The Story
100 Great Paintings is a British television series broadcast in 1980 on BBC Two, devised by Edwin Mullins. He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, the language of colour, the hunt, and bathing, picking five paintings from each. The selection ranges from 12th-century China through the 1950s, with an emphasis on European paintings. He deliberately avoided especially famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or John Constable's The Hay Wain. The series is available on VHS and DVD.
On the basis of the series, Mullins published the book Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated (1981), which contained the 50 paintings broadcast to that point. A German translation of Mullins' book appeared as 100 Meisterwerke in 1983. In 1985, a second volume came out, only in Germany, which discussed the remaining 50 paintings. Although the TV series is titled “100 Great Paintings,” the actual number of paintings introduced is 220. This can be confirmed in the list below.
Executed in signature: ‘JSteen’, measuring height: 134; depth: 8.5; width: 104, the surface rewards close looking. Jan Steen builds the composition through layered glazes and a tightly controlled palette, letting cool shadows recede so that the warm, lit passages step forward. The brushwork shifts from the precise to the almost dissolved — a hallmark of mature Baroque practice.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
