BBC - The High Art of the Low Countries (2013) Part 2 Boom and Bust

The High Art of the Low Countries

Series in which Andrew Graham-Dixon tours the Low Countries, exploring how history has influenced the area's art, architecture and culture. A history of the ground-breaking works that emanated from The Netherlands and Belgium. Van Eyck, Vermeer, Rubens, Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch, Van Gogh, Mondrian and Magritte; it's a shifting culture of early adopters, new technology, piety cut through with hellish visions, portraits of friendship and madness and new ways of seeing.

Part 2: Boom and Bust

Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at how the seemingly peaceful countries of Holland and Belgium - famous for their tulips and windmills, mussels and chips - were in fact forged in a crucible of conflict and division. He examines how a period of economic boom driven for the first time by a burgeoning and secular middle class led to the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, creating not only the concept of oil painting itself, but the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer combining art and commerce together as we would recognise it today.

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