Michael Palin: A passion for painting

Michael Palin likes art, but resisted making a programme about it until he stumbled on the Cone sisters. Without their help, we might not have heard of Picasso and Matisse, he tells Louise Jury

The BBC really wanted Michael Palin to do a programme on Matisse. It is easy to see why. Palin, one of the most likeable blokes on television, would have applied his easy charm and enormous enthusiasm and encouraged an audience of millions to discover one of the giants of modern art. For television commissioners who are eager to find new ways of attracting new viewers to a "difficult" subject like art, the combination would have been a dream.

Palin declined. "That's heavy duty," he says. "There are lots of art experts who know more than I do about an artist like Matisse." But after falling in love with painting in recent years and making a couple of programmes for BBC Scotland on painters he admired, he was keen to do more. "Paintings are perfect for television. The camera can get in there as close as you the viewer can, sometimes closer. You can see the paint, the pigment, the brush."

He wasn't always a fan. "When I was young, going to an art gallery was a bit of a chore. They were dusty and I was interested in music and acting and girls or whatever," he says. Today, he is a supporter of most of the major galleries in London. "I'm absolutely dazzled by the fact that you go somewhere like the National Gallery and everything there began as a blank canvas."

He has also become something of a collector himself. He has a Winifred Nicholson and a Walter Sickert and one or two painters "that aren't well-known but are wonderful". And he has several canvases of city life by the Royal Academician Chris Orr.

So when he came across the names of Claribel Cone and her sister Etta in footnotes at a Royal Academy exhibition one day, he decided the programme he would make for the BBC would be on these two extraordinary but little-known art collectors from Baltimore.

Most collectors, Palin says, go unrecognised – even if the blaze of publicity surrounding Charles Saatchi may suggest otherwise. Yet in supporting artists like Picasso and Matisse in the first decades of the 20th century, Etta and Claribel made an important contribution to modern art. Claribel died in 1929 but Etta continued buying until her death 20 years later, when the collection of Manets, Renoirs and the rest was bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of Art – despite eager overtures from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The collection was then worth $3m. What Michael Palin had found at the Royal Academy were some of the prize pieces on loan from the United States.

"Just reading about these two women, I thought they were fascinating," Palin says. "They are the unsung heroines of the modern art world, combining the best of the Old and New Worlds to help fuel a whole new direction in art, because without the patrons and the buyers, many of the great artists would be unknown and impoverished. Someone has to buy their works."

Palin was intrigued, too, that the sisters had bequeathed the collection to their local gallery in Baltimore, which was not the most prosperous of cities to find itself in possession of such a treasure trove. "Because I'm a Sheffield boy, I'm rather keen on provincial cities that have fallen on hard times," he says, "so I felt a certain empathy with Baltimore."

Travel was, for Palin, the decisive factor in turning the Cone sisters into a film. For these eccentric American ladies developed their passion for buying art while on a grand tour of Europe – thus necessitating a distinctively Palin-esque journey through Paris, Nice and Florence as well as their native Baltimore. The combination was irresistible. "It's a slightly selfish thing," he says. "I want to find out about things. By making these programmes, it helps me to learn in the best possible way. I knew nothing about the Cone sisters to begin with, but I've gone on a crash course and I've become genuinely fond of these people."

The sisters were "rather respectable-looking matrons" who never married, but spent their share of the family money built on a fabric business – their Jewish immigrant father supplied cotton to Levi jeans and the military – on paintings considered rather shocking for the time, such as Matisse's Blue Nude.

They discovered their passion for art in Europe, which they visited at the encouragement of the writer Gertrude Stein, with whom Claribel studied and with whom Etta appears to have had an affair. It was in Florence that they enjoyed a "truly epiphanic moment" when Stein's brother, Leo, introduced them to Botticelli's work. In Paris, they visited Picasso's first studio, in Montmartre, and acquired a stock of the drawings that threatened to overwhelm every home in which he ever lived. Their collecting began. "It wasn't just paintings," Palin explains. "Clarissa, for example, bought lace-work, hats, shoes. She was truly eccentric and bought everything in twos or threes."

Palin's own art acquisitions are, he says, somewhat more modest. He notes that he could not afford another Sickert at the prices they now command and says that the rest of his collection is not expensive. "I wouldn't particularly want to have very expensive paintings. It would be like having very expensive bottles of wine. I don't know how people drink £400 bottles of wine."

Yet fans of his travelogues need not fear. He has not abandoned the wider world to be another Rolf Harris.

A new series, on the mountains of Central Asia, beckons. "Once you know you've got an audience, it's quite hard to turn your back on them, because there's a lot of people there asking where you're going to travel to next," he says. "I've a feeling that I need that kind of push – I might just stay at home otherwise. But rather than spend two years writing an opera or making a model boat or waiting for the great Shakespearean role to come up, I tend to think that I should probably make another documentary about my enthusiasms. I've got many."