Britain's Lost Masterpieces

In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Dr Bendor Grosvenor identifies a portrait of a fellow of Merton College from the 1750s, George Oakley Aldrich. It is not known who painted the picture, but Bendor believes it is by the most famous painter of British grand tourists that ever lived, Italian artist Pompeo Batoni.

Could two anonymous landscape paintings, discovered at Birmingham Art Gallery, be by artists whose work profoundly influenced the development of European landscape painting in the 17th and 18th centuries? The first, a very badly damaged picture whose panel has spilt into two pieces is currently just attributed to the Flemish School rather than any single artist. The second is a forest scene thought to be a copy of a famous painting by Gainsborough. Dr Bendor Grosvenor believes the damaged painting is by Jan Breughel the Elder, a seminal figure in Antwerp during the 16th century. He believes the second painting is good enough to be by Gainsborough himself. The Flemish landscape tradition was a source of inspiration to Thomas Gainsborough. If these works are, as Bendor suspects, by these two eminent artists, they provide a fascinating, and previously missing, episode in the story of the development of landscape painting in European art.

Art detectives Bendor Grosvenor and Emma Dabiri travel to the National Museum Cardiff to investigate a badly overpainted Madonna, currently attributed to a follower of Botticelli, that shows signs of being worthy of investigation. Bendor believes the picture is good enough to warrant an attribution to Botticelli’s workshop, and conservation may reveal evidence of the hand of the master himself. Cleaning the picture confirms that a faker had tried to artificially age the panel. Bendor then travels to Florence to explore the early Renaissance, and the life and work of Botticelli, hoping to find evidence that will support a new attribution. Meanwhile, Emma Dabiri explores the story of the two immensely wealthy Welsh sisters who donated the work to the museum, and discovers how they tried to bring about their own renaissance in the cultural life of their native Wales.