The Look of Love

Simon Schama explores how love portraits allow us to fulfil our craving to keep the ones we love close to us. By fixing their faces in time, we can defy separation, distance, time, even death. Beginning with the extraordinary story of Sir Kenelm Digby's attempts to bring his beloved wife Venetia back to life through a series of breathtaking portraits, the film explores the images at the centre of some of our most compelling love stories - the portrait miniatures that were instrumental in the love affair between the Prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert, and Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of his daughters that reveals the power of art made for love not money. Schama will explore Charles Dodgson's, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll's, attempts to stop time in his photographs of Alice Liddell, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's use of portraiture to possess Jane Morris, the wife of his business partner William Morris. Francis Bacon's posthumous portraits of his lover George Dyer and the final photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken hours before his death, show the power of portraiture to immortalize love.