Monty Python’s Michael Palin Presents His Favourite Portray, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Pace


Of all of the Eng­lish come­di­ans to have attained world­broad fame over the previous half-cen­tu­ry, Sir Michael Palin would be the most Eng­lish of all of them. It thus comes as no sur­prise that the Nation­al Gallery would ring him up and invite him to make a video about his favourite paint­ing, nor that his favourite paint­ing could be by Joseph Mal­lord William Flip­er. “Most peo­ple aren’t inter­est­ed in rail­methods and the his­to­ry of rail­methods,” he explains, however Flip­er’s Rain, Steam and Pace has nice sig­nif­i­cance to a train-lover reminiscent of him­self pre­cise­ly “as a result of it’s concerning the beginning of the rail­method.”

Rain, Steam and Pace was paint­ed in 1844, when practice trans­port “was nonetheless a brand new factor, and a factor that fright­ened so many peo­ple. They thought it was going to destroy the coun­attempt­facet.” (Keep in mind that this was the time of Dick­ens, who did­n’t set so lots of his nov­els earlier than the arrival of the rail­method by acci­dent.) For all of Flip­er’s Roman­ti­cism, “he should’ve been excit­ed by it. Perhaps a bit alarmed.” His paint­ing declares that “this can be a new world that’s been opened up by the rail­methods, and it’s received enor­mous pos­si­bil­i­ties, and peo­ple are going to need to adapt to it.”

On this video, Palin intro­duces him­self as “a trav­el­er, an actor, and a gen­er­al hack.” His many and var­ied post-Mon­ty Python tasks have additionally includ­ed sev­er­al tele­vi­sion doc­u­males­taries on artists like Anne Purple­path, Artemisia, the Scot­tish Colourists, Hen­ri Matisse, Vil­helm Ham­mer­shøi, and Andrew Wyeth. Within the video under, he seems on the Nation­al Gallery in 2017 to share a selec­tion of his favourite paint­ings, from Duc­cio’s The Annun­ci­a­tion and Geert­gen tot Sint Jans’ The Nativ­i­ty at Evening to Bronzi­no’s An Alle­go­ry with Venus and Cupid (the supply of Mon­ty Python’s sig­na­ture ani­mat­ed foot) and Flip­er’s The Combat­ing Temeraire, a repro­duc­tion of which hung in his baby­hood dwelling.

“It’s nearly that peri­od the place steam is start­ning to come back in, and the previous sail­ing ship is now not want­ed,” Palin says of The Combat­ing Temeraire. “On the hori­zon, there’s a ship in full sail” — a “pow­er­ful, robust picture” in itself — and within the entrance, the “noisy, belch­ing fumes of the mod­ern steam tug.” Thus Flip­er cap­tures “the changeover from sail to steam,” a lot as he would cap­ture the changeover from horse to coach a number of years lat­er. Like several good paint­ing, Palin explains, these pictures “make you’re feeling dif­fer­ent­ly concerning the world from the way in which you probably did earlier than you noticed it” — and make you con­sid­er what eras are finish­ing and start­ning round you even now.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin Is Additionally an Artwork Crit­ic: Watch Him Discover His Favourite Paint­ings by Andrew Wyeth & Oth­er Artists

Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin on Nice Rail­method Jour­neys

Free: Learn 9 Trav­el Books On-line by Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin

Down­load 35,000 Works of Artwork from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­items by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & Extra

Mark Twain Skew­ers Nice Works of Artwork: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Had­dock!”), The Final Sup­per (“a Mourn­ful Wreck”) & Extra

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­ebook.



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