Andrew Graham-Dixon: prediction

Transcript context

…If you see a painting that’s English, my guess is you can recognize it as such. Oh, that’s English. It’s not French. I’d be shocked if you couldn’t do that. I think in the 20th century and the 21st century, that might be harder. I think I might struggle because the power of Esperanto and also the herd mentality of the modern artist should not be underestimated. People are very good at imitating other people. You can look at Russian art in the 19th century. An awful lot of it looks very French because they were so obsessed with trying to imitate the French, because that was the pinnacle of civilization. I think it’s a bit of a tricky one. To go back briefly to Vermeer, his patrons and their meetings, and these pictures that are painted for their meetings, I just think it’s such an astonishing thing, the lesson that’s being shown to other people in a time when, as you just alluded to, in Britain, if you’re a Catholic, forget marrying a Catholic. If you discover a Catholic, they will be tortured to death in public. They will have their entrails ripped out in public. They will be fed their own eyeballs. It’s truly awful. Yet in Holland, a tolerant Remonstrant such as Vermeer can actually marry a Catholic. He’s painting for a Remonstrant and her husband, who, to their meetings for these Christians without a church, you don’t have to believe in God. You can be Jewish. You can be a Muslim. The only thing you have to believe is that Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount contain the salvation for mankind. When you think of those people actually meeting, it’s the difference between, say, for example, if you’ve got the Troubles in Northern Ireland and you’ve got people from Sinn Féin meeting, the nationalists, the politicians meeting. That’s completely different than if you’ve got Catholic mothers of sons who’ve been shot in the conflict deciding to meet in their houses with Protestant mothers, women who’ve been shot, meet together, hug, talk, and embrace. That’s completely different. That’s what these people were doing. It’s as if, I don’t know, what would the example be today? It’s as if, say, for example, some Jewish mothers got together with some mothers from Gaza and had a picnic in the rubble together. What message would that send? That’s the message they’re sending. It’s an aspect of Dutch history that is just, as far as I’m concerned, it’s never mentioned. It’s been forgotten. You can go to any number of wonderful galleries like the Washington National Gallery, where you’ve got amazing, beautiful, wonderful Dutch art, but this context, this troubled context behind it, the war, the death, it’s just been edited out. It’s been forgotten. It’s not part of people’s consciousness. I’m trying to put it back. How does Rembrandt fit into this doctrine of toleration?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.