Spot the Painting – How “Young Royals” recreated a famous painting as a shot (and why)

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Did you notice the painting?

No, not on the wall. And not in a book or on a poster either.

The painting ‘Young Royals’ recreated as a film shot.

And this little Swedish show isn’t even the only one that did that: Cinema and TV are overflowing with examples of directors deciding they want to add a little artsy flair to their story and recreate a world-famous work of art as a film shot, transforming the frame of one specific picture into a camera frame. And there’s a reason for that:

Film is a modern-day art form.

In fact, it might be the definitive art form of the 20^th and 21^st century.

This is obvious from how well-crafted a lot of movies and TV shows are, but it’s also something filmmakers like to visually point out to us: by using famous artworks on screen. And when I say ‘using’, I don’t just mean picking a painting as a prop and hanging it up on the wall of a particular set; I mean building an entire set, arranging and composing an entire shot to make it look like a well-known painting, essentially recreating an entire picture on set almost as if it were a tableau vivant – a painting come alive.

This can be achieved by either exactly copying, i.e. ‘quoting’ said painting directly and recreating it down to its tiniest detail, or by generally referencing it, i.e. reimagining and loosely basing a set on it, using it as an inspiration for the general setup, composition and mood of a shot.

On screen, both things are done frequently and to great effect. Before we get to ‘Young Royals’, which features a brilliant shot that takes inspiration from a world-famous painting, let me quickly give you a few other examples, so we can examine how this is generally done…and why anyone would go to that sort of trouble in the first place:

The ‘Doctor Who’ episode ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ has its two main protagonists travel back in time to meet Vincent van Gogh. Even if you’re not into scifi or don’t like watching things that are advertised as ‘family shows’, I would still recommend you watch this one because it’s such a feast for the eyes. The general (slightly silly) plot is easy to follow even if you’ve never watched anything else in the franchise: Two people travel back in time, meet Vincent van Gogh, get up to various shenanigans with him, battle monsters and try to prevent the master painter from committing suicide (spoiler alert: they’ll fail in that regard, and history won’t be changed, which is to be expected in a story about time travel).

Even if you usually try to avoid the children’s corner of television, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of this story, I promise. Not only is the actor who’s playing van Gogh brilliantly cast, the sets and locations in this episode are visually stunning, as well. Over the course of those 45 minutes, the filmmakers managed to recreate several of van Gogh’s most popular paintings in their shots: ‘Café Terrace at Night’, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, ‘The Starry Night’, and many more…

Just so we’re clear: When I’m saying ‘recreate paintings’, I’m not just talking about wooden frames with canvases in them that were used as props on the show. What I mean is: The show painstakingly recreated the paintings themselves as film shots and had their protagonists move around inside these paintings. You can actually see waitresses walking around on van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace at Night’, clearing the tables. This is what I mean when I say ‘recreate’. And this is what the creators of ‘Young Royals’ did, as well.

(By the way, this ‘Doctor Who’ episode falls into the recommended-viewing category for another reason, as well: If this blog is your first introduction to watching movies and shows for their metaphorical subtext, this story is a great starting point for teaching yourself how to do that. Just give it a try. I’ll even give you a little hint: The monster they’re fighting in that episode is a metaphor.)

Now, you could obviously argue that it makes sense to recreate paintings in a story that is itself about a painter. The same is true for a number of biopics from ‘Frida’, a screen adaptation of a biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, to the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, a (mostly) fictional account of Jan Vermeer’s life, spiced up by the usual (entirely fictional) Hollywood-esque romance story. These films are about painters, so it makes sense that the filmmakers in question either directly recreate or reimagine and loosely base their film shots on the paintings of these artists.

But shows and movies about painters aren’t the only ones that do this.

Sometimes a painting is just so well-known that you have virtually no other choice but to recreate or at least reference it when directing a movie or show of a certain genre or exploring a certain sujet:

If you’re adapting Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ for the screen, for example, chances are you’re going to reference John Everett Millais’ 1851-52 oil painting ‘Ophelia’ (which depicts the girl floating in the water) one way or another because it’s just so popular. (This has happened a number of times in film history already and will probably continue to happen for as long as this painting remains popular with audiences and is expected to be referenced on screen.)

If you’re shooting a film about Napoleon, there’s a whole list of world-famous paintings you simply can’t ignore as a filmmaker and just have to recreate on set. (This has allegedly recently happened with the famous 1886 ‘Bonaparte before the Sphinx’ painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme in Ridley Scott’s new ‘Napoleon’ biopic; I’m really looking forward to seeing this with my own eyes once the film comes out later this year).

As you can see, movies and TV shows don’t have to be about the painters themselves to still generate a need to recreate a painting on set; some sujets are just associated with certain popular paintings, so it becomes a fun exercise for directors to reference them.

But it’s not just in biopics and screen adaptations of classic literature and plays where this is commonly done. Sometimes paintings are recreated on screen for entirely artistic reasons: because it’s visually pleasing to do so or because the theme of the painting or deeper message the painting conveys fits the film or show in question.

In one of the dream scenes featured in his 2010 film ‘Inception’, Christopher Nolan references one of M.C. Escher’s most iconic works: the 1960 lithograph print ‘Ascending and Descending’, a picture of an impossible never-ending staircase that is, in turn, based on the famous Penrose steps. Nolan doesn’t painstakingly recreate the picture, though. He just uses the general idea in a scene in which paradoxical architecture with impossible shapes is explained to one of the characters (who functions as Ms. Exposition for the audience).

Why does Nolan do this? I’m sure many viewers thought this was just a little visual gimmick, just Nolan fooling around a bit as is his wont, in other words: just l’art pour l’art, nothing serious or deeply meaningful. But personally, I think there’s more to it than that.

Even if you leave aside the fact that Nolan is known as a director who makes cerebral films for people who like narrative puzzles (mirroring M.C. Escher, whose works are essentially brain-teasers), there are obvious parallels between the picture and the film: There’s clearly a metaphorical meaning to the scene featuring the infamous infinite stairs in the movie.

If you break ‘Inception’ down to its core, the theme of the movie is basically the difficulty to break out of grief. Its main protagonist Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is (metaphorically) fighting his way out of grieving the loss of his wife throughout the entire film. So, a scene featuring stairs that are literally endless is actually quite fitting: Grieving a loved one is like a constant uphill battle, like trudging up a flight of stairs that just won’t end, trapped in a closed loop, moving in circles and yet not going anywhere, essentially never moving an inch…

The characters in that particular scene of the movie are, indeed, walking up (not down!) the stairs throughout the entire scene, and they’re specifically talking about how best to disguise the fact that a dream has boundaries to the subconscious of a dreamer so as to make sure the dreamer in question doesn’t manage to work it all out and escape the trap…

In short, infinite stairs are a perfect metaphorical fit for the situation of unending misery the main protagonist of the movie has found himself in, and the reason why Nolan felt inspired by an artist like M.C. Escher, whose pictures are often surprising in their subtle-yet-present pessimism, seems obvious. (We will see later why the same is true for ‘Young Royals’ where the choice of painting makes perfect sense for the main protagonist, as well.)

Sometimes the reason why a certain painting was picked can be more elusive, though: In the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic book ‘The Sandman’, a supernatural being called Morpheus, the lord of dreams, is captured and imprisoned by a British aristocrat, who mistakenly thinks he has managed to entrap Death. In the context of Morpheus century-long confinement, the show ‘quotes’ Alexandre Cabanel’s breathtaking 1847 painting ‘The Fallen Angel’: In a rather memorable shot, it gives us the captive Morpheus staring broodily into the camera across the expanse of his bare arm in the same way Lucifer does in Cabanel’s famous picture. Why this was done remains unclear, though. There’s a different character on the show already who embodies the fallen-angel archetype; this (other) character is even called Lucifer and is shown to be reigning over hell.

So, why allude to Lucifer via a reference to a painting when showing us Morpheus?

It’s possible that the show is tackling the concepts of rebelliousness, rage and defiance in this way, visually invoking them in the context of its main protagonist to show us what will happen to a supernatural being who’s trapped for too long: How dangerous will this creature of ancient mythology become? How betrayed does it feel? How outraged?

Morpheus has already been confused with Death by its captor. Will Morpheus’ captor soon feel he caught something truly diabolical as he meets Morpheus’ inevitable wrath?

I don’t know if this is, indeed, the reason for this artistic choice; I can only speculate. Ultimately, the show shows…but doesn’t tell. And it’s, of course, always possible the filmmakers just felt this was a visually compelling idea.

Even more elusive is a reference to another world-famous painting in Martin Scorsese’s 2010 film ‘Shutter Island’, the reveal of which I will definitely not spoil for you this time. (It’s one thing to tell you Vincent van Gogh is dead and will remain so; it’s quite another to spoil something about a fictional story, I think. So, no spoilers from me on that one.) In a crucial scene, the film invokes the composition, subjects and colouring of Gustav Klimt’s 1908-09 painting ‘The Kiss’ but doesn’t exactly recreate it down to the tiniest details. The reasons for this artistic choice remain unclear:

Was it really just done because the two lovers in Klimt’s painting are often interpreted more broadly as an allegory of Love?

Or was it done due to the painting’s dreamlike setting? (The film scene in question is a dream, after all.)

Was it perhaps done specifically with a few interesting details in mind? Because if you look at it closely, the painting itself presents us with a slightly uneasy atmosphere, with uncomfortable elements in its composition: The woman is kneeling in front of the man. The position the two lovers are in can be interpreted as uncomfortable, stiff or even anatomically impossible.

So, was it done to suggest something a bit darker and more sinister about the movie scene? I don’t know. And neither do any of the film critics who spotted the reference as well and have been speculating about it ever since ‘Shutter Island’ came out.

Nothing quite so elusive happens on ‘Young Royals’, though. The filmmakers of this lovely little Swedish show take a clever bow to a famous painter and recreate a rather well-known painting of his, knowing exactly what it is that they are doing. And as we will see in a moment, the reason for that isn’t all that difficult to discern.