Pierce Brosnan picks up the paintbrush

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

The film world is not enough for Pierce Brosnan. This week, the former James Bond actor announced that he is to unveil his first exhibition of paintings in Paris later this year. Brosnan revealed that he has been working away on his art in a studio in Putney, London. ‘I knew I didn’t have the qualifications, but I had some talent… I had some art’, he said.

Brosnan declined to name the location and date of the show, but did admit to moments of doubt. ‘I feel quite relaxed now, but I do look at the work and think: “Am I out of my mind?”’

Well, you can now judge for yourselves. Last week, Brosnan unveiled one of his paintings on Facebook. Entitled The Night Marchers, the work is certainly colourful – though possibly better suited to the cover of a Santana album than the passages of the Louvre.

Brosnan, who studied commercial illustration at Saint Martin’s in the late 1960s, clearly has a passion for the fine arts. Last October, he was spotted watching a film about Hercules Segers at the Rijksmuseum’s stand at TEFAF New York. A few months before, he had visited the Prado, where he had been left ‘open mouthed’ by the museum’s ‘sexy, huge’ Ingres show. (While in Madrid, he was reprimanded by Twitter users for taking a selfie in front of Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofia, which normally forbids all photography).

Looking at #HerculesSegers with a GoldenEye 😉 Pierce Brosnan @TEFAF NY https://t.co/UdSOOp0que pic.twitter.com/dznpEBmGWY

— Rijksmuseum (@rijksmuseum) October 24, 2016

Perhaps less auspiciously, one of Brosnan’s most famous roles, as the titular character in 1999’s Thomas Crown Affair remake, saw him playing an art loving billionaire who steals a work by Monet from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. When his show opens in Paris, let’s just hope life doesn’t imitate art…

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