Belfast 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 be travelling the country,

seeking out potential lost masterpieces

lying unrecognised and unregarded in dusty corridors and store rooms.

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 come from and who we are.

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

In 1921, Ireland was divided.

Belfast was the industrial powerhouse of the North.

Her shipyards were the largest in the world,

when the Titanic was launched.

But now, the city became the capital of a new state,

within the United Kingdom.

Among the institutions built to create a sense of community

for the six counties in the North was the Ulster Museum.

It inherited a historic art collection and,

with extraordinary vision and energy,

set about creating a new artistic identity.

The museum reopened in 2009 after a major refurbishment,

and now attracts half a million visitors a year,

but exhibition space is limited,

and the art on the gallery walls is only

a small sample of the wealth of riches in the store rooms.

We really start in the 17th century, and we go right up to contemporary.

Anne Stewart is the curator of fine art.

We have a small, but important collection of Old Master paintings,

but the great strength is 20th century and contemporary

and Irish, because we have the complete history,

from the beginning of the 18th century through to contemporary.

We had a number of promising leads from researching the museum

collection on the Art UK website, and right at the top of the list

were a pair of 17th century panel paintings.

Winter and Spring form part of a well-known set of four seasons,

originally begun by the Flemish artist, Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

There are versions by numerous painters in existence,

but the finest are those by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger,

and they are now very sought-after.

These two, however,

are listed in the museum database as being after

Pieter Brueghel the Younger,

meaning they're thought to be copies made by another artist.

I'm not sure about that.

Well, and actually, look, here on the frame.

It looks like at one point they were obviously thought to be

by Brueghel the Younger himself.

-Yes.

-What's the kind of hierarchy there?

After is not good, is it?

-After's not good.

-No.

-After's not worth much.

The bottom end of the scale, and then you've got

workshop of Brueghel the Younger,

so that's done by pupils or assistants in the workshop,

but not the man himself.

-No.

-And then obviously you've got autograph, which is,

is it by the man himself?

And that's where you get really valuable pictures coming in.

There are parts of these which I really like.

Look at the depth here of the landscape.

You almost can feel the wintry air.

And look - here's someone falling down on the ice.

A bare cheek.

A bawdy party up here, in the house.

But I love this one. This is really good.

And the Spring is...

Although Spring's got a few more problems.

-What's going on in this field here? That looks like a swamp.

-Oh, gosh.

-Look at those sheep.

-No, they're rubbish, aren't they?

But I reckon this has been interfered with by someone else.

We've got two different skies.

One is blue and looks quite good and authentic,

and this looks like someone's put Tippex all over it.

Yeah, what we've got here

are two pictures that could have been unjustly downgraded.

'The provenance of a picture,

'establishing its ownership since it was made,

'is vital to help us understand why these are thought to be copies.

'The museum records show they were donated in 1906.'

This is the daybook for 1906.

Here we go. 1906, number 187.

"Two specimens, Spring and Winter in oils, ascribed to Brueghel."

-There.

-There we go. Ah, well, actually,

I think it does say "by Brueghel," underneath in pencil.

That looks like a B and a Y, and then there's a capital B.

It looks like people have been uncertain about

-what these pictures are for some time.

-So these came from where?

W T Braithwaite, and this was really quite a substantial gift in 1906,

because you can see all the paintings listed here,

and then quite a lot of other quite interesting material.

-Oval medallion, ivory netsukes...

-Yeah.

-Stoneware jug.

-Yeah. Buddha.

-Coffee pot.

-Yeah.

'The contents of this gift suggest an idiosyncratic donor,

'with a wide range of interests, and a substantial collection.'

And who was W T Braithwaite?

Well, he was a local figure in Belfast.

We don't know a great deal about him.

Well, that could be one line of inquiry for us, I think?

-Mm.

-Yeah.

In 1906, philanthropic gifts from wealthy individuals like

Mr Braithwaite were vital. There was no money to purchase works of art,

and donations were the only way to add to a museum's holdings.

An art collection develops its own unique character,

built on the interests of its donors and the life of

the community it serves.

The stories of our museums really are the stories of ourselves.

So who were the big benefactors of the Ulster Museum collection?

Highlights include a large bequest from the Belfast born painter,

Sir John Lavery, including portraits of his wife, Hazel,

whose image was used on the first Irish banknotes.

There are also some fine depictions of the city's development

as industrialisation took over from traditional occupations,

like growing flax.

'But one thing that surprised me in this collection was the number of

'early 20th-century British works.'

That could really only be Stanley Spencer, couldn't it?

-Yeah.

-Presumably this is Cookham?

We've got here the village that he kept returning to.

They called him Cookham, actually, at college, didn't they?

Because when he was studying at the Slade in London,

-he used to go back home for tea every day.

-Right.

It's a very weird religious scene by the look of it here,

transposed to the village.

Exactly. The garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal of Christ,

but transposed back to Cookham.

This picture, and the many others from the period,

suggest a donor with a shrewd knowledge of

modern British painting, but, bizarrely, it turns out that

he never owned a single work of modern art.

The benefactor was a wealthy linen merchant,

Sir Robert Lloyd Patterson, and just like our Mr Braithwaite,

he gifted his entire collection to the museum.

Robert Lloyd Patterson left to the museum a collection of

Victorian paintings, which were deemed to not be of museum quality.

So the quite astonishing step was taken of selling them and using

the proceeds to buy young, contemporary British artists.

Well, that's very radical.

And his widow was quite happy for the paintings to be sold and

the money to be used to buy the young, British artists,

but she said she would prefer, then, the collection was called after him,

which was absolutely right.

So that's why the name is still attached to the collection.

Something a little more in my corner of the forest are a pair of

monster-size old brown portraits,

which are described as being by an unknown artist.

Oh, Queen Mary.

-I like this one.

-A very yellow Queen Mary.

-Yellow-y green.

-Yes, she looks very ill.

Varnish, being an organic substance,

goes off after about 50 years, and so you get this sort of yellow hue.

In the same frame, this must be husband.

-Here he is.

-Oh, so these are a pair?

Lovely.

William III, obviously, being one of our most distinctive monarchs

with his huge nose. Not that there's anything wrong with that,

before you say anything, Jacky, unkind about kings with large noses.

But didn't Mary...? She cried for a week before they got married?

I've got to be honest - if this was offered as my future husband,

I'm not sure I'd be leaping with joy.

'I'm surprised William and Mary are in storage,

'because William, Prince of Orange, known as King Billy around here,

'is a legendary figure for Northern Irish Protestants,

'lending his name to the Orangemen. It was his victory at

'the Battle of the Boyne that cemented English rule in Ireland.'

This is a fine picture, and it's in lovely condition.

Well, I think we can get somewhere with that.

I think we should follow those up.

'So, we've now got several mysteries that we need to investigate.

'Who did paint these two lovebirds?'

What's the story behind the revolutionary policy

of buying modern art while the paint was still wet?

And, most importantly,

can our two panels AFTER Pieter Brueghel the Younger

be moved up the artistic pecking order?

In order to begin to explore the question of who painted these two,

the Ulster Museum agreed that we can take them away for a full

scientific analysis and restoration.

And we'll also start to look into the story of

the mysterious philanthropist, Mr W T Braithwaite.

But, before we do that, on the other side of the city

there's one more artistic conundrum we've uncovered -

a disagreement over a painting that's been festering for decades.

The controversy began soon after Belfast became

the capital of Northern Ireland. There was a great flurry of

building activity, as the city scrambled to find room for all

the new institutions of state.

Perhaps the most immediate need was met by the new parliament buildings

at Stormont, which were opened in 1932.

It is an impressive building in a powerfully dominant natural setting,

and fiercely emblematic of the new state.

Inside, the long stone corridors felt very empty, and the hunt began

for some equally monumental and emblematic art to hang on the walls.

-Hmm. Nice picture.

-Mm.

'This picture was bought for Stormont, sight unseen, from a

'London auction in March 1933, because it purported to show

'William III in Ireland, before the Battle of the Boyne.

'Just the sort of thing to stir an Orangeman's heart.'

They haven't spotted that up in the sky there is the Pope,

apparently giving his blessing over the Protestant King William III.

So why would the Pope be blessing a Protestant king he's defeated?

-Well, quite.

-I mean, I know they say, "Is the Pope Catholic?"

but he really was a Catholic.

'The controversy was immediate.

'Questions were asked in the House by furious Unionists,

'who objected to the Pope being shown above the revered King Billy.

'But worse was to follow two months later.'

I have an amazing picture here that I have to show you.

Councillor Forester is this chap in the middle,

and this is Mary Ratcliffe,

who was the wife of a leading Scottish Protestant.

They make a little trip to Woolworths on their way to Stormont,

where they pick up some red paint and a knife,

and she takes the knife, gets close to the picture,

and hacks away at the bottom of the canvas here.

-Wow.

-Quite serious damage, by the look of it.

-Very.

And he, in the meantime is flinging red paint up there at the top,

over the Pope. This guy, some sort of a hermit,

you can see his elongated finger here,

apparently originally - it's been painted out -

there was a rosary hanging from that finger.

-Ah, OK.

-So they've gone straight for the most Catholic symbols

in this whole picture.

The scratch from Mary Ratcliffe's knife is still visible in the

marble wall where the picture hung.

As a result of this incident, the painting became notorious.

It was removed from public view, and is still one of the highlights

of a trip behind the scenes at Stormont.

But can we finally unlock the secret of its origins?

Is this really William III,

and, if so, why is he being led by a Catholic hermit?

And what's the meaning of the flag with its crown and crossbow?

It's not going to be easy. If this was a Sudoku puzzle,

it would be on the "fiendish" level,

but I just feel the answer is waiting to come out here.

Helping us to find the answers to the puzzles hidden in

all our paintings is picture restorer, Simon Gillespie.

The most powerful testimony to the past life of a work of art

always comes from the painting itself, and with a battery of

modern scientific tools, but most importantly an expert eye,

and a forensic touch, Simon will help us find the evidence we need.

The two panels, thought to be copies

of the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger,

have arrived from Northern Ireland.

I think Winter is the better one of these two.

Certainly in terms of its condition.

You've got a lot of overpaint on this.

It's so thick, you can't really see through it,

so there's going to be a reason for it.

You can see it's spreading all over the place.

All of the trees are painted over.

When you get down here, you can actually see some really nice,

clear, uninterfered with, drawings.

-Look at his boot and the flowers.

-Mm.

-You know, this peculiar man here.

-I love him, he's my favourite.

I agree. He's got a lot of character. He's been told off by

his wife, though, for planting his carrots in the wrong place.

This panel is in much better condition.

You can see all the branches of the trees are all in perfect condition.

They've not been over-cleaned or washed away.

-Same thing down here.

-Mm.

Some great parts to it. Great drawing.

He's a very confident draughtsman, although he may not have been

terribly adventurous in making up his own compositions.

Other versions of Winter by Brueghel the Younger are signed

-in this corner.

-OK.

-Which is precisely where we've got

a large blob of over-painting, so...

-There it is, yeah.

-Go carefully in there, Simon.

'Next, we look at the pictures under ultraviolet light.

'This allows us to very clearly see the organic decay of the paint.

'More recent pigments appear darker than the older, original paint.

'The results on the Ulster Museum panels are very clear,

'meaning the over-painting is a relatively recent attempt

'to repair older damage to the pictures.'

So you've got this - what looks like chickenpox up here.

This is an earlier layer of repaint.

That's why that sky looks so heavy.

It's sitting on top of the landscape.

You see the green layer here, with the ultraviolet.

This is where old varnish has been left on,

and that also has an effect on muddying the surface

of the picture, and making everything look very flat.

'The ultraviolet has confirmed that, whoever painted these pictures,

'they've been subjected to more than one clumsy restoration attempt

'in the past.

'The next part of our physical examination is to remove the panels

'from their frames, and have a look at the back and the sides.'

-Bloody hell!

-Well, well, look at that.

Oof. It's not what I was expecting, Simon.

Well, it doesn't look like a Flemish panel, does it?

Oh, I don't like this at all.

-Let's just bring it over there.

-MDF? It IS MDF!

Bloody hell! What are we doing? Is this some massive fake?

'I have to admit, I was shocked to see this,

'but Simon recognised the handiwork of a member of his own profession.'

It's not a fake, no.

This is the panel.

The original panel has had two big damages where the panel has broken,

and it's then been, in an attempt to repair it,

the panel has then been thinned down, and then backed,

but with a new piece of wood on the back.

So the original panel is just this couple of millimetres here?

-It's about three or four millimetres there, yes.

-Right.

'Fortunately, when the back came off the winter panel,

'it was in a better condition,

'and had not needed such drastic attention.'

That's what I would expect to see.

This is what we call a cradle.

This contraption is there to flatten out the bowing panel and in

the 19th century, this would have been put on to make it flat.

Nobody wanted bowing panels.

At least it doesn't look as though it came from B&Q about 20 years ago.

That's right, yeah.

-OK?

-Let's prop it up over here.

And you can see...

-Same deal?

-The same deal.

The panel HAS been thinned down, which is a shame.

And also, it's got over-paint going over the side here.

Look. This is a house painter again.

It proves how much over-paint there is on top of it,

and how clumsy and how silly it is.

Back in Belfast,

I'm hunting for information on the man who donated the paintings -

along with many others - to the Ulster Museum in 1906 -

Mr W T Braithwaite.

He was the founder of a pub chain called Braithwaite and McCann.

He never married, and lived by himself in a rather

rough part of town, looked after by two housemaids.

I found this picture of him, and he certainly looks idiosyncratic,

in his Freemason's regalia and rather unusual beard.

Like his contemporary, Sir Robert Lloyd Patterson,

Braithwaite donated a substantial collection to the museum,

but while Lloyd Patterson's name lives on,

Braithwaite's is largely forgotten today.

He seems to have been quite an interesting character,

but not your typical art connoisseur.

His obituary tells us an awful lot.

He was a Belfast bigwig, involved in the Water Board.

He was a publican. This was his very first pub.

He was an expert angler and rifle shot, a Freemason,

and founder of the Widows Fund for the Loyal Orange Order.

It seems to me that he was a real mix of the showman and the loyal

civic servant, and, most significantly for us, he lived

at a time when there was a huge change in attitudes to public art.

Art collecting has always been the preserve of an elite,

and though Braithwaite was a self-made man, he was wealthy enough

to have built up a respectable collection of artworks.

Significantly, he was also a member of the town's leading cultural

institution - the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society,

a private club where members displayed collections of art

and antiquities, giving lectures, and publishing papers.

Britain was undergoing rapid social change at the time.

Throughout the 19th century, successive factory acts limited

hours of work, and Sunday became a compulsory day of rest.

For many working-class poor, this was the first time in history

they'd had any time off, and they began to find new ways to enjoy it.

Municipal authorities like Belfast began to regard

publicly accessible art as a way to encourage the working classes

to spend their new free time educating themselves,

but the city had no permanent collection of its own,

and could only stage exhibitions of art borrowed from London.

As the owners of the largest collection of art in town,

members of the Philosophical Society were keen to support the new

enthusiasm for public access, and at the annual meeting in 1906,

in a surprising act of philanthropy,

they took the decision to give away their entire collection

to the Municipal Museum.

-Hello.

-Come in.

-Thank you so much.

'Their building has survived, and, I was pleased to discover,

'so has the Philosophical Society.'

Wow. What an atmospheric place.

There are lots of interesting ghosts, including W B Yeats.

'Over an impromptu lunch provided by Society stalwarts,

'Angelique and Brian, we looked through the minutes

'from the 1906 annual meeting,

'at which one of the most vocal members was William Braithwaite.'

Braithwaite is an important member at that stage.

He supports the transfer of this property to the

municipal authorities for a greater public use.

So, tell me, what was the exact date?

27th of September 1906.

That's just five days after he handed his collections over

to the museum, so he'd already... He'd just done that,

at the moment where these motions were passed.

Yes, yes. That's very interesting. I mean, I think, 20 years earlier,

he might well have given the collections to our museum,

because he was a member, but things have changed.

We now have a new climate,

a feeling that really greater public access is what's desirable,

and free, open museums are what we need.

It seems clear that Braithwaite was a key driver of the new mood.

In one week, he gave away his own collection,

and then encouraged the Society to do the same.

But, if the Philosophical Society no longer had anything to display,

had it now lost its very reason to exist?

Braithwaite seconds a motion asking that the society now considers

very seriously its future, and make sure it retains a future role.

Now its collection's been handed over, it must reconsider

its objectives, but continue with the founding aims of the people

who established this museum.

This was very perceptive of Mr Braithwaite.

His concerns about the future role of the society were well-founded.

Once the collections had gone,

this grand old building struggled for an identity.

So, if I'd have looked out of this window when this building was built

in 1831, what would I have seen?

We looked out on a beautiful square, with fine houses all the way round.

In our Troubles in the 1970s,

this area was very badly hit. There were bombs here,

there was a lot of unrest in this part,

and this area really became rather rundown and desolate.

But there's been a great revival, and we think that the future of this

building is important for the street, important for Belfast.

Braithwaite was a modest man, declining any honours,

quietly pursuing his various hobbies.

Wherever he's mentioned in the records,

people remark on his generosity.

As an art connoisseur,

Braithwaite's donation of his collection to the

Municipal Art Gallery is the last we hear about him,

but he remained a staunch pillar of Belfast society.

I found this fantastic photograph of him,

having just won a marksmanship contest.

He was known popularly as "Bull's-Eye" Braithwaite for his

prowess with a rifle, but was his judgment of our two

Brueghel pictures equally on target?

If we're to prove Braithwaite right, we will need to establish how well

the pictures he donated compare to works we know to be from

the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

And the best place to start is in his home city - Brussels.

He was part of an extended artistic dynasty.

Many of his brothers also followed the family trade,

but the man who first broke the name Brueghel to artistic prominence

was their father - Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

He was a master at depicting the daily life of

the villages of Flanders, what are called genre paintings,

full of incident and observation.

This little landscape might at first seem rather modest,

but if I tell you it was probably the first depiction of

a winter scene in European art, and that in the years following,

we know of over 100 copies that were made of it,

then you might get an idea of just how revolutionary

an artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder was.

All the elements that made Brueghel successful are in this painting.

His extraordinary eye and painterly delight in the details

of everyday life. The bird trap, which gave the picture its name,

is almost an afterthought - an old door propped up by a stick.

The copies rarely captured the expressive genius of this original.

Many of those copies were made by his son,

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who more or less set up a factory

just to make copies of his father's paintings.

The Elder Brueghel did not train the Younger.

He was only five when his father died,

but he inherited a name and a legacy, the Brueghel brand,

that he set out to exploit.

He had certainly inherited his father's mastery of beautifully

painted detail, if not the inventive genius for original composition,

but that didn't matter.

He already had a stock of images to work with,

and the stamp of authenticity that went with the illustrious surname.

A few kilometres away, in the town of Lier, the local museum has

an exhibition of works which all relate in some way to the Brueghels.

It's called Brueghel Land.

If Pieter Brueghel the Younger was running a factory,

then this place would be the outlet shop.

This is a Brueghel the Younger copy of one of his dad's

most famous pictures - The Proverbs.

This copy was painted in 1607.

The original was made almost 50 years earlier, in 1559,

and it's such a fascinating picture.

I think it allows us to understand why such pictures were so popular,

and how Brueghel the Younger could make a whole career out of

copying the work of a father he barely knew.

There are 87 proverbs in here.

I'm not going to go through them all, I'll just pick out a few.

Here is someone swimming against the tide.

Down here, we've got someone burying the hatchet.

And, down here, we've got someone

banging their head against a brick wall.

And here's someone who's fallen between two stools.

But these compositions were so popular that Brueghel the Younger

never felt any need to artistically develop his style.

He just carried on churning them out.

Here is another copy of The Proverbs,

made some 20 years later, almost identical.

Although these are faithful copies, there's a great deal of

individualism in the way they're painted.

Brueghel the Younger employed many assistants in his factory

to help him keep up with the demand for his father's work.

He was competing in a lively market, and he put a great deal of effort

into ensuring his copies were the best.

At the end of the process, however, the works were all signed and sold

as Brueghels. He didn't have a monopoly, though.

This set of all four seasons, by a painter called Abel Grimmer,

is a poor effort.

Flat and lifeless, the figures awkward.

But, for contrast,

just look at this version of his father's Census at Bethlehem,

transposing the Christmas story to a snowy Flanders village.

It's beautifully painted.

Here's everyone gathering round, having their names checked.

You can see they're passing over the right money,

and the fur on the census keeper's jacket can be discerned.

Another thing I've just noticed, which is very like our picture,

is these figures skating on the ice. You can see the way that

they are drawn in is very almost calligraphic.

And there's a lovely feeling of movement around each figure.

It's a little bit like a cartoon.

You sort of can feel that they're about to spring into life.

And we've got just the same thing in our skaters in our picture.

There's no denying the quality of these pictures.

They really sing and they sparkle.

I love this group of figures huddled round the fire here.

And, because they're so well drawn, their postures are perfect.

You get a real sense that they're fighting to keep out the cold

on a winter's day.

If Simon's cleaning reveals this kind of detail,

we'll be in a good position to attribute our panels

to Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

The Ulster Museum building is in a beautiful setting,

in the city's Botanical Gardens.

Construction got underway in the 1920s,

driven by the same urgent need for new institutions of state

that produced the Stormont Parliament.

The museum was opened in 1929, or to be precise, half of it was.

The original scheme was only partly finished when the money ran out,

and the extension wasn't added until the 1970s.

This must be one of the most successful mash ups

between Neo-Baroque and Brutalism anywhere in the world.

I love it. And that mix of the new and the old

is particularly appropriate here, because, since the 1920s,

the museum has, alongside its historic objects,

amassed one of the great collections of modern art.

The radical purchase of modern British works,

with the money bequeathed by Robert Lloyd Patterson,

began at exactly the moment the new museum was being constructed.

The policy was the brainchild of the curator of the Ulster Museum,

a man called Arthur Dean,

who had some revolutionary ideas for the time.

He was a pioneer, basically,

in the whole field of museology as we know it today.

In the Victorian times, when the museum was even set up in 1890,

they didn't actually believe that they should be buying what was

being made by artists and artisans of the day.

And, when he came in, from his background in Warrington, he

basically said "Look, we should be buying art that is important now."

And, you know, that's what we continue to do today.

If he wasn't an art expert himself, who did he go to for advice?

He would have been looking to the dealers in London, and the galleries

in London, looking to see who would have been really the hot property

at that time, and who we should be buying.

But also, he was very good at talking to members of the public

who were collecting art, and that's also why we got a lot of donations

at that time, of incredibly good art,

whether it was historic or contemporary.

Anne took me to see some more pictures from

the Lloyd Patterson collection.

The passage of time has proved that the works bought

with Sir Robert's money were extremely well-chosen.

Would Lloyd Patterson have turned in his grave had he known that

-his pictures would be sold?

-I think he'd have been very surprised.

And now this is a really special picture.

A huge Duncan Grant.

Really ambitious, and unusual to be working on that scale.

And really arresting, it's the period at Charleston.

So this is the house in Sussex that Grant and Vanessa Bell and various

of the Bloomsbury group were hanging out in.

-Exactly.

-In the wartime, actually, in the First World War.

-Is that right?

-Exactly, exactly.

And putting art at the centre of their lives.

I love this. Is this presumably Vanessa Bell here, painting?

-Yes.

-And who's the chap at the table?

David Garnett, who's translating Dostoyevsky.

Oh, I love it. I love it!

-With Russian dictionaries.

-With that idea and art and life completely,

not even colliding,

but just unified in this incredibly peaceful interior, while you get

a little sense of the world outside.

Yes. Just that tiny fragment of the top window...

-That sliver of sky.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Back in Simon's studio in London,

the Ulster Museum panels have been given a preliminary clean,

and we're ready to start removing the over paint.

I know it's optimistic,

but shall we try the area where we might find the signature?

That IS optimistic.

Ooh. Um... On the swimmer.

The water's changing colour to a grey...

Yeah. We have original.

-Brilliant.

-But I cannot see any remnants of any letters.

-No.

-It's a shame.

These little sheep are supposed to be here,

but I think they're going to be a little bit embarrassed

with all this grass around them. All the grass is coming off.

This is actually quite good news,

because it's not a massive damage underneath here.

It's the same type of restoration you see when a tiny little damage

has occurred, and then you get out of control repainting.

So it looks like the grassy field is changing colour a bit.

Into a sort of grey blue.

Oh, look at that. And that fence is so beautiful now.

-With a different light behind it.

-Yes, and look at the green there.

That's the same green as over there.

-We're talking now! Look at that.

-Yeah.

-What are these things?

-Are they little chickens or something?

-Are they chickens?

There's the typical wind vane.

Big fluffy tail, head.

Poor Brueghel chickens.

They've been unnecessarily covered up for no reason at all.

You can begin to see just how much of an improvement

we're going to be getting out of this clean.

As so many versions of these pictures exist,

they regularly appear in the auction showrooms.

So, if I want advice on how to spot a real Brueghel,

this is a good place to find it.

Brueghel was prolific,

so we see paintings brought in to us pretty much on a weekly basis.

You have sold genuine Brueghel the Youngers, of Spring And Winter.

And to my optimistic eye, perhaps,

I think I can see some similarities with our picture.

He's one of these artists that worked often to a formula,

and so you can measure a painting's likelihood of being by Brueghel.

-Yeah.

-What has helped us most

is the advent of high-definition infrared reflectography,

which allows us to look beneath the surface of the paint

-at the preparatory underdrawing.

-OK.

And this has been revolutionary.

In a Brueghel the Younger underdrawing,

what are the telltale signs you're looking for?

Well, what we're looking for when we look beneath the surface

is evidence of Brueghel's tracing method.

They traced with a free hand.

-Right.

-So there's an element of creativity within the tracing.

-I see.

-It's rather difficult to put into words.

-OK.

But once you've seen it once in a securely attributed work,

it can be easier to recognise it again in another work.

In order to establish if there is any evidence of the free hand

underdrawing that Andrew highlighted as the sign of a

true Pieter Brueghel the Younger, we take the panels to be scanned

by an infrared camera.

Watching the results appear, I was fascinated to see

the painstaking amount of detail that emerged.

Seeing a little bit of a roof.

Dr Nicholas Eastaugh has peered beneath the surface

of many genuine works by Brueghel the younger.

Does he recognise anything of Brueghel's working methods

in our pictures?

I think these are showing a lot of typical features of

Brueghel the Younger workshop practice.

Very often, there's very, very detailed underdrawing

in these paintings. They obviously planned them out in a lot of detail,

even if there are multiple versions of paintings,

you'll still find this freely drawn.

It's not transferred from a cartoon, say.

-They're all individual.

-Really? That's fascinating.

Even down at this level,

-they're all individually characterised.

-Yes.

Another distinctive sign of Brueghel practice is the streaky manner in

which the very first layer of paint, the ground layer, has been applied.

You can see the horizontal streakiness,

and then at the edges it's going vertically,

as if they were brushing across and then tidied up the ends.

It shows up very well on infrared because there's usually a little bit

-of carbon black mixed in.

-Right.

This is an important feature to find.

It's very, very typical of the Brueghel the Younger workshop.

It's something that we find quite commonly in these paintings.

Modern scientific techniques are wonderful to have, but some

paintings give up their secrets without us doing any tests at all.

We still have two unsolved cold cases on the books,

involving local hero King Billy, William III to you and me.

The Stormont picture is one,

but we also have to tackle those two enormous brown portraits

in the Ulster Museum stores.

There is no doubt who the sitters are,

but who is the unknown artist who painted them?

I hope we can clear that question up using an old-fashioned resource

like the Heinz archive, here at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

There's no search engine to find my way through THESE folders.

I am absolutely unable to resist a portrait that's described

as being by an unknown artist,

especially of such an important sitter like William and Mary.

Because there are various ways that you can actually begin to deduce who

the artist is when you're dealing with such an important sitter.

And this is how we do it.

Well, the bad news is I've been through several hundred

reproductions and engravings

of William III portraits and Mary portraits,

and there's no direct match at all to the pictures in Ulster Museum.

It looks like the pictures in Ulster have never been published or

reproduced or mentioned before anywhere, so they are really,

really unknown portraits. When you're a busy monarch,

you didn't always have time to sit to every artist that was around.

The solution was simple -

if a painter couldn't get a sitting with the Royals,

they would copy the work of an artist who had.

And what I've got here is a portrait

by quite a famous Dutch artist, called Caspar Netscher.

Which is not a match to the portrait in Ulster Museum,

but the head is a match.

So why stop at the head?

Well, if you wanted people to think you'd painted this all by yourself,

you didn't want it to look exactly like someone else's picture.

Whoever painted the pictures in Ulster has copied the head from this

picture by Caspar Netscher and plonked it on to a different body.

So, which body? Well,

this body, here, in an engraving by an artist called Jan Verkolje.

So is Jan Verkolje our artist?

Possibly. Did he copy Mary from Caspar Netscher as well?

It would seem not.

Well, the head type is not Caspar Netscher's head type.

So, the head in the Mary portrait actually derives from

this portrait of Mary by Willem Wissing.

That's the same head.

However, the pictures in the Ulster Museum, I'm pretty sure,

from having looked at the paintwork and the technique and everything,

are neither by Netscher or Wissing.

So we need to find out another artist

who was at the scene of the crime.

The evidence all points to Jan Verkolje.

He engraved this picture of Mary using Willem Wissing's head.

He's done a great job of covering his tracks by using elements from

different sources, but I believe he painted our two portraits.

And, having looked at examples of his work online,

and here in the library, he was a Dutch artist who paints

in a very highly finished way, quite a smooth technique,

which matches exactly the pictures in Ulster Museum.

So is there any evidence Verkolje ever painted a pair of portraits

of William and Mary?

My clincher is a record here of an auction in Edinburgh,

in the year 1831, of a pair of portraits of William and Mary,

by Jan Verkolje.

Is that the pair that ended up in Ulster? Who knows?

With an artist like Verkolje, of whom we know so little,

it's impossible to attribute uncleaned and unsigned paintings

with complete certainty.

But, for now, I'm as confident as I can be that he's our man.

Whoever painted the Ulster Museum portraits,

they're in fine company.

There's no shortage of pictures of William III in Belfast.

Murals of William still provide the backdrop to the annual

Protestant Orange marches. They have huge symbolic significance,

which is why having a portrait of King Billy at storm Stormont

really mattered to Unionist MPs.

They just didn't want one that also had an image of the Pope in the sky.

So, what is going on in the Stormont picture?

It certainly has a very different feel from the triumphant warrior

portrayed in the murals.

I'm hoping that the College of Arms in the City of London

will be able to help me find a match for some of the emblems

on the banners in the painting.

This flag, with its red cross on a white ground,

and a crossbow in the quarters, looks a promising start.

It seems this is a symbol associated with the Spanish Habsburg monarchy,

the Cross of Burgundy.

But, at the beginning of the 18th century,

the Habsburg dominions spread far beyond Spain.

Well, here we have, in a manuscript called Flemish Arms,

we have what appears to be

a depiction of the symbol in question.

-Ah.

-What are clearly two knotted staves of wood.

It's stylised on the flag as being turned into what in heraldry we call

a saltire raguly.

-Raguly.

-A saltire is a diagonal cross, as in the flag of Scotland,

-of course.

-Raguly is sort of a bit raggedy, but not quite.

Exactly, exactly. So that's a classic design from the sort of

banner or flag that might have been used by

a Flemish Guild of crossbowmen.

I think we've got a lot of papal imagery, and we've got this group of

possibly Flemish individuals using a banner with a Habsburg,

and therefore Catholic, emblem on it.

I think it's highly likely to be the Spanish Netherlands

that this painting is depicting.

I feel like I'm learning a new language here -

the red saltire with its raguly edge.

The cross of Burgundy is the most significant piece of evidence

we've found in the picture, and once you recognise it,

you start to see it everywhere.

Here it is in a book showing

the seals used by the Counts of Flanders.

So the evidence seems to be pointing towards the Spanish Netherlands,

and one thing is very clear -

there's nothing in our picture that shows Ireland.

The Spanish Netherlands occupied an area that roughly corresponds

to modern Belgium. And, in the city of Antwerp,

I think we will finally unlock the mystery of the Stormont picture.

This painting shows the Crossbowmen's Guild of Antwerp

parading in this square. You can see they're all wearing the same

red sash that the gentlemen in the Stormont picture have.

The building behind me on my left

is the Guild of St George of Crossbowmen here in Antwerp.

You can see St George at the top of the building in a fine gold statue,

slaying the dragon. And, beneath that,

there is a pair of crossbowmen carved into the stone.

As well as the raguly saltire,

which establishes the connection to the Spanish Habsburgs,

the Stormont picture has several examples of St George's emblem.

A red cross on a white ground, and this is because the picture

shows the members of St George's Guild.

I'm convinced that the people in our painting were nothing to do

with Protestantism in Ireland.

They were Catholics from that Guild building here in Antwerp.

Also, in the background of the painting in a flag,

you can see a tiny crown.

And, behind me, on the town hall of Antwerp,

you can see exactly the same crown,

the distinctive three-leafed crown of the city of Antwerp.

The people in the painting in Stormont are not

orange sash-wearing Protestants,

welcoming King William III.

They are red sash-wearing Catholic Bergers from Antwerp,

demonstrating their loyalty to the Pope.

They are nothing to do with William III at all.

Having satisfied ourselves that we know exactly where

the Stormont picture comes from, we now have a more diplomatic job

of breaking the news to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

-Hello.

-Hello.

The Assembly's represented by the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker,

two friendly sceptics needing to be convinced.

Hopefully, you're going to tell us something interesting about this

painting that means so very, very much

to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

'We painstakingly ran through the details that we'd uncovered.'

We found in Antwerp that the leading Guild of Crossbowmen was called

the St George's Guild in Flemish, which is the Guild of St George.

And, to be a member of that Guild,

you had to take an oath to uphold the Catholic Church.

And that is why His Holiness is up there.

-Ah.

-So, we can be pretty sure that the folks here in their red sashes

are the members of the Guild of the St George's Guild in Antwerp.

One of the legends of St George tells the story that when he went to

Libya, one of the people who told him that there was a dragon

up the road, and he had to go and slay it, was a hermit.

-Right.

-So the hermit is ushering in St George,

the patron saint of the Guild of Antwerp.

But old opinions die hard.

For those on opposite sides of the political divide,

the picture is now freighted with a meaning that would certainly

have mystified the crossbowmen of Antwerp.

It is of much greater value than the monetary value that

it might fetch in a public auction. And certainly, I would think,

will remain a significant feature within the building.

To have the definition obviously gives a new dimension to

our thinking on it. Having said that, the fact that it is

of historical nature to us in the Assembly, I think,

allows us to be a bit more perhaps, well,

certainly reflective at this stage, on it.

We were wondering if you could get a refund.

Back in London, Simon's been working to remove the over-paint

from the Ulster Museum panels,

and he's revealed a faint signature,

exactly where we first hoped it would appear.

I was round quicker than you can say,

"17th-century Flemish panel painting".

So the key question is, is the signature contemporaneous with

the painting, or is it something someone else has come along

and stuck on to try and make this a Brueghel?

I would say that that is contemporaneous, yes.

These are sort of quite faint light brown,

and then there's a really heavy reinforced dark brown R next to it.

Which is probably the overpainted letter.

OK. It's definitely original?

-Yes.

-Because it's enmeshed in the original paint layers.

And the date?

And the date, let's go across to the date.

Well, there it is. 1633.

-Which is about right.

-That's about right, isn't it?

-Yeah.

'Simon has now cleaned the picture back to its original paint layers,

'the work done, I'm convinced,

'by Pieter Brueghel the Younger himself.'

So you've cleaned, by the look of it, about 90% of the painting.

-Yeah.

-So you can suddenly see the recession through the picture.

So you're going down the flowerbeds, through the river,

into the little figures in the distance.

-And it all makes perfect sense.

-And you know what it is that

actually makes that procession work? And that's the light, dark, light,

dark, light, dark, light, dark, which these artists knew.

And they'd make it smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller

as it got further and further away. And what our last repainter

and retoucher didn't know was that.

-Yes.

-He's just covered over with the same old colour

-from the foreground to the background.

-Yes, yes.

After ultraviolet and infrared scanning, a slow and

meticulous clean removing the damage from past restorations,

and careful retouching, the pictures are looking resplendent.

Almost as good as the day they left the Brueghel workshop.

The detailed cycle of the seasons that was so important to

Pieter Brueghel has re-emerged.

The colour has returned to the cheeks of the Flanders villagers,

and at work or play,

their lives are once again a little bit closer to ours.

Scouring the Museum archives, I have discovered that the

over-painting was done as recently as 1969.

And the downgrade to after Pieter Brueghel was decided in 1973,

after photos of the panels were sent to London for an expert opinion.

But, however confident we feel,

our hearts are beating faster as Andrew Fletcher arrives

to give his verdict.

-Gosh, look at these!

-Our two victims.

-Wow.

-Post-surgical victims.

Yeah. They've been through rehab, and they're looking good.

They are. They are indeed.

No, they've cleaned wonderfully well, haven't they?

And we've gained a signature.

And a signature there, look at that. Yeah.

The date, 1633, works in our favour, too.

The majority of the versions his workshop painted

were painted in the 1620s and early '30s.

They come up, time and again, out of the woodwork.

In this instance, from Northern Ireland.

'So far, so good. Next, the underdrawing.'

What we don't see with Brueghel is a continuous contour

around a figure. We see lots of centimetre-long squiggly lines,

combining to create the outline of the figure.

And you see it here.

And then, further back into the composition,

the underdrawing tends to get less detailed,

more summary in its applications.

So you can see, for example, in the background, here around the church,

-there's just the odd little mark.

-Mm.

-We've gained about half a dozen sheep.

-Excellent.

And these beautiful little bleaching field details, and drying fields.

Oh, yes, look at those coming up, yeah.

And I see, for example, what we get with Brueghel

is that the application of paint on the drapery

always follows the folds and the way the drapery falls.

You mean that the brush follows the line, as opposed to...

The brush will follow the line of the...

-..crosshatching, or something.

-Exactly. So, for example,

you can see, in this lady's apron,

-the brush strokes follow the direction of the flow.

-Got it.

So, Andrew, would it be fair to say that these would most likely

have left Brueghel's studio as Brueghels?

That's what the punter was buying,

they were buying Brueghel the Youngers?

I think that's right. Today, we're looking more profoundly into

the question of attribution than Brueghel's customers

would have at the time.

But your presence of a signature on both of them argues

in favour of that, as well as the technique.

Could one see them today being sold as Brueghel the Youngers?

These are certainly of the period, and painted in Brueghel's workshop.

I would say that it is, at this stage, likely that these were

painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

I'm very favourable towards them.

Good. That's a good result, don't you think?

It certainly is.

'For the first time in nearly half a century, I think we can

'once more call them Pieter Brueghel the Younger panels, exactly as they

'were referred to by "Bull's-Eye" Braithwaite, back in 1906.'

The pictures are now returned to the Ulster Museum.

Anticipation is high, and there's a great turnout

from both the museum and the Philosophical Society.

You might remember that there were always patches of really good bits

of painting in these pictures,

but there were also really murky parts as well.

So Bendor can tell you a little bit more about

what the cleaning has revealed.

Well, thanks. Well, after much careful analysis, including of the

underdrawing and the way the pictures were created,

everything now tells us that we can say with confidence that these are

works one can describe as Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

And that is extremely good news,

because one doesn't often find them.

If I could be cheesy about it,

going from after Brueghel the Younger to Brueghel the Younger

is a bit like going from Sunday League to the Premiership

in one season. It's that good.

Just this week, in Christie's in London,

an extremely rare set of all four seasons by Brueghel the Younger

was on the market, and they sold for £6.6 million.

Yes. LAUGHTER

It's a fantastic gift. We're just so enriched.

They're going to completely dramatically change this part

of the collection, and that's wonderful.