Hey there Desmond,

Hi. So where are you today?

St James's Palace in London.

Wow, is that a castle?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're, uh, we're not in a palace. No, we're in a tiny room with two microphones.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, I think if we could just start, if you could introduce yourself and what you do for us.

Okay, I'm Desmond Scholl. if you could introduce yourself and what you do for us.

Okay, I'm Desmond Shaw Taylor and I'm the bearer of the Queen's pictures,

which means that I'm curator in charge of paintings in the Royal Collection. So recently Desmond's team was cleaning a 1643 painting by a Dutch artist named Isaac Van Ostida

That's part of the collection of Queen Elizabeth and they made a discovery.

A colleague of mine called Adelaide, Isat was cleaning the Isaachanna-Stada and she saw that a bush had been over painted so it was a much later paint and she was in the corner of the bottom right hand corner of the picture and a dog was kind of snitting at this bush which is a bit odd.

Anyway she realized that the paint was not original so she very carefully cleaned it off and it revealed that there was a man's

coursing in the corner of the road. Wait a minute so somebody had painted a bush

cover yeah you know, rather crude detail, a guy taking a drop on next to the road with a dog sort of sniffing him.

Somebody thought, probably in 1903, but this wasn't quite suitable, so they just painted

a little bush over the top, made him go away.

So this painting had been around with a guy as you say taking a drop in the

corner and then 250 years later basically someone thought oh you know we should cover that

up by painting a book.

Pretty much.

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