YouSaid · the spoken record

George Gordon

lines on the record: 13
first: 2025-07-22
most recent: 2025-07-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Then the actual act of recognizing I have often said when asked about this that if I hadn't recognised this work as Mike Rubens, I should have been fired.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much was a record then and stayed a record for a painting in an unmaster painting sale until very recently. Making of attributions is not something that ever should be done in a hurry and you need to learn. It is a measured process. So you may think, well, this really looks like a ribbons to me. I can't imagine what else it could be. But you can't say it is at Rubens until you've gone through all the proper processes in your mind and backed up by information that you find elsewhere and you put it all together. I said then and say now that it's not the discovery of the painting which is significant, it's bringing it to the market in the right way and with as much understanding of the painting itself and its circumstances of creation and its history as possible. That is a source of greater satisfaction getting it right researching it properly, understanding it properly, communicating it properly.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“London Unusually we didn't send it on travelling exhibition, partly because of its extraordinary condition and we didn't want to risk it in travelling. We were in the fortunate position of being able to announce the sale many months in advance so we had a long lead in time to the sale that we normally have and I think that was a factor in gathering momentum and gathering interest. There was a great deal of excitement by the time it came to the sale and at one point because we had put rather a low estimate on it of between four and six million on point somebody just shouted out a figure and then it went up and up and up and up. Quite a number of people realized you cannot buy paintings like this or the opportunities to buy a painting like this occur very rarely and there were still, I think, three bidders in the upper thirty millions and it finally sold forty five million pounds.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The painter came to London early in 2002 so that we were able to study it properly at first hand. We commissioned Simon Boback, who's a panel specialist, to look after it because this is a painting that was and still is in extraordinarily good condition and we want to make sure that it stayed in extraordinary good condition. It's in such good condition because it has had one very careful family owner in form of the Princess Lichtenstein from around seventeen hundred until nineteen nineteen. That's a significant factor in its preservation. And because it wasn't thought to be by Rubens for much of its life in the Liechtenstein election, it wasn't moved about to exhibitions or wasn't clean, all the things that can actually harm paintings. It was in incredibly good condition and still is. It came to auction on the 10th of july two thousand two.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of this was that Eudit went to the archives in Antwerp, got access to the original letters of the Fournt family, transcribed the particular reference to this painting, and translated it correctly and what the Prince of Liechtenstein actually said and took to the Forecons and which then became part of the correspondence is he did not want to have it if it was a painting painted while Rubens was still learning not because”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hadn't been able to see it yet. It was at that stage on loan to a monastery in Austria. We have monasteries open to the public, but it wasn't in the public areas and it was hung because it illustrated the subject of the other paintings there. I went with my colleague Eunit Neeson, who's now head of collections at the Murritz House in The Hague. We looked at it with strong torchlight and then torchlight you can see things that you can't see in even a very good image on screen. It wasn't a very good image. And you can see the paint in relief. So you can see how it's painted, the thickness of the paint. You can read the brushwork more clearly and by which stage it was clear that this was an early Rubens and a really significant picture. But obviously we need to define out what had actually happened to it and why it had gone into the Liechtenstein collection, why it had then become Jan Bandenhooker and the long story as to how that happened. But the key to”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was known, and this is where we get to the next stage of its ownership, that the Prince of Liechtenstein, Johann Adamandres, had rejected a painting offered to him by the Amsterdam dealing firm before, and the transcription of the correspondence with the Fournts had been mistranslated as this is a painting that the prince said he does not want to have because it was painted while Rubens was still learning. It was assumed that the painting in Brussels was the painting that the Prince of Liechtenstein had rejected. We knew, however, that this painting had been in the Liechtenstein collection until it was sold in about nineteen nineteen as Jan Dandenhooker, but we knew it had been a Lichtenstein collection. So there is clearly at link between these two things. So by this stage, we reasonably confidently it was by Ruben.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It found the composition in a painting on canvas in Beauzard in Brussels looked at that, saw that it was basically the same composition but with a big S shaped gap in the middle which looked odd. Then of course it looked up what had been said about the painting in Brussels. A few people had thought it was by Rubens himself or two prescient scholars had said no this must be a copy of a missing work.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big transparency was emailed to me by my colleague in Amsterdam Eudit Neeson, and it was thought to be by an article Jan Vandenhooker. So I looked at this extraordinary thing on my screen, and this is important. Did not immediately jump to the conclusion it must be at Rubens, because my training and instinct is always taken seriously an existing attribution, and in this case we knew that it had been called that for a long, long time. So I got up, went to the library, looked up Jan Van Lenluka, checked his father Gaspar Van Luka, realised it could not possibly buy either one, went back, looked at it again, thought well, that's done. Surely this must have something to do with ribbons. I got off from my desk and went back to the library, pulled out the Catalo complat, it's published in Italian ribbons, and very quickly.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A holy Italian artist When he gets to Italy he goes initially to the court at Mantua, where he does start to paint works that are recognisably rubens, he then moved about he was in Genoa, he went on diplomatic mission to Spain, and then he was in Rome where I think he really fructified as an artist what he did was to draw incessantly. He drew everything he could, and he was fortunate because Rome in the first decade of the seventeenth century was a very exciting place to be. His return to Antwerp in the autumn of sixteen oh eight caused very quickly within months a revolution in painting in the north. Everyone's eyes suddenly opened to what the possibilities were in art. I mean it is just staggering what it was able to achieve.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's got a classical architectural background, but it is literally a tour de force of bloodshed and cruelty, and it sometimes hard to look at if it wasn't so good, wasn't so astonishing, it would be possibly impossible to look at. The energy in which it's painted reflects exactly the cruel energy of the subject. We don't know who commissioned it. It's the size and shape of a chimney piece that probably was originally put above the chimney in the main room of a private house. Probably not in a church given its format. Was what we call mannerism derived partly from Italian mannerism artists by that stage were going to Italy as Rubens did himself. He considered himself to be”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're talking today about an extraordinary early masterpiece by Ribbons, painted when he just got back from nearly a decade in Italy to his native Antwerp, a painting of extraordinary violence depicting the massacre of the holy innocence in incredible condition so that its visceral power is undimmed by the passage of time. And a very, very exciting painting that makes an incredible impact on everyone that sees it. It's a swirling painting of astonishing, horrifying violence in which Roman soldiers, many of whom are naked, which is our combatants were traditionally portrayed, are slaughtering in the most brutal manner innocent children of distraught mothers. The energy is circular, so it's continuous. There is a pyramidal set up to the composition”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are very fortunate because we often get to see paintings that other people can't see in private collections, often literally an artics, and that gives us the chance to make discoveries and understand the paintings that we come across, recognising them isn't enough. You've got to understand them and understand why they matter and then explain to people why they matter and why they're significant.”
2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Rediscovery of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, with George Gordon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT