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I'm going to tell you about an affliction I suffer from.

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And I have a funny feeling that quite a few of you

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suffer from it as well.

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When I'm walking around an art gallery,

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rooms and rooms full of paintings,

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after about 15 or 20 minutes,

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I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings.

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I'm not connecting to them.

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Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee

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I desperately need to wake me up.

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I'm suffering from gallery fatigue.

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How many of you out there suffer from --

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yes. Ha ha, ha ha!

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Now, sometimes you might last longer

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than 20 minutes, or even shorter,

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but I think we all suffer from it. And do you have

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the accompanying guilt?

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For me, I look at the paintings on the wall

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and I think, somebody has decided to put them there,

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thinks they're good enough to be on that wall,

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but I don't always see it.

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In fact, most of the time I don't see it.

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And I leave feeling actually unhappy.

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I feel guilty and unhappy with myself,

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rather than thinking there's something wrong with the painting,

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I think there's something wrong with me.

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And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that.

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(Laughter)

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The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break.

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If you think about going into a restaurant,

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when you look at the menu, are you expected to order

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every single thing on the menu?

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No! You select.

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If you go into a department store to buy a shirt,

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are you going to try on every single shirt

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and want every single shirt?

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Of course not, you can be selective. It's expected.

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How come, then, it's not so expected

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to be selective when we go to an art gallery?

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Why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting?

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Well I'm trying to take a different approach.

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And there's two things I do:

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When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast,

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and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones

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that make me slow down for some reason or other.

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I don't even know why they make me slow down, but something

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pulls me like a magnet

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and then I ignore all the others, and I just go to that painting.

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So it's the first thing I do is, I do my own curation.

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I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50.

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And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting,

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and I tell myself a story about it.

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Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired,

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our DNA tells us to tell stories.

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We tell stories all the time about everything,

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and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place,

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and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit,

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trying to bring some order to it.

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Why not apply that to our looking at paintings?

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So I now have this sort of restaurant menu

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visiting of art galleries.

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There are three paintings I'm going to show you now

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that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks

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and want to tell stories about them.

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The first one needs little introduction --

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"Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer,

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17th-century Dutch painter.

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This is the most glorious painting.

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I first saw it when I was 19,

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and I immediately went out and got a poster of it,

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and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house.

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It's accompanied me everywhere I've gone,

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I never tire of looking at her.

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What made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with

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was just the gorgeous colors he uses

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and the light falling on her face.

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But I think what's kept me still coming back

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year after year is another thing, and that is

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the look on her face, the conflicted look on her face.

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I can't tell if she's happy or sad,

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and I change my mind all the time.

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So that keeps me coming back.

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One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall,

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I lay in bed and looked at her,

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and I suddenly thought, I wonder what

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the painter did to her to make her look like that.

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And it was the first time I'd ever thought that

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the expression on her face is actually reflecting

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how she feels about him.

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Always before I'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl.

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Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship.

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And I thought, well, what is that relationship?

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So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered,

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we have no idea who she is.

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In fact, we don't know who any of the models

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in any of Vermeer's paintings are,

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and we know very little about Vermeer himself.

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Which made me go, "Yippee!"

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I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to.

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So here's how I came up with the story.

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First of all, I thought,

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I've got to get her into the house.

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How does Vermeer know her?

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Well, there've been suggestions that

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she is his 12-year-old daughter.

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The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting.

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And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look,

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but it's not a look a daughter gives her father.

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For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time,

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if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability.

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It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer

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to paint his daughter like that.

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So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody

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close to him, physically close to him.

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Well, who else would be in the house?

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A servant, a lovely servant.

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So, she's in the house.

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How do we get her into the studio?

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We don't know very much about Vermeer,

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but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know

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is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother

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in a house where he had his own room

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where he -- his studio. He also had 11 children.

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It would have been a chaotic, noisy household.

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And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before,

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you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet.

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How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around?

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Well, he compartmentalizes his life.

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He gets to his studio, and he says, "Nobody comes in here.

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Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean."

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She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together.

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And he decides to paint her.

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He has her wear very plain clothes.

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Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings

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wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials.

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This is very plain; the only thing that isn't plain

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is her pearl earring.

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Now, if she's a servant, there is no way she could afford

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a pair of pearl earrings.

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So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they?

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We happen to know, there's a list of Catharina, the wife's clothes.

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Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur,

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a yellow and black bodice,

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and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings,

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different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings.

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So clearly, her clothes were lent to various different women.

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It's not such a leap of faith to take

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that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife.

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So we've got all the elements for our story.

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She's in the studio with him for a long time.

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These paintings took a long time to make.

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They would have spent the time alone, all that time.

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She's wearing his wife's pearl earring.

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She's gorgeous. She obviously loves him. She's conflicted.

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And does the wife know? Maybe not.

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And if she doesn't, well --

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that's the story.

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(Laughter)

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The next painting I'm going to talk about

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is called "Boy Building a House of Cards" by Chardin.

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He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes,

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but he did occasionally paint people.

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And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting,

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different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated.

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I like this version the best, because some of the boys

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are older and some are younger, and to me, this one,

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like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right.

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He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man.

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He's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience,

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and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting.

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And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit.

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The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed

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in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting,

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and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it,

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I was standing there going,

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"Look at me. Please look at me."

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And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards,

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and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is,

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he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us.

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And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece,

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of a painting when there's a lack of resolution.

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He's never going to look at me.

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So I was thinking of a story where,

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if I'm in this position, who could be there looking at him?

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Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter.

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I'm thinking of an older version of himself.

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He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant,

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saying, "Look at me. I want to warn you about

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what you're about to go through. Please look at me."

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And he never does.

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And that lack of resolution, the lack of resolution in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" --

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we don't know if she's happy or sad.

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I've written an entire novel about her,

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and I still don't know if she's happy or sad.

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Again and again, back to the painting,

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looking for the answer, looking for the story to fill in that gap.

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And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily,

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but not really, and we come back again and again.

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The last painting I'm going to talk about

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is called "Anonymous" by anonymous. (Laughter)

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This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery.

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They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury,

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and then they discovered that it wasn't him,

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and they have no idea who it is.

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Now, in the National Portrait Gallery,

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if you don't know the biography of the painting,

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it's kind of useless to you.

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They can't hang it on the wall, because they don't know who he is.

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So unfortunately, this orphan spends most of his time in storage,

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along with quite a number of other orphans,

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some of them some beautiful paintings.

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This painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons:

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One is the disconnection between his mouth

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that's smiling and his eyes that are wistful.

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He's not happy, and why isn't he happy?

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The second thing that really attracted me

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were his bright red cheeks.

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He is blushing. He's blushing for his portrait being made!

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This must be a guy who blushes all the time.

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What is he thinking about that's making him blush?

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The third thing that made me stop in my tracks

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is his absolutely gorgeous doublet.

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Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons.

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And you know what it makes me think of,

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is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed.

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I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks,

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and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him,

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and I thought, is that what he's thinking about?

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And I thought, if I'm going to make a story,

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what's the last thing I'm going to put in there?

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Well, what would a Tudor gentleman be preoccupied with?

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And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay.

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He'd be preoccupied with his inheritance, with his heir.

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Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune?

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You put all those together, and you've got your story

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to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back.

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Now, here's the story.

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It's short.

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"Rosy"

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I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me.

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It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves

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and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread,

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set close together so that the fit is snug.

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The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed.

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Perhaps that was the intention.

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I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor.

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I knew even before I stood up to speak

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that my cheeks were inflamed.

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I have always flushed easily, from physical exertion,

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from wine, from high emotion.

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As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys,

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but not by George.

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Only George could call me Rosy.

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I would not allow anyone else.

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He managed to make the word tender.

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When I made the announcement, George did not

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turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet.

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He should not have been surprised.

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It has been a common assumption

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that I would one day marry his cousin.

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But it is difficult to hear the words aloud.

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I know, I could barely utter them.

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Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden.

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Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale.

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We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces.

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"What do you think of my doublet?" I asked.

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He glanced at me. "That collar looks to be strangling you."

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"We will still see each other," I insisted.

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"We can still hunt and play cards and attend court.

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Nothing need change."

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George did not speak.

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"I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry

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and produce an heir. It is expected of me."

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George drained another glass of claret and turned to me.

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"Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James.

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I'm sure you'll be content together."

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He never used my nickname again.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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Thank you.

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(Applause)