the appalling indignities

it has suffered over the centuries.

Simon, I think most people would look at this picture,

and while you and I might say "That's a beautifully painted head",

they'll go... "There's a massive hole in it."

It's a horrible hole,

and luckily I think that the Rips around there we can actually,

just like a jigsaw puzzle, put them all together,

and actually there'll be a very slight line

where we can actually just knit.

What we do is take off all those things

that are making those deformations,

but then we'll get, because of this severe rip,

we're going to have to support

the whole of the original canvas with another canvas.

The quality is very good, but actually the condition, importantly,

is very good as well, because the two of them together

will enable us to find out who this is by.

All right. OK.

It's got to be by Allan Ramsay, that's the idea.

The best pictures are sometimes preserved in neglect,

and I think this has...

This has been neglected and hasn't been treated by poor restoration.

So, in other words,

by not being considered to be an important work by Allan Ramsay...

-Yes.

-..it has been left...

-Yeah.

..and it hasn't been attended to by cack-handed restoration.

-Yeah.

-Great.

This is housekeeping.

-This is taking off the dirt.

-Yeah.

And now we can see into the picture,

-and it's actually quite a nice shot, isn't it?

-Yes.

In order to make a case for the Ramsay attribution,

I'd been doing a bit of sleuthing in the journals of his contemporary,

George Vertue,

who had actually seen him at work on the original portrait of Dr Mead.

This is from George Vertue,

the art historian to whom I am often indebted.

He says "Ramsay still accustoms himself to draw the faces

"in red lines, shades, etc...

"..finishing the likeness in one red colour or mask,

-"before he puts on the flesh colour."

-Perfect.

-And that's exactly what we've got here.

-Perfect.

-Isn't it?

I mean, you can see the red underneath the pink.

-Yeah.

-Pure red in there, isn't there?

-And red coming through in this.

-Yeah.

This is extremely rare,

to get a contemporary account from the time the picture was painted,

-and then to be able to match it up...

-Yeah.

-..with the technique to the document.

-Yeah. Well found.

It's such a good portrait.

There's a real person, there. I'm convinced it's by Ramsay.

Being born in Edinburgh was something of a handicap

for an aspiring painter at the beginning of the 18th century.

There was no academy of fine art in Scotland,

and to really learn his trade,

Ramsay would need to study elsewhere...

..and thanks to his sponsor, Dr Mead,

he went somewhere where they had the very best art academies.

BELLS RINGING JUBILANT

Italy.

In fact, making the journey to Italy to complete their training

was very common for painters from all over Europe.

This is the little-known flipside of the Grand Tour,

because after young aristocrats,

the most frequent travellers were aspiring artists.

The journey was often made in the company of wealthy patrons,

but thanks to the generosity of Dr Mead,

Ramsay could afford to travel independently.

Like so many other British visitors,

Allan Ramsay arrived in Rome through these gates.

It was 26th October 1736,

and a week earlier, Ramsay had celebrated his 23rd birthday.

By sponsoring a promising young painter to learn his craft in Italy,

surrounded by classical and Renaissance splendours,

it was hoped some of that artistic glory would rub off on them,

and in Ramsay's case, it worked a treat.

Working in the studio of an Italian master

meant that, when he got home, a British painter could knock out

a fine classical portrait of his patrons,

or a view of their mansion,

or landscaped park,

as if it had been painted by Claude.

Ramsay was soon living in rooms here, in the Piazza di Spagna,

at the bottom of the Spanish Steps.

The area was already becoming a bit of a British ghetto,

and Ramsay was to set up his own little outpost

of the Scottish Enlightenment in this corner of Rome.

According to his friend's diary,

for three weeks, Ramsay "did little else than scamper about the streets,

"staring and admiring."

It's interesting that he was less enamoured by the Raphaels he saw

than George Hamilton-Gordon would be 70 years later.

But, ultimately, he was here with a purpose.

To learn.

By November 1736, he had settled down to study,

joining the workshop of a respected painter,

Francesco Imperiali,

and enrolling in the drawing class of the French Academy.

On 15th November,

he arrived with a letter of introduction,

but he was so excited to get going

that he went straight into a life drawing class.

It's lovely to see here one of the many drawings he made

while he was in Rome.

These life classes were probably the first time

that Ramsay, as a Scot, had drawn from the nude -

public life drawing was prohibited at home

due to the objections of the Church of Scotland.

Ramsay's time in Italy was important in a wider sense for art in Britain.

He spent three years here, working in Rome and Naples,

and when he returned, the influences he'd absorbed

not only changed his own techniques,

but had a profound effect on British painting.

Ramsay returned to Britain

infused with the style and technique of the late Baroque,

and helped introduce to British painting

what would become known as the "grand manner" -

adding classical architecture and noble gestures to his portraits

to suggest the manners and learning of the sitter.

The portrait of Dr Mead is very much in the grand manner -

a bust of Sophocles over one shoulder,

the Greek god of medicine over the other,

and medical textbooks open on the desk.

The grand tours that artists made

significantly raised the bar of domestic art in Britain.

These painters hoovered up the creative culture of Italy

and carried it home

where it not only influenced the work of existing artists

but led to a rash of academies,

training a new generation in the art of the grand manner.

Ramsay was to revisit Italy

many times over the course of his career

and became himself an accomplished classical scholar and antiquarian,

as well as one of the most popular portrait painters in Britain.

The knowledge that he gained from his grand tour

has played no small part in that success,

so I imagine Dr Mead felt he got a good return on his investment.

Simon has spent several weeks

working on the portrait of Dr Mead...

..and the results are frankly incredible -

there is no sign whatsoever

of the substantial hole in the canvas.

The acknowledged expert when it comes to Allan Ramsay

is Dr Duncan Thomson...

At first glance, they look quite similar.

..and the National Portrait Gallery have kindly allowed us

to stage a head-to-head showdown with their version of Dr Mead

which, up until now, has been considered the original.

I waited patiently as he had a really good look at them both.

He doesn't know that ours is on the left.

That's a much better portrait.

The moment you home in on the faces, you see, in the picture from Angus,

a real individual.

The face, painted with real observation, sensitivity.

Real contact between artist and subject.

You look at the NPG painting,

the first that strikes you, actually,

is this dead sense within the head.

It's got the feeling of ceramics.

Look at the wig - very, very peremptory in its handling.

-The moment you home in on that head...

-Yes.

..you get the sense of a real individual,

interacting with the artist.

Even here, the very delicate handling

within those little, greenish shadows

-on that rather plump double chin...

-Yes.

Pure Ramsay handwriting. Pure Ramsay handling.

This will be very good news for Montrose Museum.

A place of honour has been found on the walls for Dr Mead

since he has now become the most significant painting

in their collection.

That looks great.

John Johnston has organised a small gathering

to hear what we have discovered.

Now it was always known

that when Ramsay comes back from Italy,

he paints a portrait of Mead as a sort of gift, a thank you,

but it wasn't known where the original was.

It was thought the original

was probably the one in the National Portrait Gallery.

However, I am very pleased to be able to say

that this is, in fact, that lost original portrait

and the restoration and the cleaning of the picture has revealed,

actually, a work of extreme brilliance.

Really very nice to have it back

and to be able to put it on public display again.

I feel fantastically privileged

to be able to rescue works like this picture,

and see the pleasure it brings to a small institution

like the Montrose Museum.

A real treasure of Angus returned to where it belongs.

Thank you very much.

With one problem put to bed,

it's time to turn our attention back to our unassuming star,

the Haddo Madonna

and its attribution as a copy "after Raphael".

Art restoration lore says

that if there is evidence of the artist changing his mind,

showing original creative thought,

then it's unlikely to be a copy, and we have seen that

in the arrangement of the fingers in this picture.

However, that still leaves us

with no direct link to any known Raphael composition.

So I've come to the Witt Library to explore another avenue.

I'm here to look at Raphael's drawings,

in the hope that we can find something a little bit more tangible

to connect the painting at Haddo House to Raphael himself.

I have found a picture online of a drawing which, I think,

looks to be quite close to the painting at Haddo House.

However, unfortunately, it's a very bad photograph

and I see in this catalogue online that the drawing is, in fact,

described as "lost".

However, fortunately, here in the Witt Library,

we've found this, which fits compositionally the painting

at Haddo House really quite precisely.

The outline of the face is identical.

The angle of the eyes, the angle of the nose,

the shape of the head,

even the folds in the headdress itself

and the line of the neck...

..all appears, to me, to match pretty exactly

the composition at Haddo House.

It's potentially very exciting.

If I knew what the Italian was for "game on", I would say it,

but I don't.

I looked it up -

"inizio partita", apparently,

for those of you wondering.

But comparing the known Raphael drawing

to the Haddo painting,

I'm tempted instead to say "mucca sacra",

which is "holy cow!"

The Madonna has been under the infra-red camera

and the underdrawing it has revealed

is adding weight to our case.

It's really beautifully done with a clear and confident line,

and in just the style we would expect from a genuine Raphael.

It seems the more we find out,

the more compelling the evidence for a Raphael attribution.

Owen has now completed the work on the cleaning of the painting

and some more fascinating details have been uncovered.

Now, just as interesting to a paintings anorak like me

is the sort of thing we learn

on the back and the side of the picture.

This white layer you can see exposed on the edge is the ground layer,

the first layer of preparation

that the artist would have put on the wooden panel

and, in this case, we've analysed it

and know that it's made of gypsum,

which is exactly the right type of ground layer

that artists were using in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.

That gypsum ground layer goes out of use

towards the end of the 16th century.

The panel - well, this is poplar wood,

which is the preferred wood of artists in Italy

in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Finally, most intriguing of all, is that where someone later on,

I think in the 19th century,

has cut some channels in the back of the panel in order to put

these batons in, because they wanted to stop it warping,

they have revealed this fascinating little fruitwood insert,

which the original panel maker would have put in

when they were preparing the panel for the artist to use.

In the 15th and 16th centuries,

they were worried about knots in the wood cracking over time

so what they used to do was carve out

a little half centimetre deep channel and put in

a little plug of wood of a different kind and then they would

match the grain to the direction of the grain in the panel.

That is exactly what we have got exposed in this channel here.

Now, none of these things mean that the painting is by Raphael

or indeed any specific artist,

but what they tell us is that we can be pretty confident

that we are dealing with a picture from the right period of history.

The fruits of George Gordon's travels are most evident

back at his home in Scotland.

The landscape we see today was his creation,

moulding the Aberdeen hills into a Claudian arcadia.

With a classical urn and some carefully placed lakes,

he has left us with a reminder of the place he loved best - Italy.

All of George's many pursuits and enthusiasms, as a statesman,

art lover and antiquarian, came together in this house,

and it would be a really wonderful result if we could help restore

his reputation as a collector

by reaffirming the status of two of his most significant paintings.

First up is the Claude.

We were delighted to discover that Professor Marcel Roethlisberger,

whose very helpful book on Claude was published in 1961,

is still the best man to authenticate our picture.

It is almost like a cliche of Claude, you know,

this is the kind of thing

that has been immensely imitated right after him.

We are so used to the seductive power of a rural landscape

with a radiant sunset, it's easy to forget that back in art history

somebody had to invent the cliche -

that somebody was Claude.

It breathes beautifully,

the atmosphere is harmonious,

the spatial expanse is profound and convincing.

And the details are there, too.

And it is very readable.

So, in this small format,

it makes a complete universe with this.

There is no doubt,

I am convinced this is entirely by the hand of Claude and only by him

on the evidence of the composition,

but equally on the evidence of the handling.

There is a personal handwriting in it and one recognises that.

These are happy discoveries.

And that is one of the...effect of English collections,

that they still have amazing surprises.

The final act of our restoration drama is the Haddo Madonna.

It's a bold claim to have discovered a lost work by Raphael

and confirmation, if it comes, will require far more research,

technical analysis and consensus among the experts

than we've had the time or budget for.

My opinion, for what it's worth,

is that everything seems tantalisingly right.

I think it could be by Raphael,

but we've asked Sir Nicholas Penny to give us his response.

It's very beautiful. I am very impressed by parts of it.

The painting of the hair seems absolutely...

It seems very characteristic indeed.

The ear, the veil, absolutely what he liked, the modelling,

the light under the chin.

The drawing of the face, it is a very distinctive Raphael type.

Almost exaggerated.

I mean, the area at the top of the nose

is more marked than you'd normally find.

The features are, when you start analysing it,

you think they are a little lost in the face.

That is something that you do find in Raphael.

It's a very big ask for me to ask you to come up here

and look at a picture and judge it on the basis of connoisseurship

that this might be by one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

-HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

-Yes. Quite right.

I have had a cup of coffee...

If one was to look at the sort of rather,

perhaps sometimes rigid,

but formal ways in art history we catalogue these pictures,

there's a sort of intermediate "attributed to" level

when we're not quite sure, but we are confident.

Would you go for attributed to Raphael?

I have to tell you this, one of my very few achievements

as director of the National Gallery

was to abolish the use of the word "attributed".

I've got the curators at the National Gallery to commit to "by",

"probably" or "perhaps",

which are degrees, which I think the public actually recognise.

So in terms of this picture, "by", "probably", "perhaps"?

At the moment, where are you going?

Well, I'm definitely on the "probably".

Between "probably" and "by".

I mean, I just want a bit more time and courage.

-I think that's a result for Haddo, don't you?

-Very exciting.

Back at Haddo, the two pictures have been returned,

and like all the best country house mysteries,

we've assembled everyone in the drawing room

to reveal our conclusions.

Staff from the National Trust for Scotland,

including our original guide, Alan,

are joined by Lord Aberdeen, who has come to find out

if his great-great-grandfather's judgment was sound.

First up is our Landscape with Fishermen,

whose attribution has been in doubt for 200 years.

There was quite a lot of overpaint.

Now that the varnish and everything has been removed,

the picture sings in that sort of Claudian harmony,

which is what got people

like George, Earl of Aberdeen, so excited.

We have shown this picture, cleaned, to Professor Marcel Roethlisberger,

who is the great Claude guru,

and we now have this confirmed as an early Claude

from that sort of revolutionary moment

when he is changing the whole nature of landscape paintings.

This is one of very few examples from that period.

We can now be in no doubt at all as to what it is.

There was one significant alteration,

which is the belly of the main fishermen here.

The way the shaft of sunlight

comes in and catches his tummy

helps illuminate that focal point of the picture.

Someone had decided to send him to the gym and had flattened his belly.

So now that works much more happily as Claude had intended.

With Claude confirmed as the painter of our landscape,

we turned to our most audacious attribution -

the Haddo Madonna probably by Raphael.

So this lovely Madonna was hanging above the door there looking

rather yellow and jaundiced.

In cleaning, we have revealed the most delicate and fantastic

glazes and colours, especially in areas like the hands here,

which are really beautifully modelled.

We showed the picture to Sir Nicholas Penny

who used to be director of the National Gallery

and, very pleasingly, he said that this had

a really excellent chance of being by Raphael.

Which I think would make it the only publicly owned Raphael in Scotland.

But, I think, we have done the best we can with the time available

and the resources we have

to significantly elevate this picture status.

I think it is a work of extreme beauty

and I hope that it does great things for Haddo House.

It's good to know, with absolute certainty,

that this little slice of Italian sunshine is by Claude.

The Haddo Madonna will need further work.

We have discovered much to suggest it is by Raphael,

but this is only the start of a lengthy process of attribution.

-Absolutely exquisite.

-Very lucky that it is in such good condition.

Whatever the conclusions reached,

Alan will have to revise certain elements of his tour of the house.

I am so excited, so excited. It will make a big difference to my tour.

I will be able to speak about the Madonna and hopefully

by word-of-mouth, we will get many,

many more visitors here to Haddo House.

So, I am really excited.