Lectures 2024 - 2025
12 September 2024.
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism — Sarah Ciacci.
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are two of the most popular movements in the story of art, with famous Impressionists such as Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne and a younger generation of Post-Impressionists including Seurat, Gaugin and Van Gogh. Their stories are fascinating, their art diverse and their ideas challenging, which helps explain many of the artistic changes that came after them.
10 October 2024.
The Glories of Byzantium — Jane Angelini.
The Byzantine period of AD 330 to 1453 spans the medieval centuries. With the west in decline, Byzantium, mistress of the Mediterranean and centre of Christendom, was a symbol of wealth, power and cultural ascendancy. Here Christianity took root, giving us architectural forms and imagery persisting to today. We look at mosaics, frescoes and icons, opulent vessels in gold and enamel, silks, ivories and manuscripts, and the centrally planned domed churches, designed as microcosms of the Universe.
14 November 2024.
Marc Chagall — Monica Bohm-Duchen.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) remained deeply loyal to his humble Russian-Jewish origins, yet he also wished his art to have a universal appeal — which, judging by his popularity, it undoubtedly achieved. This lecture traces his career, giving particular emphasis to the creative tensions produced by the cultural and artistic environments in which he found himself, from Russia, Paris, Germany, America during the war and back to France in 1948.
12 December 2024 - Change to published programme.
The Art of Snow and Ice - Sue Jackson
The bleak midwinter held little appeal for artists for many centuries until Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’ in the 16th century.
From pristine backdrop, to the tempestuous snow storms of Turner, to the capturing of snow effect by the Impressionists, the ability of artists to convey snow as a symbol of peace but also of grandeur and terror is compelling.
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9 January 2025.
Clash of the Titans: Michelangelo and his Rivals - Paula Nuttall.
A fresh angle on some of the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, from the viewpoint of the fierce and often bitter rivalries between the artistic Titans of the day. Set against the backdrop of Florence, Venice and Rome, with Michelangelo as its protagonist and Leonardo, Raphael and Titian in supporting roles, it draws on contemporary anecdote to evoke personalities and tell the stories behind many of the most famous, iconic works of the High Renaissance.
13 February 2025.
The Wind in the Willows revisited through its illustrators — John Ericson.
The beauty of Kenneth Grahame's prose is widely acknowledged and the story is so full of wonderful imagery that it demands to be illustrated. In this engaging presentation we will revisit the story as depicted by numerous well-known illustrators, including E H Shepard and Arthur Rackham, looking at how the same scene is treated by different artists. We will also explore how the story came to be written for Grahame's son Alastair and Grahame's interesting and ultimately tragic life.
13 March 2025.
London, New York, St Ives: the Avant Garde in Cornwall 1939 - 1964 — Sarah Burles.
This lecture will chart the rise of St Ives as a centre for modern art after the war. The arrival of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, three key players in British modernism, marked a significant moment for them and a challenge to the status quo of the artists already established there. Their success, and that of Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Wilhemena Barnes Graham, resulted in the town becoming a focal point for post war avant garde art, and led the eyes of the modern art world to focus, at least for a time, on St Ives.
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10 April 2025.
Riviera Paradise: Art, Design and Pleasure in the 1920s — Mary Alexander.
In the 1920s an intoxicating mix of artists, writers, musicians and international visitors created an exciting new summer season on the Riviera. This was a liberating playground of ideas across the visual design arts, traditional boundaries were torn down with a merging of the worlds of art, fashion, theatre and interiors. We will time travel to meet great artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Dufy, Jean Cocteau, impresario Diaghilev, the famous Chanel, and the Americans Cole Porter and Scott Fitzgerald.
8 May 2025.
Love and Loss: Orpheus and Eurydice — Lois Oliver.
Orpheus could charm the birds out of the trees with his music, yet he failed to bring his beloved Eurydice out of the Underworld. This tale of a legendary singer who lost his beloved through a single glance has inspired much great music and visual artists too have responded to this tragic story of love and loss. Explore the wealth of art and music on the theme, with a rich array of paintings and music from Monteverdi, Gluck and Offenbach, and even the Can-Can!
12 June 2025.
The Spirit of Place: Artists and the British Landscape — Susan Owens.
Artists have depicted our landscape for over a thousand years. Some have transformed it in their imaginations, while others have depicted it under changeable British skies. We tell the story of our landscape art from its origins in manuscripts and maps, the Arcadian views of Gainsborough and others, Constable's close observation of nature, watercolourists of the Golden Age, Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites, and into the C20th with Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious, steeped in the landscape tradition but with an entirely modern angle too.