The Pioneers Bought with Love: The Secret History of British Art Collections

Imagine a world that is very different from today.

A world where there are no public galleries full of colourful paintings.

Where the names of great men like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo

are hardly known.

Where art is considered purely decorative

and the artist a mere craftsman.

It's astonishing, yet this was Britain 400 years ago.

Since then, great works of art have flooded on to British shores

and our appreciation of art and artists has been transformed.

This is the story of the private collectors

who brought a wealth of treasures from overseas,

whose patronage encouraged British-born artists

and whose personal passion for art and individual taste

helped create this cultural revolution

and shape the artistic direction of our nation.

In this programme, I am going to reveal

the pioneers of British art collecting.

How, in the 17th century, just a handful of aristocratic adventurers

sought to redress the visual austerity of the Tudor era.

They opened Britain's eyes to the Renaissance

and introduced a passion for the Baroque to a British court.

From the first picture-collecting trips to Europe

by the intrepid Lord Arundel...

He gets the dust of Italy on his feet.

He falls in love with the place.

And this is the leitmotif of English collecting for the next 300 years.

..to the art-loving circle of Charles I,

who brought old masters into the county on an unprecedented scale.

There was a revolution in looking and in seeing

greater than at any other time in British history.

And finally, by the end of the century,

to an earl and his wife who made their entire house a hymn to art.

Look at that wonderful, spectacular shaft of rainbow light.

400 years ago, Britain was considered by Europeans

a miserable damp island.

And, in terms of the visual arts, it was an isolated and backward place.

For one German visitor to London in 1598,

there was so little of cultural value to be seen

that all he could describe in his letter home

was the 30 decapitated heads he had counted on the spikes of London Bridge.

When Henry VIII broke from the Church in Rome,

in effect, he started 70 years of cultural isolation.

The Catholic continent was shut off to England

and so the light of the Italian Renaissance that was sweeping

through the rest of Europe barely touched England's closed-off shores.

Here, even the word "art" was associated

with artifice and deception

and it was illegal to import paintings from abroad.

Paintings did exist in Tudor England, of course,

but mostly they were portraits

and portraits, above all, were practical.

They told you what someone looked like or their status.

And for the English artists who painted them

there was little freedom of expression.

They were controlled by the Painters and Stainers' Guild

who made sure that painting remained a craft used for decorative purposes.

This spectacular portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth

is known as the Coronation Portrait.

But what is fascinating about it is that three quarters of the painting

is taken up with her gold coronation robes and her crown,

which are what define her image here.

There is little attempt at perspective,

nor to convey any sense of her personality through her facial expression.

The importance lies in the detail.

The jewels, the sumptuous gold fabric

with its folds and its embroidered decoration.

And the orb and sceptre, symbols of her authority.

Even more telling is the fact that this painting,

like most of the others here in the Tudor Rooms

in the National Portrait Gallery, is by an unknown hand.

The identity of the artist was not important enough to be recorded.

And a painting itself wasn't valued either.

A courtier could spend £500 on a single costume,

while just £50 bought a full-length portrait by Holbein.

But then, in 1603, Elizabeth I died

and the Tudor dynasty came to an end.

The door opened to a new Britain and in the next two decades

art was transformed in this country.

Where once the only tourist attraction had been those heads on spikes,

by the 1620s, a visitor to London

could have seen many of the finest paintings in the world,

all within a mile radius of our current National Gallery.

And the man credited with starting this enormous cultural

and aesthetic change is Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel,

known to history as the Collector Earl.

Arundel was a descendent of the great Catholic family, the Dukes of Norfolk.

He would become one of the most distinguished patrons

and collectors of art that this country has ever known.

But at his birth in 1585,

this illustrious future was not at all clear.

Like many great Catholic families, his had fallen foul of Elizabeth.

And he grew up not in the splendour of a family seat

but in a humble parsonage in Essex.

His father had been committed to the Tower by Queen Elizabeth

for alleged involvement in Catholic plots.

Their fortunes had been confiscated

and his mother had been left to bring him and his sister up alone.

On we go. Up and up.

John Martin Robinson is the curator at Arundel Castle

and he believes that Arundel's early life

had a profound impact on his later career.

His mother was very pious.

And she did her best to instil

a strong religious upbringing in these two children.

This is a biography of his mother and it goes all through her life.

And of interest to us, chapter 12,

"Of the Education of her Children,

"and her Love and Affection towards them."

"The young lord, her son, now Earl of Arundel, being but 10 years old,

"so much profited in learning that besides her skill in working and writing very well,

"she not only understood the Latin and Italian tongue

"but could read in English very readily at first sight

"anything written in either of those languages."

-That's amazing.

-Yes.

One can't help wondering whether his love of Italy and his knowledge of Italian

somehow stimulated his love of the visual arts.

Obviously, somebody who is Catholic

is automatically attracted towards the visual arts

because it's one of the aspects of the Catholic religion.

You come to love their beauty and art, music and so on.

In 1603, when the new Stuart king,

James I of England and VI of Scotland, came to the throne,

things began to change for the 18-year-old Arundel.

James was sympathetic to the family

and restored some of their titles and estates,

including the family seat Arundel Castle in Sussex.

In James's court, Arundel began to feel at home.

James was also an intellectual

and perhaps saw in Arundel a kindred spirit.

This was the time of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Jonson.

The written word and masques

were the main cultural pursuits of James and his courtiers.

But a few members of the court

began to express a tentative interest in the visual arts.

And now, with his place secured and his seat and title restored,

the Earl of Arundel's thoughts turned to marriage.

His sights were set on Lady Alethea Talbot,

youngest daughter of the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury.

The current Duchess of Norfolk

is married to one of Arundel's descendents

and Arundel Castle is still their family home.

She has documents that give an insight

into Arundel's relationship with his young wife.

It's rather lovely to see a picture, a portrait of her, looking so pretty.

I know. And that must be 1619, just about the time...

It's rather wonderful, also, the clothes that she's wearing.

They're quiet masculine, actually, if you look at them.

I mean, she was quite a strong woman for that day and age.

That's what I like about her because she seems to have been quite a force in that marriage.

Oh, she was the heiress, so the money all came from her.

That's how the Collector Earl could go off

and do his travelling and his buying.

He was brought up penniless, married Alethea

and suddenly this is where the wealth came back into the family.

Her wealth that came into the family has kept the family going ever since.

This is a letter from Thomas, the Collector Earl, to Alethea.

Isn't that so lovely? "My dearest heart, my thoughts are without intermission

-"fixed on thee."

-Fixed on thee.

Wouldn't you like that from your husband?

It's so lovely, it's so touching.

He was really quite affectionate, which is sweet,

because you don't necessarily get that from all his portraits.

-You don't, no. You don't get that.

-He looks quite stern.

And those old portraits,

they don't really give out so much of the character of them.

They give out their posture and who they are in their status.

But you don't see the innerness of them and this you do.

-No, you don't.

-It's just nice to see the affection between them.

I love this picture here of her dancing, her frivolity, her gaiety.

-That must have been at one of these masques here.

-Yes.

-Yes.

This drawing of Alethea is by the architect Inigo Jones.

Jones was 12 years older than the Earl of Arundel and was already seen

as an authority on the visual culture of James's court.

Designer of masques and Surveyor of the King's Works.

He would form a lifelong friendship with the young couple and together

they would undertake a trip that would change the course of art history in Britain.

Their destination was Italy.

For almost a century, England had been cut off from Italy

when its Church broke away from Catholicism.

The English had to obtain licences to travel on the continent.

So the Arundels' visit to Italy was truly pioneering.

Even now, arriving in Italy feels very different.

The light, the warmth, the atmosphere.

So imagine what it must have been like for an English traveller in 1613.

Now that Italy seems so close, it's hard to appreciate

just how pioneering the Arundels' trip was.

Before them, there was no tour, no itinerary of places to visit.

This was virgin territory for English travellers.

It was on this trip that the Arundels developed a passion for art

that would remain with them throughout their lives.

Here was a country where the understanding and appreciation

of the visual arts was central to everyday life.

And the city that captured their imagination more than anywhere else was Venice.

Arundel was determined to explore

every street, palace and church in Venice.

And he later wrote, "We all declare that Venice is truly paradise."

The Arundels' Catholicism undoubtedly opened doors

that had remained firmly closed to other Englishmen

and, in this respect, their visit was crucial.

They provided a bridge between two cultures.

The Arundels stayed here in the Palazzo Grimani.

Today, it's a museum but then it housed

an astonishing private art collection.

The Grimani were one of the richest and most powerful families in Venice

and their collection would have been full of works

by the great Renaissance Venetian masters,

Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

For the first time, Arundel could experience what it was like

to have an art collection on such a scale.

The impact of the Arundels' Italy trip on the history of collecting

has been charted by writer James Stourton.

Arundel was presumably a very erudite man.

He is erudite but he's visual first.

And his eyes are opened by Italy.

He's a very unusual person.

He was brought up separate as a Roman Catholic.

The Earl of Essex called him the Winter Pear.

He's clearly seen as very different.

And art becomes almost like a parent for him.

And going to Italy, it's an awakening.

Yes, it's a lovely thought that.

Everything that he didn't find at home

-he finds when he goes to Italy.

-Correct. Correct.

I think it was a spiritual home and he relaxed there.

I think he just appreciated the life in Italy,

the way Italians are, being so different to ourselves.

Back in London, at court, he was considered very haughty.

He was very conscious of his pride and conscious of who he was.

And he never really came off his pride. But in Italy he did.

In Italy, he warmed to the country

and clearly he sort of let his hair down.

There was a famous scene of him coming over the Channel in a boat,

laughing and being intimate with artists.

He would never have done that with his fellow peers at court.

How lovely. What a lovely thought.

So he really sort of escaped when he went to Italy.

Yes, it was the other side of his personality.

It was the way in which art was central to everyday life that so enraptured Arundel.

It wasn't confined just to private houses, it was everywhere.

Particularly in the churches.

As part of their patronage, noble families paid for decoration of churches,

not only as an expression of their status and piety

but also as a way of bringing art into everyday life.

This is the Church of San Sebastiano and behind this restrained facade

an exuberant world of colour opens up.

The Arundels would undoubtedly have visited this church

as it was largely paid for by their hosts the Grimani family.

The church is covered in paintings and frescoes by the artist Veronese.

Paolo Veronese came from Verona, as his name suggests,

and he was adopted as a protege by the great Venetian master Titian.

His work here is typical of what is so striking

about Venetian Renaissance painting,

with its emphasis on colour and movement.

And how he sensitively depicts the subjects' faces,

humanising these religious figures.

The Veronese paintings dominate the church here.

But it is charming that in this unassuming spot by the side door

there's a Titian of Saint Nicholas.

Titian would become a passion for Arundel

and the most collectable artist of all the Venetian school.

Even for me today, walking into a church like that is so impressive.

So put yourself in the Arundels' shoes. They must have been amazed.

In England, the Protestant churches were bare

and they would never have seen painting like this.

Arundel would have understood that the mark of a connoisseur was to be able to read a painting,

to appreciate the skill of an artist and take pleasure from it.

In Italy, the Arundels witnessed the miracles of the Renaissance

in Venice and dug for ancient marbles in the Forum in Rome.

Now they wanted to bring art back with them

but it wasn't always so straightforward.

Arundel bit off more than he could chew when he decided

that in Rome he wanted the obelisk in the Piazza Navona.

-At that point, the pope just said no.

-SHE LAUGHS

So, how important do you think Arundel's visit to Italy was

in terms of the history of collecting?

I think it's the foundation visit because he...

It's a compulsion, energy and passion that he gives it.

But it's not just about the quantity, it's also about the quality.

Arundel was terribly, terribly keen on getting the best things.

So he sets, in a sense, the compass,

not just on Italy, but also the benchmark of quality.

And he starts that tradition of people going to Italy

and scouring the country for great works of art

and not resting until he came back with the goods.

And this is the leitmotif of English collecting for the next 300 years.

The Arundels returned to London transformed.

They wasted no time in commissioning Inigo Jones

to design a gallery in the Italian style for their London home,

which they intended to fill with works of art.

This pair of portraits by the court artist Daniel Mijtens

show Lord and Lady Arundel in front of their new galleries.

Stylistically, they represent quite a big step forward

from the stiff formal Tudor portrait

because Mijtens has cleverly used perspective to draw the eye

down the length of the sculpture gallery

to a rather Italianate Thames behind.

But the real importance of these portraits

is that they present the Earl and Countess of Arundel

as true connoisseur collectors

in the great Italian tradition.

And the works of art that would fill these galleries

were world-class acquisitions.

Arundel was bringing the Italian Renaissance to England

and it was a revelation to those who would see them for the first time in his collection.

It's difficult to know exactly what came into Arundel's collection and when.

But in a 1655 inventory,

we can see the names of all the great Italian masters.

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,

Raphael,

Tintoretto and Titian.

37 paintings by Titian are listed here.

The Sleeping Venus. Titian's Venus, very rare.

Diana Bathing.

Pictures like these have become part of our cultural landscape

and Arundel was amongst the first to bring them here.

We know that the Arundels had a Diana by Titian.

And Lady Arundel even had a Diana room in her London house.

So it's wonderful to imagine that they might have had a version

of one of these Titians that now hang in the National Gallery.

To begin with, Arundel was pretty much alone

in bringing this wealth of art into the country.

But then, in 1625, when King James I died

and the new king Charles I came to the throne,

collecting stepped up a gear.

Inspired in part by Arundel's collection,

Charles decided that building up a great art collection

was the way to define his majesty in the eyes of the world.

And, as king, he had purchasing power Arundel could only dream of.

Now old masters poured into the country.

Leonardos, Raphaels.

Charles's timing was fortuitous.

Italy was in economic crisis and he bought up whole collections

at a time from the great Italian dynasties.

Correggios came to England for the first time.

And, of course, more Titian.

The king's passion for collecting had a profound effect.

Realising that art was a way to the king's heart,

his circle of courtiers began to collect art too.

This was something completely new in London.

They had to learn the language of art quickly.

There was no art market here,

no exhibitions and no tradition of collecting.

This new appreciation of art

was confined to an elite group centred around the king.

They had grand houses lining the Thames,

spreading out from the royal palace on Whitehall.

I love to think of this part of the Thames in the early 17th century

being lined with great aristocratic houses.

And imagine the great sense of excitement there must have been

when a new consignment of pictures arrived.

This group of connoisseurs became known as the Whitehall Circle.

And the main protagonists were King Charles I, the Earl of Arundel,

the Earl of Pembroke and the Duke of Buckingham.

You've written about them. What do you think are their characteristics?

Arundel, who was the first of the collectors, was the most earnest,

awkward, difficult and abrasive man.

But tremendously passionate about learning and the arts

and his commitment to booming up this collection.

The Earl of Pembroke looks a much quieter figure, doesn't he?

-He looks rather sour.

-He does. Rather disillusioned.

He looks slightly shifty. He looks as if you've just

interrupted him doing something he'd rather you hadn't noticed.

But he had this wonderful house that Charles loved to go hunting at.

And he clearly was an amazingly successful patron.

He created what remains the finest domestic interior

of the period in all of England.

-Then we turn to Buckingham.

-The most beautiful man in Europe, Buckingham.

Extraordinary charisma. Admired by almost everybody.

Very charismatic.

They form a kind of close-knit group but very different personalities.

And here is Charles I, who was surrounded by these courtiers

who flattered him, encouraged him, gave him presents.

It was a very exciting period

because people's taste was developing,

a whole range of styles and schools, Northern painting, Italian painting,

everything was possible then.

-So there was a truly remarkable contrast.

-Huge contrast.

A revolution in looking and in seeing and in appreciating

greater than at any other time in British history, I think.

Though Arundel was the pioneer collector,

it was the dashing George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,

who collected with an ostentation designed to woo the king.

This Italianate gate is the last vestige

of the great London house of the Duke of Buckingham.

It must have been agony for Arundel to stand by and watch the king

fall under the spell of the glamorous young duke.

And worse still, in just five years,

Buckingham had built up a collection to rival Arundel's own.

Buckingham and Arundel's duties at court meant that most of the time

they had to rely on agents to scour the art markets of Europe for them.

And the agents they chose said as much about their characters as their art.

In the case of Buckingham, being the fount of all patronage, being the king's favourite,

he simply couldn't spend the time wandering around

art galleries looking at things.

So he basically gave carte blanche to this man to buy in a hurry.

Whereas, Arundel trained up for a long time, for nearly ten years,

his chief agent, a man called the Reverend William Petty.

Petty was indefatigable and would do anything and travel anywhere.

And often would see a painting and pursue it doggedly

and finally manage to secure it.

Buckingham's approach was entirely different.

Buckingham's agent swept through Paris

buying collections with an open cheque book.

He went for flamboyance, he went for sensuality,

for the big pictures.

But while Buckingham went after the big pictures, the Italian masters

with their voluptuous women and brilliant colours,

like Guido Reni's Four Seasons,

Arundel bought items that some collectors failed to value at all,

like drawings.

Today, a volume of 600 anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci,

bought by Arundel, are amongst the most prized treasures of the Royal Collection.

Leonardo was a pioneer in the understanding of human anatomy.

He made discoveries which would take centuries

for their significance to be fully realised.

This volume was in Arundel's collection by the 1640s.

The fact that Arundel understood that this was an exceptional mind

is rather incredible because

not that many people would have noticed that about Leonardo, probably, at that stage.

I imagine to open that album of drawings with 600 sheets of all this

different subject matter would have been a rather baffling experience.

And, for many people, it would have been incomprehensible.

But Arundel really engaged, I think,

with the variety of material that Leonardo was concerned with.

The survival of Leonardo's works is entirely down, through the centuries,

to people understanding that the drawings contain his genius,

for want of a better word. They are 90% of what we have by Leonardo.

Without the drawings, we'd have so little understanding

of what he actually achieved in his life.

But, through the drawings, through the single album of drawings,

-you get the whole man.

-Absolutely.

And I think that's something that would have appealed to Arundel.

His collecting of drawings is so unique in England at the time

that he wasn't competing with anybody else, if you see what I mean.

Nobody was pursuing drawings with a single-mindedness like Arundel was

-in the whole of Europe at the time.

-No, that's incredible.

And this really was a mark of his connoisseurship, I suppose,

the fact that he was prepared to go beyond the big canvases

and collect these beautiful sheets of paper.

Yes, it's something which marked Arundel out

as the most astonishing collector in England of the period.

Arundel's intense rivalry with Buckingham

came to an abrupt end in 1628.

Buckingham had led a disastrous military campaign in France

and on his return to Portsmouth

one of his disgruntled soldiers stabbed him to death.

There's an element of schadenfreude to the Arundels' visit

to Buckingham's assassin in the Tower of London

the night before his execution and their payment for alms for his soul.

With Buckingham out of the way,

Arundel could now take his place as the premier art advisor to the king.

And, in this position, he was hugely influential

with another aspect of British art history.

It wasn't only as collectors that Lord and Lady Arundel led the way but also as patrons.

Inspired by their visit to Italy, the Arundels recognised

that the role of a true connoisseur was not only to build up

a fabulous collection of old masters

but to commission work from contemporary artists too.

But there was little home-grown talent,

so the Arundels determined to attract the best continental painters to England.

There were two artists who would come to define the reign of King Charles I.

Rubens and his pupil Van Dyck.

And it was the Arundels who were largely responsible for introducing

these two painters to England.

Rubens was a Flemish painter who had studied in Italy

and his work had absorbed the colourful influence

of the Venetian painters that the English collectors so admired.

In 1620, Lady Arundel had defied convention

and gone alone to live in Venice for two years

while her sons were at university in Italy.

It was on her way there that she visited Rubens' studio in Antwerp

and it was then that he started work on a portrait of her.

Rubens rarely agreed to paint portraits but it was a mark

of his respect for Arundel that he accepted this commission

because, in his words, he regarded him

as "one of the four evangelists and a patron of our art."

This painting, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich,

shows how Rubens has elevated Lady Arundel

to the status of a regal collector surrounded by her courtiers,

with the majestic family coat of arms in the background.

In doing so, he was marking out Alethea and, by extension,

her husband, as players on the world stage.

But despite the Arundels' reputation, it would take another

seven years before Rubens could be persuaded to come to England.

News of the cultural revolution that Arundel and the king had spearheaded at home had not sunk in abroad,

and many of the great Catholic continental painters

still considered England a cold, uncultured land full of Protestants.

However, in 1629,

Rubens was forced to travel to London on a diplomatic mission

and he found himself not in the Philistine backwater he had expected

but in a newly cultured land.

He wrote, "When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,

"I have never seen such a large number in one place

"as in the royal palace and in the gallery of the late Duke of Buckingham."

Won over, Rubens then began negotiations for a commission

to paint a great ceiling in the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall.

Though the palace has gone, the Banqueting House still remains.

I've been here many times before

but each time I'm astonished by the ceiling.

Rubens was a Catholic who claimed he was inspired

by a passion from the heavens, not from earthly musings.

The theme is the glorification of the Stuarts and the benefits

of peace and plenty that the dynasty brought to the kingdom.

Rubens allegorises the Stuarts here.

For example, we see James I, Charles's father,

being carried on the wings of an eagle to the seat of God,

above him hovers the triumphal crown.

If we look at this in the context of the time in which it was installed

we can see what a radical departure it was for the English court.

Just 20 years before, such a dramatic visual display

of swirling figures would have been totally unthinkable.

This was the culmination of two decades of exposure

to European culture and the way in which art could define majesty.

This was Charles showing that he could compete with the great European courts.

Now the pursuit of art was unstoppable.

And another artist was on his way

who would have an even greater impact.

He was a pupil of Rubens and his name was Anthony Van Dyck.

It was the Arundels, once again, who played a pivotal role

in introducing Van Dyck to England.

On Alethea's trip to Rubens' studio in 1620,

his young apprentice had caught her eye.

The report came back, "Van Dyck is still with Signor Rubens

"and his works are hardly less esteemed than those of his master.

"He is a young man of twenty-one years."

Van Dyck is a hugely significant figure in British art history,

not only for his new style of painting but also for the way

in which he elevated the status of art and the artist in England.

Before, artists had predominantly been regarded as artisans,

but Van Dyck was made a member of the royal court,

he was knighted by the king and he was given his own studio

where his sitters would come to him to be painted.

Van Dyck was doing in England what Rubens had already done in Antwerp

and what the Italian Renaissance painters had done before him,

asserting the importance of the visual arts.

This was the coming of age of art in England.

The Arundels might be recognised as Van Dyck's first English patrons

but they certainly weren't his only ones.

I think the most dramatic expression of Van Dyck's work

still sits in the house for which it was intended

in the Wiltshire countryside.

This is Wilton House, home of the Earls of Pembroke.

It was the country retreat of the 4th Earl of Pembroke,

who was part of the Whitehall Circle with Arundel.

In the 1630s, tensions were mounting between the king

and those who wanted greater parliamentary rule.

It was against these simmering tensions that Charles commanded

that noblemen should repair to their country houses

in order to entertain the king and his court.

During these years, Wilton was transformed from a Tudor to a Palladian house.

The court would often move to Salisbury,

so Pembroke wanted to have his house looking its best.

A contemporary wrote, "King Charles did love Wilton above all places.

"It was he that did put the Earle of Pembroke to new build

"that side of the house that fronts the garden al Italiano."

The Earl of Pembroke was creating

an Italian art palace in the English countryside.

And it wasn't just the exterior.

The interior is even more astonishing.

The Earl of Pembroke commissioned Inigo Jones

to design a suite of rooms for Wilton.

The first of them is known as the Single Cube Room,

as it is a perfect cube, 30-feet high and 30-feet square.

But it's through the next doors

that you really see the ambition of this project.

Known as the Double Cube Room, it's been recognised

as the grandest surviving room of the mid-17th century.

And I think it's one of the most distinguished rooms in any English country house.

In between the elaborate carvings and swagger of the decorations

is an astonishing collection of Van Dycks.

This is Van Dyck's great English masterpiece,

the Pembroke family portrait.

And in it, we can see just how far Van Dyck has transformed

painting in England over a period of just 20 years.

What he's done, which is completely new,

is to make his characters believable.

Rather than positioning them all facing solidly forwards,

he has made them move and turn.

They look completely comfortable in their setting.

Like the great Italian Renaissance masters,

Van Dyck has also introduced

a second symbolic layer of meaning into his picture.

This is a family portrait but it's also a subtle drama

of life and death, fertility and mortality.

Each figure group represents a different stage of life.

The cherubs in the top left are the babies

of the Earl and Countess of Pembroke who died in infancy.

Below them, the three boys playing with their dogs

represent the carefree stage of childhood.

The Earl and Countess of Pembroke sit unsmiling in the centre.

By this stage, their marriage had broken down,

so they do look very world-weary and full of disappointment.

Van Dyck has used his Lord Chamberlain's staff

to act as a visual divide between the two.

He's also very cleverly used lighting in this painting

to highlight those figures in the prime of their lives.

On the right of the painting there are the figures

of his daughter Anna Sophia who has just married the Earl of Carnarvon.

They're a beautiful young couple and they've just given birth to an heir.

Van Dyck portrays them almost as one intertwined figure here.

And look at that intimate hand gesture.

But the central irony of the painting

lies with the figure of the Earl of Pembroke himself,

head of the family, seated rather hesitantly at the back.

He should be the one in control here

but, actually, Van Dyck is hinting that they are all,

in fact, being controlled by time.

This room is a testament to just how important these collector earls were

in patronising art in the 1630s.

The visual arts were now part of the cultural landscape of England.

But it was a world confined to a small elite centred around the king

and the gap between them and the rest of the country was widening.

While their circle of men and women were becoming connoisseurs,

understanding and appreciating art,

this sort of sophistication was lost on the general population.

What they saw was a king ruling without Parliament,

surrounded by a small close-knit group of aristocrats

who were encouraging him to spend the country's money on foreign art.

The storm broke in 1642.

Civil war was declared, Royalist against Parliamentarian.

For the pioneer collectors this spelt disaster.

The fiercely royalist Arundels were forced into exile,

selling most of their collection to survive.

Lord Arundel died in 1646 in his beloved Italy.

Three years later, after seven years of civil war,

King Charles I was led to a scaffold through Banqueting House.

As he did so, he passed under Rubens' magnificent ceiling

that represented the apogee of his reign and the collecting era.

A week later, the Royal Collection was put up for sale

and Oliver Cromwell ruled over a commonwealth.

The Civil War could have spelt disaster for collecting in Britain

but it had another completely unexpected effect.

There had never been an art market here before

but the sale of the century was about to begin.

Art historian Jerry Brotton has written about the sale of King Charles's collection.

It all goes on sale in Somerset House.

They take everything in 1649, they dump it in Somerset House,

and they literally put price tags on them.

And ordinary men and women go in, tradespeople go in,

and they inventory everything, they inventory cushions,

bolsters, tables, but they also inventory the artworks,

they inventory Titians, Raphaels, Correggios.

-They put a price on absolutely everything.

-Yes.

-They're putting a value on pictures.

-They're putting a value.

-How much is a Titian worth?

-Which they don't know about

because the history of the collection has not been about talking publicly about money.

So you get people... You get tailors who go in to inventory this stuff

and they go, "Oh, picture on the wall of Holy Family, quite large, £20?"

When overseas buyers come in,

so the French and the Spanish ambassadors come in,

and are quietly told by their own sovereigns,

"Buy back the stuff that they bought from us."

Once that starts to happen and you get competition between people who do know,

so the French ambassador knows what a Titian is,

the Spanish ambassador does.

So the guy who's living in Bethnal Green who's got a Titian goes,

"Why are they so interested in this funny picture of a naked woman? Oh, it's a Titian."

And that's when that process starts to happen.

So the guy in Bethnal Green says, "How much will you give me for it?

"500 quid? He'll give me 650 quid. Oh, £1,000."

So what this sale did was spread the art market to a wider public.

It was no longer just a tight group of courtiers.

Yeah, absolutely. This is a bill of sale that you would get.

Goods sold to this guy Colonel John Hutchinson.

And I love the fact that Hutchinson is one of the regicides.

He signed Charles I's death warrant. He's a Puritan.

What on earth is a Puritan doing buying sexy Titians of naked ladies?

-For £1,000.

-For £1,000.

He takes them home to Northamptonshire where he lives.

And I love the story of him going back

and, being a Northerner, I can parody him saying,

"Look, Lucy, look what I bought." And she goes, "Oh, good grief! It's a naked lady."

It's an extraordinary story and here you have that kind of transaction.

People start to see that there is a monetary value to a painting.

And that is a new development.

And with the art market came another development,

the idea of provenance.

Now, knowing who had owned works of art and when,

became a factor in their desirability to a collector.

As can be seen from a picture at Wilton House.

This beautiful chalk drawing by Raphael is a perfect illustration

of how collecting was beginning to evolve

by the second half of the 17th century.

It was first brought to England by the Earl of Arundel

and, after his death, was sold to the artist Sir Peter Lely.

The 8th Earl of Pembroke, in turn,

bought it from the sale of Lely's collection.

Peter Lely was the first-known collector

to mark his drawings with what we call a collector's mark.

Here you can see it's his initials PL.

This is the start of a very interesting new dialogue

between artist and collector,

each adding value to the other.

A drawing gives status to a collector

but an established collector also can add value to a drawing.

It's the start of a long tradition that continues today.

Check any sale catalogue and you will see pages

devoted to the provenance of a work of art.

At Wilton, some of the collection

was lost in a disastrous fire in 1647.

Other important pieces were sold to raise money

in the aftermath of the Civil War.

But the idea of a private collection was here to stay.

In the 1680s, the 8th Earl of Pembroke rebuilt the family collection,

buying back some paintings that had been sold and acquiring new ones.

He even bought many that had been in the Arundel collection.

Here at Wilton, you get a clear idea of what these early collections must have been like.

Walking from the Van Dyck room into the anteroom,

you come face to face with another selection of real gems.

Like Rembrandt's moving portrait of his mother.

It would be another 200 years before the notion of a national gallery

filled with masterpieces was born.

But these private collections were already paving the way.

Despite the impact of the Civil War,

collecting was now embedded in English cultural life.

In 1658, Oliver Cromwell died.

Two years later, Parliament restored Charles I's son, Charles II.

Despite almost 20 years of Cromwell's Puritanism,

the taste for Renaissance riches

and the Baroque style that Rubens had introduced had not gone away.

Collecting now entered a new phase.

Luckily for us, the legacy of this

is perfectly preserved in the beautiful

Burghley House in Lincolnshire.

The Elizabethan exterior, though,

gives little clue of the visual extravagance which lies within.

Here is the very illustration of Restoration opulence.

This is known as the Hell Staircase

and was painted by the Italian artist Antonio Verrio in the 1680s.

And at the top of the stairs is heaven.

If you want to understand Baroque, this is it.

Baroque was all about taking everything to the extremes,

pushing the boundaries of perspective so that the walls

seem to fall away and we're standing in a temple open to the skies.

And the use of visual tricks,

look at that wonderful, spectacular shaft of rainbow light.

That's a true example of trompe l'oeil.

And, of course, the tumbling, contorted naked bodies

that are drawing us up into the heavens.

Verrio spent over a decade at Burghley between 1686 and 1697.

He came here through the patronage of two extraordinary collectors,

John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter,

and his wife, Lady Anne Cavendish,

the only daughter of the 1st Duke of Devonshire.

The Exeters picked up where the Arundels left off.

But they took collecting in England in a new direction.

This time, it wasn't so much a passion for old masters

as the shock of the new.

Archivist Jon Culverhouse has a wealth of documents

relating to this extraordinary pair

and their adventures in Italy in the late 1670s.

They were clearly a real couple.

They worked as a team, by the sound of it.

An intrepid pair heading off into the unknown.

She was very much, as you say, an intrepid lady.

I mean, to go off on a party like this

into territories unknown, crossing the Alps by wagon.

The danger of brigands and all the rest of it.

-They took gentleman soldiers.

-It was impressive.

-She was a brave lady.

Um, it's amusing that they took far too many people.

I think there were over 30 of them on the first trip.

And far too much stuff.

They took travelling beds, they took a tent, they took cooking equipment,

woollen clothing against bad weather.

-All sorts of things that they didn't need.

-Oh, how funny.

-I suppose they were used to English climate.

-Yes.

So, what idea do you have of their characters?

I think he had a huge enthusiasm.

I think that's what comes over more than anything.

You've got to be enthusiastic to buy over 350 paintings in four trips.

-He just didn't stop. He was incorrigible.

-Yes.

There was no way that anything was going to slow him down.

He wanted the very best, or what he saw as the best,

and he wanted lots of it.

What really comes across from these records is the fact that

-they immersed themselves totally in Italian life.

-Yes.

Here, look, they're in Padua, going between Padua and Venice.

And they've obviously arrived in Venice because here they are paying

-for a gondola.

-How lovely.

-Look, spent...

-On cool drinks.

-Cool drinks.

-How lovely.

They were buying iced drinks.

It's an everyday account. Look, here,

he's paid for washing their linen.

So, thinking about sending things home, did they actually buy paintings on this journey?

-Yes, very much so.

-Do we have records of those?

There is. Where are we?

Um... Here we are. Here we are.

-To Carlo Maratta, 600 crowns.

-How wonderful.

That's incredibly forward thinking, isn't it?

To be buying these contemporary Italian painters.

This was his great thing, really.

He liked the contemporary.

He wasn't looking for the Leonardos, for the Titians,

as the other grand tourists were.

He wanted things from artists that he met.

This is a really good example of the kind of painting

that the Earl of Exeter would have bought on his Italian travels.

In fact, this artist, Pietro Liberi,

the Venetian, was renowned in Italy

for his outrageous and highly erotic nudes.

It didn't seem to have deterred the 5th Earl, however,

because he bought a group of six.

It depicts Logic, with her mathematical instruments,

caught between Vice and Virtue.

But what's particularly lovely is that this Italian painting

is surrounded by a beautifully

intricately carved English overmantle.

What the 5th Earl and Countess were doing at Burghley

was not just building up an impressive collection of paintings

but making their house a work of art in itself.

The paintings were commissioned to go in specific locations

to create an effect and then, just as importantly,

the interior designed around them.

These elaborately carved picture frames and overmantles

are typical throughout the house.

Some of the finest carvings are by the master craftsman

Grinling Gibbons.

Today, furniture conservator Anthony Beech has a workshop in the stable yard

and has had the chance to conserve some of these carvings.

When these were first installed,

these swags of fruit and flowers, they would've been

this bright colour standing out against the dark panelling.

They really would. They would have been artworks in their own right.

-It makes much more of it, doesn't it?

-Yeah, absolutely.

That's absolutely right because it's a very important part

-of the artistic conception of the room.

-It really is.

They're not just carving to decorate panelling

or to embellish something, they are artworks in their own right.

And Gibbons really was an artist just working in wood rather than in paint.

Because this was really quite a new thing at this period, wasn't it?

It really was. Gibbons started off producing small items,

small panels and was discovered, really,

and then created this fashion.

So as soon as it became fashionable,

particularly at the royal court, everybody wanted it.

The renovation at Burghley went on for almost 20 years.

It must have been a nightmare at times.

As, like with any modern building projects,

tensions were never far from the surface.

One of the most important relationships

was that between the artist Verrio and his patron the earl.

And, at times, it was explosive.

Verrio was a florid Italian.

He liked his drink, he liked his women.

And, I think, very quickly proved problematical.

Well, I suppose it must be quite a difficult relationship,

-the patron and painter relationship.

-HE LAUGHS

And think of a painter who has worked for the king

-and thinks he's pretty grand.

-Yes.

As far as we know, he was living in

for the first time, for the first months here.

But when the second contract comes along,

the earl and his craftsman fall out.

And they have an argument, which Tanner the steward records

in scribbled notes and you get things like,

"Milord, you impudent dog."

The story is, there's a figure upstairs on one of the ceilings

portrayed as Ceres, the goddess Ceres, with six breasts,

and it's meant to be the cook who rejected him.

-So his revenge was to paint her with six breasts for all eternity.

-Really?

It may not have been the easiest of relationships

but it was clearly worth it.

By 1697, Verrio had finished these rooms

and the effect is breathtaking.

The 5th Earl died in 1700

and, unsurprisingly, he left huge debts.

Over the period of his earldom,

he had managed to overspend his income by 50% a year.

It took 14 years and an Act of Parliament to clear the estate.

These pioneer collectors, from Arundel to Exeter,

brought a fundamental idea to England

that paintings could be so much more than just functional.

They could be enjoyed for their aesthetic value.

And their legacy lives on not only in these wonderful houses

but in the way that we as a nation appreciate and value art.

In a century, collecting in Britain

had gone from almost nothing to all this.

Arundel's original ambition of having a mini Italy in England

was beginning to come to pass.

In the next programme, I'll be looking at the golden age of collecting.

Now the passion for art spread throughout the aristocracy.

And, as the very best of European art

was brought back to Britain by the shipload,

treasure houses dotted the country.

By the end of the 18th century,

our collectors began to turn their attention to home

and patronised the first great British artists.

Many of the paintings collected and commissioned by British collectors

are now in public ownership.

To find out more, visit

www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd