Season 2006

Paris was the centre of the art world in the nineteenth century and for American artists, its lure was irresistible.

They flocked there in their thousands, eager to establish their artistic credentials.

As their letters home prove, initial impressions of Paris were overwhelming: the light, the noise, the smells, the contrasts.

Theatres, cafés, gardens and boulevards provided rich subject matter for these painters, as did their fellow artists, often portrayed as the elegantly dressed flâneur (dandy), or as the bohemian, studiedly careless in appearance.

This fascinating film, much of it shot on location, captures the excitement that Paris conveyed to its American visitors, and provides a vivid sense of what American artists retained of their experience, and brought back with them to America.

In the late-thirteenth century, the highly patterned and stylised form of painting that dominated the Middle Ages began to give way to a much more naturalistic kind of art.

The way art looked changed dramatically and this film questions why it happened at this particular point and how artists learned to paint with completely new approaches.

The National Gallery's collection presents a unique opportunity to investigate the development of early Italian Renaissance painting.

The early Renaissance Italian painters transformed the ways in which they depicted their subject matter, developing more naturalistic representations of people and places. How did later generations of artists use and expand those techniques, and to what ends?

This film looks at the aims and ideals of both painters and patrons in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy. It examines the kinds of subject matter being depicted, and themes or interests associated with specific artistic centres such as Florence, Rome and Venice. It poses questions about what happens when certain ideals – of harmony and balance, for example – are attained.

The National Gallery's collection presents a unique opportunity to explore the development of Italian Renaissance painting.

The National Gallery, London has three important paintings of bathers: Monet's 'Bathers at La Grenouillère', Seurat's 'Bathers at Asnières', and Cézanne's 'Bathers' (Les Grandes Baigneuses). Although made by French artists within a period of about thirty years, all three look very different: this film explores the broader context for their creation.

This film shows how nineteenth-century French artists exploited new subject matter, such as the bourgeoisie at leisure, new ways of composing paintings and depicting spatial form, and new ways of applying paint, to produce a variety of 'modern' works. It explores the experimental nature of avant-garde French painting in the second half of the century, looking also at the work of academic painters like Ingres to understand why these developments caused such an uproar.

Stunning photography of the paintings is accompanied by location footage and on-screen interviews with acknowledged experts on the subject.

Written and narrated by Louise Govier and produced by the National Gallery Audio Visual Unit

John Virtue was invited to become the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist because of his deep-rooted relationship with the great European landscape tradition that is magnificently represented in the museum’s collection. Working in the National Gallery’s studio, Virtue has made an unprecedented series of large-scale paintings that represent the London cityscape looking towards St. Paul’s and a smaller group showing Trafalgar Square from the roof of the National Gallery. Executed solely in black and white, they are monumental, epic works.

This film traces the origins and rapid rise to fame of Rafaello di Giovanni Santi (1483-1520), one of the most precociously talented artists of the Italian Renaissance and follows his remarkable artistic journey from Urbino, where he was born, to the papal court in Rome.