Succession – TV tyranny with a few choice paintings

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 TV event of the month is the return, for its second series, of Succession – the sour saga of a Murdoch-style media dynasty toughing out family feuds in helicopters and well-appointed apartments on the Upper East Side.

The lead publicity shot for the first series showed Logan Roy, tyrant in chief of Waystar Royco and the Roy family, and his four children in front of The Tiger Hunt (1615–17) by Rubens. Though your correspondent kept his eyes peeled for the painting throughout 10 episodes, it didn’t appear in the series itself: perhaps, Rakewell wonders, because the lower part of the picture was seemingly chopped off by the Roys at some point during the photo shoot:

The poor old Tiger Hunt must have returned to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, its usual home, for patching up. For the second series, Logan Roy has hung a Bouguereau in his dining room – and not just any old fleshy fantasy, but Dante and Virgil (1850) from the Musée d’Orsay, which shows the poets watching on as a one heroic fraudster sinks his teeth into another’s neck. Let the voyage into High-Net-Worth hell commence…

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