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(piano playing)
Voiceover 1: Here we are at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London
and we're looking at a Rembrandt, A Girl at a Window.
She's from about 1645 and this is just one of those pictures that it hooks you.
Remember when you were at a cafe and you were staring out,
gazing at the world go by, that's what she seems to be doing in this picture.
Her little rosy cheeks, but she's gazing off into the distance.
Voiceover 2: Yeah it's true and being the viewer of this painting kind of puts you
into that imagined scenario that she's looking at.
If you walk back and forth, it really is one of those portraits that seem like her eyes follow you.
Voiceover 1: As we're gazing at her, she's gazing back at us.
We're equally beguiling to each other aren't we?
Voiceover 2: That's right and it's funny because there's very little background with this.
We don't really know where she is.
It's called Girl at a Window, but you don't really see much of a window there.
Voiceover 1: No, it's Girl definitely leaning on a ledge and what is that background?
Voiceover 2: Yet she's so captivating, even without any background.
Voiceover 1: Rosy cheeks. She makes you think what temperature is it?
What's she been doing to have those cheeks?
Voiceover 2: Exactly.
Voiceover 1: And her age, when I first look at her I think, young girl.
Then the more I look at it the more I see some kind of, seems to be wisdom in there.
She's got gold chains around her neck, she's holding them.
It makes you question her status because her clothes, again, are very ambiguous.
Is that a nightdress, is she a servant girl?
Voiceover 2: To Rembrandt's credit of course, but he really does make you psychologically interested
in her without giving you ... he hasn't put a house in the background
and he hasn't given her clothes that exactly tell you who she is or how old she is.
He's made you interested in her simply by how he's painted her in this very basic way.
Voiceover 1: The parted lips, is that a smile?
It's almost that Mona Lisa question isn't it, is she smiling at us or is she not?
Is she staring across us or is she looking at us?
I love the color, the way he's used the texture of the paint,
the dry rasping paint that he's put on her cheeks
and the highlights in her hair really bring her to life.
Voiceover 2: Kind of contrasting different areas of the painting as well,
how dark and nondescript the background gets.
Even the ledge that she's leaning on, he's done with fairly quick brush strokes.
Then the detail in the draping of her shirt and again those rosy cheeks,
her skin looks like it would be soft to touch.
Voiceover 1: Definitely.
This is definitely another one of those ones that you just want to fall into it.
I find it's interesting because it mirrors what I want to do,
I want to keep gazing in that people watching way which is what she's doing in the painting.
They say that when Rembrandt painted this picture he hung it outside,
facing out of his apartment window and people walking in the street shouted up
because they felt it was so realistic, that she was really there.
Voiceover 2: A real girl in the window, maybe that was where the name came from
rather than the window being actually painted.
(piano playing)