Cathy FitzGerald invites you to discover new details in old masterpieces. Each episode of Moving Pictures is devoted to a single artwork – and you’re invited to look as well as listen, by following a link to a high-resolution image made by Google Arts & Culture. Zoom in and you can see the pores of the canvas, the sweep of individual brushstrokes, the shimmer of pointillist dots.

This episode explores Ambulance Call by the great American artist, Jacob Lawrence. We're on the sidewalk in Harlem, New York, in the 1940s. A crowd gathers as a patient is stretchered away. But not just a crowd - a community... captured in all its tender humanity by one of its own. Lawrence notices the everyday moments that are so often overlooked and gives them back to us in bold, brilliant style.

To see the high-resolution image of the painting made by Google Arts & Culture, visit www.bbc.co.uk/movingpictures. Scroll down and follow the link to explore Ambulance Call.

Interviewees: Austen Barron Bailly, Jen Padgett, Turry Flucker, Leslie King-Hammond and Brittany Webb.

Producer and presenter: Cathy FitzGerald

Executive producer: Sarah Cuddon
Mix engineer: Mike Woolley
Art history consultant: Leah Kharibian

A White Stiletto production for BBC Radio 4

Picture credit: Jacob Lawrence, Ambulance Call, detail, 1948, tempera on board. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2023. Image courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Edward C. Robison III. Show less