# Getty Center audio guide, five stops, free.

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Five paintings, upper floor, three adjoining pavilions. It starts in the East Pavilion, Gallery E205, with two Rembrandts in the same room: the small copper self-portrait known as Rembrandt Laughing, and The Abduction of Europa. Then the South Pavilion, Gallery S204, for Jacques-Louis David's Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, and on into the West Pavilion, Gallery W204, where Caillebotte's Young Man at His Window hangs a few steps from Van Gogh's Irises. Ten and a half minutes of audio and roughly fifteen minutes of walking, once the tram has carried you up the hill from the car park.

Every gallery number, date, dimension and sale price here was read off the Getty Museum's own collection records on 6 September 2026 and checked against a second source. The Getty is part way through a modernization programme that keeps moving pictures, so if a wall label disagrees with us, the label is right and we would like to hear about it.

## The stops

### 1. Rembrandt Laughing

Rembrandt van Rijn · about 1628 · Oil on copper, 22.2 × 17.1 cm · East Pavilion, Gallery E205

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/getty-center/en/rembrandt-laughing.mp3?v=1072317 (134 s)

Look for:
- The monogram in the upper-left corner. Three interlocking letters, R H L, cut into paint that was still wet. Rembrandt used that signature only between late 1627 and early 1629.
- The gorget, the polished metal collar round his throat, worn over a dark robe and a rough brown woollen cape. He is dressed as a soldier.
- The size. Twenty-two centimetres by seventeen, on a sheet of copper rather than canvas or panel.
- The brushwork in the face: short, quick strokes, with the background swept in briskly, so the laugh reads as caught rather than held.

The first surprise is how small it is. Twenty-two centimetres by seventeen, roughly the size of a sheet of writing paper, and the support underneath the paint is not canvas or wood but a sheet of copper.

The man laughing at you is Rembrandt van Rijn, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, painting around 1628 in his first years as an independent master in Leiden. He has dressed himself as a soldier: a polished metal gorget round the throat, a deep purple robe, a rough brown cape over the shoulder. The Dutch had a word for a picture like this. A tronie, meaning a study of a face and an expression rather than the portrait of a particular person. What makes this one unusual is the mood. Rembrandt painted himself more than forty times, and a laughing one is rare.

Look at the upper left corner. Three interlocking letters, R H L, for Rembrandt Harmenszoon Leidensis, Rembrandt son of Harmen from Leiden. He used that monogram only from late 1627 to early 1629, and he cut it into the paint while it was still wet, which is why the date can be pinned so tightly.

Now the part that should make every auctioneer nervous. For most of the twentieth century nobody knew where this painting was. It survived as an old engraving by a Flemish printmaker, Lambertus Claessens, who published it as a work by Frans Hals. Then, on the twenty-sixth of October 2007, it turned up at a country saleroom in Gloucestershire, at Norcote, as lot 377, catalogued as a follower of Rembrandt. Photographs had been emailed to the experts at the Rijksmuseum before the sale, and the auctioneer said afterwards that the response was pretty dismissive. The estimate was one thousand to fifteen hundred pounds. It sold for 2.2 million pounds.

The proof came next. Ernst van de Wetering, who chaired the Rembrandt Research Project, published his case that year. The monogram written into wet paint. The copper sheet, the same standard size Rembrandt used for etchings dated to 1628. And an electron emission radiograph that showed an earlier, probably unfinished history painting lying underneath the laugh. In 2013 the Getty bought it from the London dealers who had made the winning bid.

One more thing before you move on. A French owner in the eighteenth or nineteenth century wrote on the back of the copper that this was Democritus, the laughing philosopher. Dutch painters of the period gave Democritus a globe to hold, and there is no globe here. It was always just Rembrandt, enjoying himself.

### 2. The Abduction of Europa

Rembrandt van Rijn · 1632 · Oil on single oak panel, 64.6 × 78.7 cm · East Pavilion, Gallery E205

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/getty-center/en/the-abduction-of-europa.mp3?v=910358 (114 s)

Look for:
- The young woman fallen on the shore with her arms up, and the flower garland she had woven for the bull's neck spilled into her lap.
- The coachman on the carriage above the beach, up on his feet, staring after the princess in horror.
- The city in the mist on the far horizon, with a crane among the buildings. Cranes belong to Rembrandt's Amsterdam, not to Ovid's Tyre.
- The gold. Rembrandt worked the glitter on the carriage and the dresses hard, and set it against the dark thicket of trees on the right.

Same room, four years later, and a different painter altogether. Start at the bottom left, in the water. A white bull is swimming away from the shore with a young woman on his back. She has one hand on his horn and the other dug into his neck, and she is twisting round to look at the friends she is leaving behind.

The story is Ovid's. Jupiter wanted the princess Europa, turned himself into a bull, waited on the beach until she climbed on, and carried her over the sea to the land that took her name. Rembrandt hardly ever painted mythology. Out of roughly three hundred and sixty finished paintings, five come from the Metamorphoses, and this is the one people cross a city for.

Follow the panic along the shore. One young woman has fallen to the ground with her arms up, and the flower garland she had woven for the bull's neck has spilled into her lap. Her friend beside her clasps her hands and does nothing, because there is nothing to do. Up on the bank the coachman has risen to his feet on the carriage and is staring after the princess. Everything in that group is silk and gold and Rembrandt showing off what he can do with a highlight.

Now look left, past the bull, to the horizon. There is a city in the mist, and among its buildings, a crane. Cranes did not exist in Ovid's Tyre. They existed in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, and that is the commission talking. The man who paid for this was Jacques Specx, who set up the Dutch East India Company's trading post in Japan in 1609 and later governed Batavia, the city now called Jakarta. A Flemish writer Rembrandt would have read, Karel van Mander, had argued that the bull who carried Europa west was not a god at all but the name of a ship. So a merchant whose living was moving Asian cargo to Europe by sea was handed his own career, dressed as a myth, on a single oak panel.

It hung in Specx's house until his death inventory of 1652. After that the panel worked its way through Paris salerooms, sold once for 86 livres, once for nine thousand one hundred francs, then to a banker named Leopold Koppel in 1911 for nineteen thousand pounds. It went to his daughter, and from her to her son, and the Getty bought it from that estate in 1995.

### 3. The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis

Jacques-Louis David · 1818 · Oil on canvas, 88.3 × 103.2 cm · South Pavilion, Gallery S204

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/getty-center/en/farewell-of-telemachus-and-eucharis.mp3?v=969290 (121 s)

Look for:
- The two faces. She has closed her eyes and put her head on his shoulder; he is looking straight out at you, over her hair.
- The gold quiver on the left and the hunting horn in the middle. Eucharis is dressed close to Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
- The white dog at the right edge, gazing up at Telemachus. It is there to send your eye to his face.
- The edges. The figures are cropped abruptly and there is almost no setting, so there is nothing to look at except the two of them.

Two people in a cave, cropped at the edges, with nothing else in the picture at all. Watch where the eyes go. She has closed hers and laid her head on his shoulder. He is looking straight out at you, over her hair, one hand on her thigh and the other holding a spear upright.

This is a farewell, and he is the one leaving. The story is not Homer, although it borrows his people. It comes from a French novel of 1699, Les Aventures de Télémaque, by François Fénelon, in which Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, comes ashore on Calypso's island, falls in love with a nymph called Eucharis, and has to give her up in order to go looking for his father. Jacques-Louis David is not illustrating a particular sentence in the book. He is painting the second before the leaving.

Look for the gold. There is a quiver on the left, a hunting horn in the middle, and Eucharis is dressed close to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Then look at the far right, where a white dog pushes into the frame and gazes up at Telemachus. David gives you an animal so that you will follow its eyes to the face he wants you to read.

He painted this in Brussels in 1818, in exile. He had left France in 1816, after the Bourbons came back to the throne, and this is the last painting he made of a mythological couple. Somewhere between 1817 and early 1818 a German collector, the Count von Schönborn, heard what was on the easel, came to the studio, and bought it. A Brussels newspaper then announced that the painting was destined for a great lord from Bavaria for whom it was made, which told the city that somebody important had it and nobody who.

It was never shown in Paris. It hung in Ghent, so well received that the head of the academy there asked David to extend the run, then in Brussels for three weeks in aid of the hospices, and then it went to Germany. Four years later one of David's students, Sophie Frémiet, painted a second version under his instruction, and it was her copy, not this canvas, that Paris saw in 1846.

A German writer of the day complained that cutting figures off at the edges like this was ill-suited to history painting. That cropping is exactly why the picture still feels modern, and why people now call it proto-Romantic. It reached Los Angeles from a Sotheby's saleroom in New York on the twenty-fourth of February 1987.

### 4. Young Man at His Window

Gustave Caillebotte · 1876 · Oil on canvas, 116 × 81 cm · West Pavilion, Gallery W204

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/getty-center/en/young-man-at-his-window.mp3?v=1001055 (125 s)

Look for:
- The woman down on the pavement in fashionable clothes, about to cross the street. She is the only person on that side, and the only thing he can be looking at.
- His stance: back turned, feet planted apart, hands in his pockets, a dark suit against a sunlit street.
- The wide street running away on the diagonal behind him. That is the Boulevard Malesherbes, and the matching apartment blocks along it were new when this was painted.
- The horse-drawn carriages further down the road, which tell you how high above the street this balcony is.

You are looking at a man's back, and he is not going to turn round. Dark suit, hands in his pockets, feet planted apart, standing at an open window with a sunlit street in front of him and a dim room behind.

The man is René Caillebotte, the painter's brother. The window belongs to the family's newly built apartment building, at the corner of the rue de Lisbonne and the rue de Miromesnil, in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. The wide street running away on the diagonal is the Boulevard Malesherbes, and the cream apartment blocks along it were nearly all new. Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, had cut those boulevards through the old city, and the property speculation that filled them with matching cream apartment blocks had made the Caillebotte family rich. The painter's father, Martial, had been one of the men doing the building, and he had died shortly before this was painted.

Now find what the young man is looking at. Down on the pavement, small, in fashionable clothes, a woman is about to cross the street. She is the only person on that side of the road. A couple of horse-drawn carriages sit further off, and they give you the height of the balcony.

Gustave Caillebotte was twenty-seven, and this was his public debut. He hung it at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, and of everything he sent, only his Floor Scrapers drew more comment. He refused to call it a portrait. He titled it Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, young man at his window, and presented it as a genre scene, a type rather than a person, which is a strange thing to do with your own brother.

Not everyone was convinced. Émile Zola thought this was photography rather than painting. He wrote that a copy of reality that is not stamped with the painter's own talent is a pitiful thing, and called the picture anti-artistic because of the exactitude of the copying. The same exhibition sent the critic Edmond Duranty away to write his essay The New Painting, which argued that pictures of modern city life were precisely what art should now be doing. He named no artists. He did not have to.

The canvas was a gift from the artist to a friend in Meaux, and it stayed in that family for decades before Paris, New York and Dallas. In November 2021 it came up at Christie's from the estate of the oilman Edwin Cox, and the Getty paid fifty-three million dollars, more than twice the previous record for a Caillebotte. It is the first Caillebotte the museum has owned, and it hangs beside the Van Gogh you are about to see.

### 5. Irises

Vincent van Gogh · 1889 · Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 94.3 cm · West Pavilion, Gallery W204

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/getty-center/en/irises.mp3?v=1298224 (162 s)

Look for:
- The single white iris near the left, alone among the blue. The Getty's own paintings curator asks whether it is there for the eye or for Van Gogh's loneliness, and does not answer.
- The pairs of opposite colours: pale green leaves against reddish earth, blue-violet flowers against the orange and yellow ones behind them.
- The blue that used to be violet. Under the surface is a violet mixed from geranium lake and blue, and the red has faded out of it.
- The outlines. Every iris has its own line, wavy in one flower, twisting in the next, curling in the one after.

There is not a single person in this painting, and it is still the most crowded thing in the building. Get close enough to see the paint. Every iris in front of you has its own outline, wavy in one flower, twisting in the next, curling in the one after that, because Van Gogh sat in the garden and worked them out plant by plant.

He was in that garden because he had checked himself in. In May 1889, after episodes of self-mutilation and hospital, Vincent van Gogh entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy, in Provence. He was confined to the grounds. A walled garden and the view from a window were the whole of his access to the world, and in the year he had left he painted almost 130 canvases. He began this one in his first week.

Find the white iris, near the left, alone among the blue. The Getty's own paintings curator, Scott Allan, puts the question rather than answering it: is it there mainly for the eye, a moment of respite and contrast among strong colours, or does it stand for Van Gogh's own loneliness and isolation, as many people like to think. He does not decide. Nobody can.

The colour is a system, not a mood. Pale green leaves against reddish earth. Blue-violet flowers against the orange and yellow ones behind them. He was pairing opposites on purpose so that each one would look stronger. And here is the thing your eye cannot do for you: the blue used to be violet. When Getty conservators took cross-sections through the paint they found a violet mixed from geranium lake, a red, and blue, and the red has faded out. A brown patch among the flowers that looks like dirt today was once a vivid red. You are standing in front of a cooler painting than the one he made.

There is a pine cone in it, too. A pollen cone from the umbrella pines in the asylum garden dropped into the wet paint and is still embedded there.

He called it a study. No drawings survive for it, no preparation of any kind. His brother Theo thought more of it than he did, sent it to the Salon des Indépendants that September along with Starry Night Over the Rhône, and wrote to tell him it struck the eye from afar, a beautiful study full of air and life. The critic Félix Fénéon reviewed it that month in a line worth the drive up this hill: irises violently slash into long strips their violet petals on sword-like leaves.

The first owner was Père Tanguy, the Paris paint grinder whose portrait Van Gogh painted three times. In 1891 Tanguy sold it for three hundred francs to Octave Mirbeau, a critic and an anarchist and one of the first people to grasp what Van Gogh was. Mirbeau wrote that he had understood the exquisite nature of flowers, and later put the painting into a novel.

Three hundred francs. On the eleventh of November 1987 it came up at Sotheby's in New York as lot 25 and sold for 53.9 million dollars to an Australian businessman, Alan Bond. It was the most expensive painting in the world, and it held that record for two and a half years. Bond could not pay for it. In 1990 it went back to Sotheby's, Sotheby's sold it to the Getty, and it has been in Los Angeles ever since.

## Before you go

1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049. There is one public entrance, off Sepulveda Boulevard. The Getty warns that some navigation devices route drivers wrongly and asks you to set them to North Sepulveda Boulevard and Getty Center Drive instead.

The Getty's own directions name Metro bus line 761, which stops at the museum entrance where Getty Center Drive meets Sepulveda Boulevard. Everyone else arrives at the bottom of the hill: there is a taxi rank on level P1 of the parking structure, a drop-off turnaround outside it for cars and vans carrying fifteen people or fewer, including Lyft and Uber, and free bike racks on the entry level. From the lower station a three-car cable-pulled tram carries you up to the museum.

- Admission is free but you still need a timed-entry reservation, and parking is charged: $25 a car or motorcycle, $15 after 3pm, $10 after 6pm, and free on Saturdays after 6pm. Parking is cashless, so bring a card.
- Mondays are dark. Saturday runs late, until 9; the other five open days end at 6:30.
- Build the tram into your timings. You park at the bottom of the hill and ride up, and there is no cell reception or Wi-Fi in the parking structure, so download anything you want to listen to first.
- The North Pavilion, South Pavilion galleries 101, 102 and 206, and West Pavilion galleries 102 and 103 are shut for renovation. The Getty's collection records place all five stops here in open galleries, though its visitor page was still listing the East Pavilion as closed when we checked, so look at getty.edu on the morning you go. The whole Getty Center closes on 15 March 2027 and plans to reopen in spring 2028.

Official tickets: https://www.getty.edu/visit/center/

The Getty's own guide costs nothing either. It is the GettyGuide app, free in the App Store and Google Play, with themed tours, a highlights tour in English and nine other languages, and audio numbers printed on some labels that you type into the app. Download it before you drive up, because the Getty says cell service on the hill can be spotty, and bring your own earphones. This page asks for no download at all and covers five works; the Chiaro app covers whatever else you photograph.

Official site: https://www.getty.edu/

## Questions

**Is there a free Getty Center audio guide?**

Two of them, in fact. This page plays five stops in your browser, with transcripts and gallery numbers and nothing to install. The Getty also gives away its own GettyGuide app. When you want commentary on something neither one covers, the Chiaro app narrates whatever you photograph.

**How much is the official Getty Center audio guide?**

Nothing. The GettyGuide app is free in the App Store and Google Play, and its highlights tour runs in English plus Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Download it before you drive up, because the Getty warns that cell service on the hill can be spotty and on-site Wi-Fi varies, and bring your own earphones.

**Where is Irises in the Getty Center?**

West Pavilion, Gallery W204, on the upper floor, in the same room as Caillebotte's Young Man at His Window. The pavilions run in date order, with the oldest art in the North Pavilion and the newest in the West, so Van Gogh sits at the far end of the circuit from the entrance hall.

**Is the Getty Center closed on Mondays?**

Yes, every Monday. The doors open at 10 on the other six days and close at 6:30, except on Saturday, when the galleries stay open until 9. The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades runs its own schedule, 10 to 5 daily, and takes Tuesday off instead.

**Is the Getty Center really free?**

Admission is free, but you have to book a timed-entry slot before you go, and the parking is not free: $25 for a car or a motorcycle, $15 after 3pm, $10 after 6pm, and nothing at all on Saturdays after 6pm. Payment is by card only. Bicycles park free, and United States military service members and veterans park free between Memorial Day weekend and Veterans Day 2026.

**Is anything closed for the renovation?**

Yes. The North Pavilion galleries, South Pavilion galleries 101, 102 and 206, and West Pavilion galleries 102 and 103 are closed while the Getty replaces the air handling across the campus. The Getty's own collection records list galleries E205, S204 and W204, which hold all five stops here, as on view, but its visitor page was still naming the East Pavilion among the closures when we checked, so confirm on getty.edu before you travel. The Getty Center then closes entirely on 15 March 2027, with reopening planned for spring 2028.

## Continue in the app

Chiaro knows the rest of the Getty Center.

This page runs out after five works. The app works the other way round: photograph whatever is in front of you, a Sèvres vase, a page of a bestiary, a Meier staircase, and it tells you what it is and why anyone bothered making it, then keeps answering out loud while you walk.

Download Chiaro: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6745618830?pt=127817940&ct=getty-center-md&mt=8