Goodbye, Blue Monday, and what is officially the most miserable week in the year – when back-to-work blues, empty pockets and winter weather compound in a toxic cocktail of misery.

But if spring still seems a way off, can I recommend one of the greatest tonics to the winter blues I know? Yes, I’m talking about art.

Wherever you are, the chances are you aren’t far from a world-class museum or gallery that is free, brightly lit, well-heated and full of joyful, transporting pictures or objects to take you out of yourself.

I learnt this young. When I was a boy, my mother used to take me to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

I was too little to appreciate many of the pictures but there was one I rushed to sit in front of every time by the 18th-century painter William Hogarth. Or should I say six? 

For that’s the number of pictures that make up Marriage A-la-Mode. These expressive paintings tell a dramatic story of human vice.

A social comment from their time, they rival the most convoluted soap opera plot.

In the first painting the bankrupt Viscount Squanderfield makes a marriage of convenience to the daughter of a wealthy merchant and by the last he has been executed for murdering her lover, while she lies dying after taking poison.

Nobody told me to like these pictures. There are many thousands in the National Gallery but I chose these for myself, drawn to the dramatic story they tell of human folly, boring my mother to tears in the process.

I would stare and stare, always discovering new details, overwhelmed by the drama of it all. While doing so, I would forget about myself and feel empathy as well as disgust for the suffering of the figures before me. 

I didn’t have the words to describe it but I was discovering the power of art to take you out of yourself and look at the world differently.

Those pictures may have been the only thing in the gallery I really cared about when I was six but it was enough: the National Gallery had a special place in my heart and as I grew older I developed a relationship with many of the other, less obviously spectacular, objects in the collection – and then in galleries and museums across the country.

I think it’s fair to say that Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode had as much impact on me as seeing Ghostbusters and The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema.

The big difference is that Marriage A-la-Mode was free because of our national commitment – rarely matched by other countries – to ensure our great artworks and treasures can be seen by everyone.

I believe that there is something like the Hogarths out there for every child: we just have to ensure they have the chance to find it. 

That simply means getting them through the doors of galleries and museums: they will do the rest. Whether you’re a parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt, it is astonishing to see what captivates a child and the insights it gives you into their character.

The great thing is that you normally end up discovering something new yourself. It’s partly to encourage this that the BBC is presenting a major celebration of art from across the world called Civilisations.

In the nine-part series on BBC Two, in March, Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga show how art and culture have always been at the heart of civilisation and tell us more than anything about what it means to be human.

Alongside it, there is a wealth of programming from local television and radio celebrating the objects and stories in museums, galleries and libraries right across the UK that tell us something special about civilisation too.

And from March 2 to 11, many of those organisations are putting on free events inspired by the series in a UK-wide Civilisations Festival. 

In the same month, the BBC is joining with museums, galleries, libraries and other arts organisations for the Get Creative festival, in which everyone can have a go at different art forms.

We want more people participating in the arts and getting the most out of our public collections. Over the Christmas break, I took my daughter to the National Gallery and carried her past some of my favourite paintings: the Rembrandts, Holbein’s The Ambassadors and, yes, Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode.

It was a few days before her first birthday and, to be honest, she was more interested in the light fixtures.

It may not be next year, or even the following year but maybe the year after that she’ll suddenly show a lingering fascination with one image – and her life-long journey into exploring the world in different ways, through arts and culture, will begin.