Few people nowadays give more than a second thought to their clocks: practical, sometimes beautiful, devices that form the background noise of our daily lives. But from their introduction in the thirteenth century onwards, clocks have held a variety of philosophical and social meanings.

This talk explores the visual and literary uses of the clock, the varied meanings it could hold throughout the ages: as an ominous symbol of oncoming death, but also as a metaphor for the soul, for capitalism, and for the good use of time.

Dr Christina Faraday FSA FRHistS is a historian of art and ideas, specialising in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider 16th and 17th-century world. She is a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a Trustee of the Walpole Society for British art history, and a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3 and in other popular media.

She is an experienced lecturer, and teaches for the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge, The Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, London, and for the Institute for Continuing Education, Cambridge, where she is Co-Director of the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture. 

Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published in 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press. Her next book, The Story of Tudor Art, will be published in 2025.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

London's history is fascinating and full of colourful characters, from William Shakespeare to Dick Whittington's cat! 

In this lecture we gallop through almost 2000 years of London's history brilliantly illustrated through the stained glass windows found in the city churches and livery halls.  Often overlooked, these provide a unique insight into the milestones which have made up London's story.  As well as 18th, 19th and 20th century windows we look at some of the most up-to-date and contemporary glass makers.  

I also provide a list of windows and where they can be found so you and your members can undertake a self-guided walk if you wish!

Anna Warrillow studied for her BA in History of Art & Italian at the University of Sussex and did her MA in Renaissance Decorative Arts & Design at the Royal College of Art.  She worked for 6 years as a curator in the Sculpture Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum as well as in smaller collections such as the Henry Moore Family Trust. 

As well as guiding she is an adjunct lecturer at Richmond The American International University in London where she teaches undergraduates The History of London. 

She graduated as a Blue Badge Guide early in 2013.  Since then she has been conducting bespoke private tours for discerning visitors to London. She established my own guiding company Canvas and Stone Tours in 2018 (www.canvasandstonetours.co.uk) Her background and passion is Art & History. 

She lectures regularly for art, history and academic societies.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

In December 2024, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, often referred to as the Soul of the City, reopened to the public after a devastating fire had threatened to destroy it 5 years earlier.  A seemingly impossible target had been set by the French President to rebuild; yet huge sums of donated money and teams of expert restorers ensured the timescale was met.

Such is the symbolic power of this cultural icon in the psyche of the French people and indeed people beyond.

Carole is an experienced guide and lecturer on combined history and art tours in France with 20 years experience. Having lived and worked on a number of bespoke river vessels and converted barges there she has used them as a platform from which to research her lectures. She uses art in all its guises to explore the characters who shaped France and likes to delve behind the scenes to discover hidden truths. She also acts as a guide for a privately owned ancestral home in her native Chilterns.

Our lectures start at 8pm and will be preceded by our AGM at 7.45pm so please arrive earlier than usual.  Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

Shot twice in the neck and stabbed five times in the leg, Mr Frick was back behind his desk within the week.

Today, his name is synonymous with beauty and culture through the house on which he spared nothing, built with the sole intent of leaving it, and everything in it, as a gift to the nation. But just who was Henry Clay Frick, and how did this man who swapped a beehive oven for the classroom become the most prominent art collector of his generation in America, and the benefactor of its finest collection of European paintings?

Join me on another astonishing ride from rural Pennsylvania to Gilded Age New York as we pull back the curtain on Frick: the man, and his museum. 

Mark Meredith is the founder of AmericanAristocracy.com and lectures regularly in Europe and the United States, notably at the New-York Historical Society.

After leaving Stowe School, Mark worked for twenty years as a plumber in London. However, his real passion has always been history, and he delights in 'telling a story,' not 'giving a lecture'. Packed with facts and laced throughout with humour, he takes a particular joy in bringing to life the stories behind the people that shape houses; and, his area of special interest lies in the great American houses and American social history, from pre-revolution to the end of the Guilded Age. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was high society’s leading portraitist. Flaunting a consummate technique, his luxurious canvases mirrored his subjects’ wealth. Yet beneath the dazzling veneer of works such as Madame X, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and Lady Agnew of Lochnaw lurks a much rawer world by far.

Sargent certainly scandalised Parisian society and the city’s Salon with his frank depictions of human sexuality, yet he was even more modern than they might have feared.

This talk charts the artist’s life and his prolific output, showing that, like the era he came to represent, Sargent was always on the cusp of seismic change.

Gavin Plumley a writer and broadcaster. Appears on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and contributes to newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes worldwide.

He lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe. Recent appearances include Klimt and The Kiss in cinemas worldwide, and talks for the Hay and Cheltenham Literature Festivals, the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Trust, the National Theatre, the British Museum and the V&A.

His first book, A Home for All Seasons, is out now. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

In 1943, the German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Forty-seven women and girls were drafted into a hurriedly-assembled band that would play to other inmates as they left each morning and as they returned at the end of the day.

They were made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and members were sometimes summoned to give individual performances of an officer’s favourite piece of music. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, the orchestra was to save their lives. 

Anne Sebba biographer, historian and award winning author of eleven books who lectures to a variety of audiences in the US and UK, including the English Speaking Union, Royal Overseas League, National Trust, British Library, Imperial War Museum and on several cruises.

A former Reuters foreign correspondent, Anne is now a broadcaster who has presented documentaries for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and regularly appears on television talking about her books, mostly biographies including Jennie Churchill, William Bankes, Laura Ashley and Wallis Simpson. The latter, published as That Woman, was an international bestseller followed in 2016 by a history of Paris between 1939-49 through women's eyes entitled Les Parisiennes, How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, winner of the Franco British book prize for 2016.  

In 2021 she published Ethel Rosenberg, A Cold War Tragedy, which is under option for a feature film. Her latest book is The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz : A story of Survival. 

Anne is a former chair of Britain's 10,000 strong Society of Authors, a Senior Research Fellow at The Institute of Historical Research and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). In 2023 she was selected as a judge on the inaugural Women's Prize for non fiction.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

Today we look at the rich art, architecture and history of Sicily - the largest island of the ancient Mediterranean and, in the ancient world, the wealthiest.

First we see the Carthaginians, the first major invaders of Sicily and their distinctive, enigmatic culture, still visible on the small island of Motya.   Afterwards come the Greeks, with beautiful cities such as Agrigento, and Syracuse and Segesta, filled with theatres and temples to the gods. Then we see Roman Sicily, peaceful and prosperous, with cities such as Syracuse and Taormina, and the sumptuous ‘mosaic villa’ of Piazza Armerina.

Dr Paul Roberts OBE is Research Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University.  Paul has been a lecturer with the Arts Society/NADFAS for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean.

He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford.  He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching.  He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines. 

His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. In 2024 his book "Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments", looking at the history of Rome through its monuments and the Emperors who built them, was published by Thames and Hudson.   

From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2015, in 2019/20  he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine. 

He was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List 2025 for services to Archaeology and Heritage. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

The 1700s was a period when the people of England seemed to be especially gullible. They believed a woman could give birth to rabbits; a man could climb inside a two pint bottle and sing inside it; and where a blond-haired European could write a book claiming that he was born in Taiwan. 

These hoaxes weren't just written about extensively in newspapers and journals but also brilliantly and amusingly depicted by satirical artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray. 

In this entertaining talk Ian demonstrates how 18th century hoaxes are memorable not only for their imaginative nature but also because of the differing motives of the tricksters.  

Ian Keable gained a First Class degree from Oxford University, qualified as a Chartered Accountant and then became a Professional Magician. He is a Member of The

Inner Magic Circle. In 2014 he published Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters & Literature. He now divides his time between performing magic, giving talks and researching and writing. 

His latest book is The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm

Bring a Friend for Free - all non-members welcome at no charge 

Although glass has been made for centuries, the 1960s saw a revolution in the way it was made, opening it up to artists across the world and allowing glass to be used as a medium for art.

After looking at the historical context and the genesis of the movement, Mark examines the work of six key glass artists from the US and the UK, including Dale Chihuly, Sam Herman, and Peter Layton.

Containing previously unseen photographs taken at the time, this talk also includes his top tips and an overview of the market today and the creative journey made by studio glassmakers so far. 

Mark Hill studied History of Art & Architecture (BA Hons), and began his career as a porter and Junior Cataloguer at Bonhams, before moving to Sotheby's where he was a Specialist in the Collectors' Department. Became director of an internet company forming and running a ground-breaking deal with eBay Live Auctions.

He was co-author of the internationally published Collectables Price Guide with Judith Miller from 2002-17. Founded his own publishing company in 2005 and has published over 15 books on emerging specialist subjects in the decorative arts.

A Miscellaneous expert on the BBC 'Antiques Roadshow' since 2007 and an expert on the BBC's 'Antiques Roadtrip', has also co-presented five primetime TV series on antiques and collecting for BBC2. A member of the British Antiques Dealers' Association (BADA.org). Senior Vice President at a company offering digital solutions to the antiques industry.

Mark has lectured across the world, including at the V&A in London, and contributed to many newspapers, magazines, radio and TV programmes. A Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars and a Freeman of the City of London. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

In the midst of its traumatic struggle, Ukraine is trying to protect its art and reclaim its heritage. But Russian and Ukrainian art were intermingled for 250 years. ‘Russification’ concealed the Ukrainian origins and identity of many artists, both under the Tsars and the Bolsheviks.

With a wealth of illustrations, this lecture maps three consecutive revolutions in style, as painters in both Ukraine and Russia experimented with social criticism, then modernism, and then confronted Soviet conformity.

This outline of a dynamic century includes superb painters little known in the west as well as others who  became key figures in modernism.  

Gabriel Chanan took up lecturing on art history in 2015, building on his lifelong interest in the arts during a career as a social researcher and policy analyst.

He was the founding Chair of Windsor Community Arts Centre (now The Old Court). His study of the visual arts focuses mainly on realist painting, especially on points of transition between different periods and styles.

Following publication of his book on Shakespeare and Democracy (2015) he also ran a small theatre company performing at arts centres and festivals till 2020. He was awarded an MBE for services to community development in 2009.  

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

In 1745, a Princess from the minor province of Anhalt-Zerbst in Saxony, married Prince Karl Peter Ulrich of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, heir to the Imperial Russian Throne. She was Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike and by 1762 she had deposed her, was crowned Empress Catherine II and became the sole ruler of the Russian Empire.

Andrew Prince has had a passion for jewellery since he was a child. Leaving school at the age of 16, he joined a Bond Street jewellers and his true education began. He developed a taste for jewellery that was valued more for the design and craftsmanship than for the value of the stones.

He started collecting vintage costume jewellery and soon after began creating his own pieces. British Vogue and Tatler featured his jewels in their magazines and he was then commissioned to make a large shoulder jewel for Michael Jackson as well as  pieces for Shirley Bassey and others.

Film and TV work came in and he created many jewels for  "The Young Victoria", "Mrs Henderson Presents", "Downton Abbey", Disney's "Cinderella", "The Princess Switch" and even the Muppets, to name but a few.

Andrew is also a respected lecturer on fashion  and jewellery history and has spoken many times at the Victoria and Albert Museum and other places.

His true passion though is still to create beautiful jewels, that can be worn and loved.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge has been described as “one of the country’s most intimate and spellbinding museums, the collection of one man and his unerring eye; restorative,  homely yet life-changing”. This man was H.S. ‘Jim’ Ede, curator, writer, collector and  friend to artists.

In 1957, he opened his Cambridge home to university students as “a  living place where works of art could be enjoyed… unhampered by the greater austerity of  the museum or public art gallery.”

His collection included works by Ben and Winifred  Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska which were carefully placed alongside pieces of furniture, ceramics and natural objects.

Sarah Burles studied History of Art at Cambridge University before doing a master’s degree at University College London. She went on to have a career in museum and gallery education, establishing new services in three different museums before working at the Fitzwilliam Museum for many years. 

She is the founder of Cambridge Art Tours, which runs tours and courses in and around East Anglia. She is also a Tour Director for a travel company and has led tours to Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and America. During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah moved her work online, offering art history courses to audiences all over the world.

Sarah became an Arts Society accredited lecturer in 2021 and, since then, has given lectures and run study days for Arts Societies throughout the UK and in Europe. She is delighted to have been invited lecture for the Arts Society in New Zealand in 2024.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is the last great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, yet today his works are often maligned as “cute” and “saccharine”. This lecture reassesses his paintings in the context of 17th-century Seville, the great port city for the Spanish empire and a centre of catholic reform. By looking at Murillo’s most innovative and beautiful paintings we will see how his art blends faith and empire, from his grand cycle in Santa Maria la Blanca to his small works painted of imported Aztec mirrors.

Isabelle Kent is an academic and educator specialising in the baroque, with a particular focus on Spain and its empire. She received a BA and MPhil in History of Art from Trinity College, Cambridge, where she is currently completing her PhD on the art of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán.

From 2017 to 2019 she worked as the Enriqueta Harris Frankfort Curatorial Assistant at the Wallace Collection and in 2020 her book Collecting Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in Britain and Ireland was published by CEEH.

Alongside her academia, Isabelle is an expert guide for a travel company, leading groups around Spain and beyond, and she also teaches regularly for the V&A, Art Fund, Royal Academy, Chelsea Arts Club, Wallace Collection and University of Cambridge.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

So many of our historical references for musical instruments can be found in works of art. Not only can these windows into the past show us what the instruments looked like but also the social context in which they would have been played.

Music and different instruments also play a strong role within symbolism in art. Sophie explores the instruments in selected works and then gives live demonstrations on replicas of the instruments depicted.

Sophie Matthews is a musician well-known for her prowess on the English border bagpipes and has become one of the foremost players of the instrument in the UK. She plays a variety of early woodwind instruments such as shawm, rauschpfeife, crumhorm and recorder. She’s also one of a handful of British players of the baroque musette, an 18th century French bagpipe similar to the Northumbrian smallpipes.

When not touring with GreenMatthews, Sophie also makes instruments (she made her own baroque oboe) and works with respected luthier Tony Millyard on his flutes. Sophie is self-taught on all of her instruments. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

The arrival of the Knights of St John in Malta in 1530 was the prelude to two and a half centuries of remarkable building and artistic activity. Their heroic defeat of the Turks in the legendary Great Siege of 1565 inspired the building of the new city of Valetta, the finest Renaissance fortified city in Europe.  The Grand Masters were great patrons, commissioning numerous magnificent works of art. In 1607 they invited Caravaggio to Malta where he produced some of his greatest late works. 

We shall trace the development of Maltese architecture from the relative austerity of the late Renaissance during the early days of the Order to the richness, grandeur and architectural display of the High Baroque of the 18th century. As the Turks no longer posed a major military threat, the Order could now focus its financial resources on the construction of lavish palatial buildings, exciting town planning schemes and the commissioning of splendid works of art.

Barbara Peacock is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts with 35 years' lecturing experience. Organises art and architectural tours in UK and abroad. Previously lecturer for Birmingham University Department of Extra-Mural studies and Tutor in Fine Art, Dept of Continuing Education, Southampton University; Assistant Keeper of Fine Art, Birmingham City Art Gallery.

Freelance lecturer throughout Britain and abroad for the National Trust and numerous other organisations. Much involved in the preservation of the architectural heritage of the Czech land and has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Czech government and the Points of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door

Great new talk - marvellous as a celebration of our 10th Anniversary!  This talk is in itself a celebration of how the Ancient Greeks and Romans created our love of wine. How wine's popularity spread, how wine production has and has not changed, what wine connoisseurs 2,000 years ago thought made a wine great!

As an archaeologist who has excavated a Roman wine-producting warehouse, I promise that this talk will refresh your palette!

Gillian Howell holds a BA (Hons) Latin and Ancient History, Exeter University, and then branched out into archaeology. Ex-BBC, lecturer for British Museum and York University, an award winning writer and author who specialises in relating the ancient world to our modern lives, in person, in the field, on line and in the media (most recently on BBC News Channel, Radio 4 Today programme and BBC World Service).

Publications include Visiting the Past: A guide to finding and understanding Britain's Archaeology and Roman Britain. Forthcoming Latin Yesterday, Today and For Ever, and A Mediterranean Tour: Not just a Load of Old Stones.

She teaches adult education courses in Latin, archaeology and ancient history and has publicly lectures widely and passionately, on cruises and tours and for museums such as the British Museum & Ashmolean, national press, universities, literary festivals, and diverse societies including Classical Associations, the U3A and the National Trust. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Celebrations start at 6:45. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

MacDonald 'Max' Gill, younger brother of the sculptor and typographer Eric Gill, was an architect, graphic designer and letterer, best known for his pictorial maps, especially those for the London Underground. He also created painted maps for Arts & Crafts houses including Lindisfarne Castle, magnificent murals for Cunard liners, and eye-catching publicity posters for organisations such as the Empire Marketing Board. An enduring legacy is his alphabet for the Imperial War Graves Commission used on all British military headstones since the First World War.

This illustrated talk by Max Gill’s great-niece presents a colourful overview of this versatile artist's personal life and artistic achievements. NB. Max's work can be found in many localities around Britain. Caroline will include local connections wherever possible.

Caroline Walker began research into her great-uncle ‘Max’ in 2006. Since then she has co-curated several exhibitions of his work around the country, contributed articles to publications including Country Life and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and set up a dedicated website.

An accredited lecturer for The Arts Society since 2016, she’s also given talks for organisations such as the National Archives, the Art Workers’ Guild, Christie’s and the National Trust. Her illustrated biography MacDonald Gill: Charting a Life was published in June 2020

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

In the Renaissance, Christmas was a popular time to hold jousts, tournaments and courtly spectacles. In the dark, dead of winter, a colourful, glamorous celebration of chivalry very much took on the role of a kind of sixteenth-century 'festival of light'.

In England, Christmas jousts became especially popular under that famous lover of armour and fighting, King Henry VIII. Such events were a kind of performance art, which fused real armoured combat with fantastical, mythological and allegorical themes.

In this lecture, we explore this rich history through the personal experiences of the lecturer, an academic specialist but also one of the world’s foremost jousters and medieval martial artists.

Toby Capwell is Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London and an internationally-acknowledged authority on Medieval and Renaissance weapons.

He is the author of numerous books on the subject of arms and armour, including Masterpieces of European Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection (2011; Apollo Magazine Book of the Year 2012); The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance Europe 1520-1630, ex. cat. (2012); Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450 (2015; Military History Monthly Illustrated Book of the Year 2017); and most recently Arms and Armour of the Medieval Joust (2018). Toby also appears regularly on television, most recently on A Stitch in Time (2018; BBC4); as presenter and armour advisor on Richard III: The New Evidence (2014; C4), and as the writer and presenter of Metalworks: The Knight's Tale (2012; BBC4).

In 2015 Toby had the unusual honour of serving as one of the two fully armoured horsemen escorting the remains of King Richard III, from the battlefield at Bosworth to their final resting place in Leicester Cathedral.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

Henry Moore established his unique approach sculpture from the 1920s based on Michelangelo, Cubism, abstraction and central and south American Aztec and Mayan cultures. He often sculpted family groups and reclining figures, and was a great believer in taking art into public places. By the middle of the 20th century, Moore was a dominant figure in world art.

When Anthony Caro studied sculpture in the 1940s, he was taught by traditional sculptors.  Seeking to be modern he became Moore’s studio assistant for two years and made Moore-like sculptors. In 1959, Caro met with American abstract artists, and in consequence changed his approach, relying on sheets of steel to produce non-figurative sculptures.

Subsequently Caro publicly criticized Moore for being a showman and thwarting younger talent. Moore took it badly and relations between them never fully recovered.

This lecture traces the career of both Moore and Caro, and describes their time together, their falling out, and their respective impacts on modern sculpture.

Ray has had a life-long love of art. From 2014 to 2017, he studied art history at the Open University, and then at the University of Buckingham, from where he has an MA in the History of Art.

Since 2011, he has been a guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, where he leads public tours of all the permanent displays and also undertakes exhibition tours.

In his twenties, Ray studied social sciences at the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, from where he was awarded a BSc and a MSc respectively. These degrees led to a career in health and social care, with art being an evening and weekend passion. They also gave Ray a grounding in evidence-based approaches, which he now uses to ensure his art lectures are well-researched and well-informed.

Ray is an experienced public speaker who, over many years, has given presentations and lectures on a range of health, art and other themes to diverse audiences in the UK, and abroad from San Diego to Hong Kong. In mid-2020, Ray began organising, hosting and giving many on-line art-based seminars for fellow Tate guides and other art lovers. Ray is a member of his local Arts Society in Blackheath.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

2024 marks the bicentenary of our much loved nation treasure – the National Gallery. Home to one of the greatest collections of European art, it is also a repository of headline grabbing stories surrounding acquisitions, controversial conservations, thefts, film appearances, acts of vandalism and scandals…

Lydia Bauman, a guide and lecturer at the National Gallery for over 35 years will tell those stories against the backdrop of some of the most glorious masterpieces in the collection.

Lydia was born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, (19th-20th century art - Distinction for thesis on Matisse's Illustrations to Poetry). She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London's National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the latter as a guest speaker for travel companies. Since the pandemic began in March 2020 Lydia had devised and delivered a programme of upwards of 180 online lectures to her own group Art For The Uninitiated.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

Keith Bonser was a teacher and senior manager in education for 38 years, until retirement gave him the opportunity to pursue a specific interest that has its origins in 1995. A weekend break in Dublin introduced him to Caravaggio. Keith has travelled extensively throughout Europe to see his paintings in situ, tracing his life story from the town of Caravaggio to the cities of Milan, Rome, and Naples, and the islands of Malta and Sicily. He subsequently wrote a book on these experiences.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £15 on the door.

In Greek legend, Pandora was created with the express purpose of causing trouble to men which, by opening her box, she achieved. This lecture looks at the original sources for the story, draws parallels with both Eve in Genesis and Galatea in Ovid before showing how ballets, operas and plays from Coppelia to My Fair Lady and The Winter’s Tale to Educating Rita have developed the theme of a creation that runs out of control. 

Mary is an experienced broadcaster and teacher with particular expertise in literature and drama. She worked for many years for BBC Radio 4 producing some of its most popular programmes including Start the Week and Woman’s Hour before joining the senior management team as a Commissioning Editor. Mary has subsequently worked as a teacher and Director of Sixth Form at a leading girls’ grammar school. She now runs her own company 'Opening Up Literature' which offers literature courses for adults including studies of Shakespeare and Creative Writing. Her most popular course is 'Telling Tales' which explores how writers and artists have reinvented classical stories. She is also a professional bridge teacher and lecturer.  

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

The Nazis looted over 20% of Western Art during World War II, confiscating art from Jewish families and emptying museums throughout Europe. This lecture will provide an overview of Nazi looting by setting the scene in Nazi Germany, discussing Hitler’s obsession with art and how the Monuments Men recovered art after the war. Several landmark cases will be discussed in detail, including Gustav Klimt’s celebrated Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer and the stash of over 1200 artworks found in possession of the son of a notorious Nazi dealer.

Shauna Isaac has been active in World War II art restitution for several years and has worked with families and government organisations to recover Nazi looted art. She set up the Central Registry on Looted Cultural Property and served as a member of the Working Group for the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague. Shauna studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in the UK and Smith College in the USA. She is a regular lecturer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Her publications include articles for The Art Newspaper, The Times Literary Supplement and Art Quarterly. She is a contributor to the book Insiders/Outsiders: Refuges from Nazi Europe and their contribution to British Visual Culture.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is arguably the most important Indian artistic figure of the modern era. The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed that he had two gurus: Gandhi and Tagore. A renowned poet, novelist, composer and painter, Tagore is also the only person in history to have written the national anthems for three countries. He became a global sensation when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-European to do so. This lecture provides an introduction to Tagore’s remarkable life and work, including his novels, poetry, songs and paintings. It also explores the role Tagore’s art played in the story of India’s fight for independence.

Dr John Stevens gained his PhD in History from UCL, before going on to teach British Imperial History, Indian History and Bengali Language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). His biography of the Indian guru Keshab Chandra Sen – Keshab: Bengal’s Forgotten Prophet - was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a regular visitor to India and Bangladesh and has lectured at numerous Indian universities. He also works as a consultant on Indian affairs and teaches the Bengali language to private students. He has appeared many times in the Indian media, and was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s In Our Time, discussing the poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

The start of Coronation Street in December 1960 radically changed the national perception of the North of England. Traditionally the North had been seen as grim, bleak, working class and impoverished. Alternatively, it had been seen as the home of comic characters personified by George Formby and Gracie Fields but in the early 1960s the British film industry “found” the North and the films produced by this discovery included Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life, Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, all made in an astonishing three year period. Without Corrie would there have been Albert Finney or Tom Courtenay?

Dr. Colin Shindler has been lecturing on American and British social and cultural history for over 20 years. He was awarded his PhD at Cambridge University and subsequently lectured on film for their History Faculty exploring its relationship to modern British and American social and cultural history.

He has pursued a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and film. His work includes the screenplay for the feature film Buster and the production of television dramas such as Lovejoy and Wish Me Luck. He has written three novels as well as numerous television scripts and radio plays but regards his greatest cultural contribution as choosing the title music for the police series Juliet Bravo.

He is currently working on the television adaptation of his novel Hollywood Nazis. His next book is titled Granada Land: Coronation Street and the Emergence of the North 1960-1970. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

The city of Vicenza was transformed in the sixteenth century by the architect Andrea della Pietra della Gondola - or Palladio, as he is better known. Palladio's first designs were built in Vicenza, where the cityscape of this little visited part of the Veneto remains a testament to his extraordinary vision.  In this talk we will explore Palladio's style, looking at some of the buildings that he designed for patrons in Vicenza and its surrounding countryside, and look at how Palladio’s legacy can be seen in buildings throughout the world, including close to home at Chiswick House.

Dr Lydia Goodson is an art historian and lecturer specialising in the art and material culture of Renaissance Italy. After a career in television production and raising a family Lydia returned to academia and now holds a BA in Renaissance History, an MA in History of Art and was awarded her PhD in 2020 from the Warburg Institute of the University of London, for her thesis on painting and patronage in Renaissance Perugia. This return to study as a mature student has given Lydia a passion for the benefits of life-long learning and she hugely enjoys writing and delivering lectures for audiences of all ages. She is an art history tutor for CityLit and regularly speaks to other adult learning groups. Lydia’s research interests centre on painting production in Central Italy in the Renaissance. Lydia lives in Kent and the Umbrian region of Italy.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

Discover the deeper meaning hidden in the work of paintings of the past. Learn how to read the secrets of different objects, forms, shapes and colours included on the canvas. As the centuries passed, a language of symbols developed so that artists could tell stories with deeper and more intricate emphasis.

This lecture will cover a wide range of classical European art of diverse kinds and origins, and examine the fascinating and complex range of different symbols no longer recognised by modern audiences, making it easier for you to interpret works of art.

A Social Psychologist by trade, it took until the birth of her children for Mariska to take up her love for the arts again. Heavily pregnant with number 3, Mariska finished her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, in Dutch Baroque Art. Soon after this she was lucky enough to lecture for the most wonderful group of students. She decided this was what she wanted to do, and set up Art Historical London offering art historical lectures, courses, tours, travel and events from London. Over the years this has expanded to events in New York and Amsterdam, and since March 2020 online.

A fully accredited PTLLS lecturer, she also teaches on the public program of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and can provide live, online and recorded lectures for groups or individuals.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

Easter Island is the most isolated piece of permanently inhabited land on the planet, yet it produced a most extraordinary Stone Age culture: hundreds of sophisticated coastal stone platforms, over a thousand enormous stone statues, the richest rock art in the Pacific, and a unique writing system. This talk covers the discovery of this culture, its principal features, and what archaeology, oral traditions and, more recently, palaeobotanical evidence have combined to teach us about the island’s cultural rise and decline, its environmental crisis, and the lessons all this can teach us about how we look after the Earth as a whole.

Paul Bahn studied archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and completed his PhD thesis (1979) on the prehistory of the French Pyrenees. He has held post-doctoral fellowships, at Liverpool and London, plus a J. Paul Getty postdoctoral fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Paul devotes time to writing, editing and translating books on archaeology, plus occasional journalism and as much travel as possible. His main research interest is prehistoric art, especially rock art of the world, and most notably Palaeolithic art, as well as Easter Island. He led the team which, at his instigation, searched for and discovered the first Ice Age cave art in Britain (at Creswell Crags) in 2003.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

The remarkable untold story of Carry On actor Peter Butterworth and his wife, the impressionist Janet Brown, best known for her Mrs Thatcher. Tyler reveals the private story behind his parents’ public lives, a journey that takes in MI9, the building of a theatre in the notorious WW2 Prisoner of War camp Stalag Luft III, nights at Chequers with a Prime Minister, This Is Your Life and many more moments in their long, shared life in the theatre.

Tyler Butterworth grew up in a theatrical family and spent twenty five years as an actor working extensively in film, television, theatre and radio. He then worked as a development producer in television documentaries and was closely involved with NASA on a landmark commemorative tv series. Now, he works as a voice actor, recording audiobooks, documentaries and voiceovers, and he produces walking audio guides to cities across Europe for private clients on whatever subject he’s commissioned to do. They’re just like the audio guides you get in art galleries and museums but they’re out on the street. He lives in Sussex where he walks on the South Downs and the South Coast.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

When the new process of photography was formally introduced and demonstrated to a joint meeting of the Académie des Sciences and Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in January 1839, the history painter Delaroche is reported to have exclaimed “From today painting is dead!”. Far from sounding the death knell of painting, photography in fact gave rise to a fascinating dialogue between both art forms. This lecture charts and outlines the birth of photography in the early nineteenth century and how its invention transformed and influenced the use, purpose and aesthetic of painting.

Born in Paris in 1976, Aliki Braine studied at The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford, The Slade School of Fine Art, London and The Courtauld Institute where she was awarded a distinction for her masters in 17th century painting. After working for the National Gallery for 20 years, she now teaches for Christie’s Education and the Wallace Collection, and is an Associate Lecturer for the Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts London. Aliki is also a practising artist who regularly exhibits her photographic work internationally.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

Pilgrims often respond to an inner voice when they set out to walk in the footsteps of countless saints and sinners, be they crusaders, criminals or humble peasants, on a path set down twelve hundred years ago.  The bones of St. James the Great, Jesus’ brother, were ‘found’ in North West Spain, ca. 830 AD, about a hundred years after Muslims had invaded Spain from North Africa, and were threatening Europe. Pilgrims flowed down from every corner of Europe, blocking the advance of Islam, while they sought the salvation of their souls at the end of the known world, Finisterre. They risked, and still risk, death, to achieve it.

The Knights Templar built fabulous castles and round churches along the way to defend the humble pilgrims. Franciscan monasteries, convents, cathedrals, and small churches drenched in New World gold line the Way but the peregrinos are more interested in their feet as they make their way, day by day, sometimes painfully, to Santiago de Compostela. 

Hilary Guise lectures in the main museums in London for American universities, and has toured widely in the USA and lectured for the Smithsonian Institution. She has also worked for the Art Fund, taught courses for Cambridge University and has been a guest speaker on cruises. She trained as a painter at Central St Martin’s; she exhibits abroad, most recently in Berlin and France. She lives in London and in Provence.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

Perhaps the best-known British architect today, during his prolific career Norman Foster has designed an extraordinary range of buildings, from the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia to the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong, the Reichstag Dome in Berlin, the Millenium Bridge in London and, of course, "the Gherkin”. This talk examines the high-tech architecture of Britain’s most celebrated archistar.

Andrew was previously Assistant Director of the British School at Rome from 1998 to 2002 and since 2004, Associate Professor at the University of L'Aquila. Part of his PhD (Courtauld Institute 1995) on Venetian architecture was awarded the Essay Medal of 1996 by the Society of Architectural Historians (GB). A Fellow at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti in Florence in 2003-2004, and in 2009 was the Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Amongst his many publications are, with Arnold Witte, Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (2010), and Baldassare Longhena and the Venetian Baroque (2012). 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.

It has been illustrated by more than ninety artists – making it the most widely illustrated book in the English language. We will revisit the story as depicted by numerous well known illustrators such as E H Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Robert Ingpen, Val Biro and Inga Moore. We will compare the same scene in the book through the eyes of different artists and explore how the story came to be written for Grahame’s son Alastair and the interesting but ultimately tragic life of Kenneth Grahame.

John Ericson was formerly a lecturer at the University of Bath where he was Director of Studies in the School of Education with responsibility for the professional development of teachers. He has worked extensively overseas as an educational consultant and this has given him the opportunity to give lectures and presentations at conferences all over the world.

Over the last decade he has been a popular speaker on The Arts Society circuit in the UK and Europe as well as a frequent visitor to the societies in Australia and New Zealand. In his professional life he has developed a particular interest in presentation skills including the role of pictures in learning and the appropriate use of PowerPoint. This, coupled with his ability to relate well to people of all ages and backgrounds, makes him an impressive and confident public speaker.

As well as the talks he has developed from his professional background, he offers presentations on an eclectic range of topics that are derived from his diverse interests and enthusiasms such as Pub Signs, Children’s Book Illustrations and the Shakers of North America. All his talks are entertaining, highly informative, very well illustrated and presented with warmth and humour.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door. We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any flu or Covid-19 symptoms.

Although not always acknowledged nowadays, this 17th century Spanish artist is one of the most influential painters in the history of art. Born in Seville in 1599, where he made his name producing penetratingly observed scenes of everyday life, he moved up to Madrid where his portraiture was so successful that by the age of twenty-four he was the only artist permitted to paint the king of Spain. After his death, the cool elegance of his style, his ability to discover a sense of dignity and humanity in even the simplest of subjects, coupled with his breathtakingly daring treatment of the paint was widely admired by generations of artists from Whistler to Picasso, who famously described him as “The Great Magician of Art”.

Douglas read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 8000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of  The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular lecturers at The Study Center, Christie's course 'The History of Art Studies' and other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hanger in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe.

He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door. We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any flu or Covid-19 symptoms.

Better known as a manufacturer of Art Deco glass, Lalique was also a jeweller of great imagination and skill. His work features the sinuous curves and natural references so prominent in Art Nouveau design. More dramatic and lavish were the jewels made for Sarah Bernhardt which represented wildly imaginative designs with some macabre elements. Calouste Gulbenkian claimed “He ranks amongst the greatest figures of art of all time”. This from the man whose motto was “Only the Best”.

Nicholas's career has mirrored his abiding interest in antiques. He has worked for some of the major auction houses in London as well as running his own book business devoted to the decorative and fine arts. His particular interest is English 18th century furniture and country houses; he enjoys discussing objects, particularly in their historical context. He lectures extensively in the USA, South Africa, Europe and UK, including the V&A, as well as for the principal cruise lines. Former Chairman of the West Yorkshire Art Fund. He arranges specialist short breaks for collectors and a range of prestigious clients including groups of The Arts Society who enjoy visiting the treasures of the UK.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door. We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any flu or Covid-19 symptoms.

By 323 BC Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian empire and launched a new era of Mediterranean history, known today as the Hellenistic Age. The world had changed, and soon two cities emerged as centres of extraordinary culture and learning. In Egypt, Alexander conceived a vision of a new city to take his name: Alexandria. It soon became the intellectual hub of the ancient world, which saw extraordinary discoveries in science and mathematics, philosophy, and medicine. Its library was the greatest of the ancient world; moreover, its lighthouse was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Meanwhile, in north-west Asia Minor, the Attalid kingdom developed a new capital city, Pergamon, as a cultural centre to rival Alexandria. It too had a remarkable library; today the archaeological site is on the UNESCO World Heritage List, while the famed Pergamon Altar has been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. This talk explains how these two cities changed the intellectual and artistic landscape, and examines their legacy.

Following a degree in Classics from Oxford University, James taught Classics at secondary school level since 1998, and currently teaches at Godolphin and Latymer in London; here he runs the school’s Ancient World Breakfast Club, which has an ethos similar to that of The Arts Society. 

Since 1998, he has published a number of textbooks related to the classical world, including In Search of the Greeks and In Search of the Romans. In addition to his school teaching, he has also lectured for the V&A Academy, most recently on their Classical World and its Afterlife and Classicism from the Ancients to the Renaissance courses. He is a keen traveller, and says he is lucky enough to have taken many photos of ancient sites, a number of which have been used in his books.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door. We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any flu or Covid-19 symptoms.

Pliny the Elder described the Atlas Mountains 1900 years before Jacques Majorelle arrived in Morocco, designing posters to entice French tourists. Extensive travel in the Atlas Mountains inspired glorious blue dominated canvases and a garden in Marrakech. His blue horticultural testament was saved by Yves Saint Laurent who tailored the garden with pattern and panache and created a foundation for its survival and public entry.

Caroline has lectured in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Europe, Japan and on cruises to the Baltic, Mediterranean, Red Sea, Caribbean and Indian Ocean. In 2017 she returned to The Arts Society in New Zealand. University of Cambridge ICE Academic Tutor and Course Director; lectures for the Royal Horticultural Society, museums, specialist travel companies and online for The Gardens Trust. Consultant designer specialising in evoking historic, artistic and symbolic references. Author of 12 books including Water Lilies and Bory Latour-Marliac, the genius behind Monet’s water lilies; Impressionists in their Gardens; Follies of Europe: Architectural Extravaganzas; Monet at Giverny and Icons of Garden Design. Contributions to Viking TV include Monet’s Garden at Giverny https://viking.tv/live/monday/explore-claude-monets-life-in-giverny-with.... Presenter and contributor on television and BBC Radio 4. 2017 recipient of the Herb Society of America ‘Elizabeth Crisp Rea Award’.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door. We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any flu or Covid-19 symptoms.

image by Caroline Holmes

Well known to The Arts Society of Chiswick, Giles returns to deliver another spirited lecture on the making of the great British pantomime. Over 2500 years in the making from mixing Greek and Roman drama with commedia dell’arte and medieval morality plays, stir in a sprig of C17th masque, a dash of C18th harlequinade and a hefty shot of Victorian music hall. Mix this potent brew and, hey presto, you have the modern Christmas pantomime. Oh No You Don’t!!!!

A fellow of St Chad’s College, Durham University and a Course Leader in Theatre at the V&A Museum as well as a regular lecturer on the V&A Academy courses. Giles combines academic analysis with hands on experience to bring a unique insight to the world of the theatre.

As an independent theatre director and producer Giles specialises in creating new work with artists in developing countries. He is the Founding Director of the charity Developing Artists. He has run theatre projects across the world in Botswana, Cape Verde, Kenya, Kosovo, Palestine, Mexico, Thailand and Zimbabwe as well as delivering lectures to various institutions from the Foundation for Mexican Literature in Mexico City to the Royal College of Physicians in London. He has regularly lectured on the history and practice of theatre on the Queen Mary 2 as it sailed from New York to the UK.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms.

This lecture sets out to capture the achievements of Frank Hurley, one of the great photographers of the C20th. He accompanied Ernest Shackleton’s 3rd Antarctic expedition in 1914 on the ship Endurance. Which was trapped and eventually crushed by the pack ice. The crew camped on the ice for 5 months, they rowed to the remote Elephant Island and from there Shackleton sailed for help to South Georgia over 800 miles away returning to rescue his crew 3 months later.  Through his photographs,  Frank Hurley gave a visual narrative to this epic journey. They captured new and amazing landscapes within which this remarkable human drama played out on essentially terra incognito.

Born on the Isles of Scilly and educated at Truro School, Cornwall, and Birmingham University. His career has been spent in education and training at home and abroad. He has lectured at Exeter College on Medieval and Tudor history, St Mark’s and St John’s University College, Plymouth, and at Bath University on Anglo Saxon and Medieval England.

He currently runs two small companies which provide training and study breaks.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms.

One of the most well-known and admired historic buildings in England, Blenheim Palace is an uncompromising monument to English military ambition and one family’s self- importance. The story of its construction is a fascinating catalogue of excess and outrage, the result is both monstrous and utterly sublime – according to our lecturer this evening. The effect on the generations of Marlboroughs is revealing and within this ‘cauldron’ a Churchill was born – recently voted The Greatest Briton of All Time. This lecture will explore these themes and the characters involved, consider the genius of Vanbrugh’s architecture and consider the impact the Palace has left on the nation.

Anthony is a cultural historian, writer and artist and has travelled much of the world, combining painting with tour lecturing – principally to American university students on bespoke tours and to the Arts Society as an accredited lecturer since 2011. He spent 6 years as a consultant for Luke Hughes and travelled with country advising on the furniture needs of prestigious buildings, including museums, palaces, schools and cathedrals.

He is now based in London and spends much of his time lecturing and undertaking research, whilst assisting at the British Museum with their outreach event programme and hosts visiting lecturers.  He has been described as ‘Hugh Grant meets the Dalai Lama’!

He is currently undertaking research for a new book on civilisation; what it is, whether we have it and how you get it.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms.

This lecture explores how the New York heiress, Peggy Guggenheim - the poor little rich girl - came to play such a pivotal role in the making of mid-century Modernism. Friends with so many cultural figures of the day – from Cecil Beaton to Scott Fitzgerald, Barbara Hepworth to Igor Stravinsky and so many more iconic artists. What prompted her to start collecting contemporary art in the 1930s?

And what was the impact of her galleries in London and New York on the artists and the wider art world? Through collecting not only art but the artists themselves, her life was as radical as her collection.

In this lecture we will be expertly guided by Jacky Klein, art historian and lecturer, publisher, writer and broadcaster who specialises in modern and contemporary art.

Jacky Klein is an art historian, publisher, writer and broadcaster, specialising in modern and contemporary art. She studied Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London after which she worked as a curator in several leading galleries: Tate, the Barbican, the Courtauld and the Hayward.

In 2008 she made a sideways move into the world of art publishing at Thames and Hudson, Tate Publishing followed by a directorship at a small independent arts publisher HENI Publishing.

Jacky is also the author of several best-selling titles including on the British artist Grayson Perry (T&H 2020) and co-author on a number of other titles; Alfred Cohen An American Artist in Europe (Ben Uri Gallery/Alfred Cohen Art Foundation 2020) : Body of Art (Phaidon 2015) and What is Contemporary Art? She has also written a very successful children’s guide to MOMA, New York which has been translated into 11 languages.

Jacky has presented and contributed to a range of television programmes for the BBC, and is a regular contributor on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. She has also written and presented online films and livestreams for Tate, Christies, the Art Fund amongst others.

She is an experienced lecturer in museums, galleries and literary festivals as well as having taught at various arts institutions such as UCL, Christies Education, the V&A, the Royal Academy and currently is an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute on their Masters programme ‘Curating the Art Museum’.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms.

Howard Smith has a background in Graphic Design, an art form for the 20C. His talk on the birth of documentary films in the 1930’s is both nostalgic and entertaining. It will be lavishly illustrated by vintage film clips such as the experimental Soviet era Battleship Potemkin. In a mere seven years the GPO Film Unity produced 129 films, including the iconic Night Mail with poetry by WH Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. An extraordinary period which saw immense change, ingenuity and creativity.

Howard Smith is a retired graphic designer whose lecture series mainly cover an extraordinary 50 year period of the C20th which saw immense change, ingenuity and creativity. All are possibly in living memory or near living memory, so they feature a wealth of actual information to support the stories which often show extraordinary creativity sometimes in unbelievable circumstances.

He was born during the Second World War and educated in Scotland followed by an MA from Trinity College, Dublin.

In the 1960s he worked for UK and International Advertising Agencies before starting his own marketing and print company in Canterbury. He was delighted to become an accredited lecturer of The Arts Society in 2017.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. 

Murder, poison, corruption and incest: all perfect ingredients for sensational popular culture. But in an age known for its brutality and church corruption were the Borgias really so bad? This lecture reveals the real family that dominated the Papacy and Italian politics during the last decade of the C15th: the charismatic figure of Pope Alexander VI, living inside his sumptuously decorated apartments, the career of his son, Cesare - Cardinal, General, employer of Da Vinci and the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince - and the journey of Lucrezia Borgia from “the greatest whore in Rome” to a devout and treasured duchess of the city Ferrara. Sometimes truth is more intoxicating than myth.

Novelist, broadcaster and critic. Sarah read history at Cambridge, then worked for many years as a cultural journalist in radio and television on such programmes as Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4), The Late Show (BBC 2), and Night Waves (BBC Radio 3). She has published thirteen novels, taught renaissance studies at Washington University, St Louis, is a visiting tutor on the MA in creative writing at Oxford Brooks and has lectured around the world at festivals and conferences. Her last five novels have been set within the Italian Renaissance. In the Name of the Family (2017) completes the story of the Borgia family and the remarkable period of Italian history in which they lived.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. 

The lecture will also be live-streamed on Zoom and details of how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. If guests would like to join on Zoom they would be most welcome and the cost will be £6. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and to receive the Zoom link.

Originating in the Italian Renaissance courts in the C15th, Ballet came to the French court in 1533, when Catherine Medici an Italian noblewoman married the French King Henry II. A century later, King Louis XIV, a passionate dancer, popularised and standardised the art form and in 1661 he founded the Royal Academy of Dance,

The popularity of ballet soared in Russia in the late C19th with Russian choreographers and composers taking it to new heights and in the early C20th, Sergei Diaghilev and Michel Fokine experimented with movement and costume going beyond the confines of classical ballet.  George Balanchine would change ballet even further when he created neo-classical ballet and is considered to be the greatest innovator of the contemporary “plotless” ballet. 

Today, ballet is multi-faceted. Classical forms, traditional stories and contemporary choreographic innovations intertwine to produce the character of modern ballet. 

In this lecture we'll take an exciting and colourful look at ballet bringing it alive with video clips and music as well as stills. 

Jennifer is an experienced guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern and lectures at various art societies and institutions. She has a special interest in British and European art of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Having gained an MA in film and television practice, Jennifer had a long-standing career spanning twenty years as a television producer/director making documentaries and factual programmes for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. She was also a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College and Birkbeck, University of London and a senior lecturer at Southampton Solent University in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Society.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. 

The lecture will also be live-streamed on Zoom and details of how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. If guests would like to join on Zoom they would be most welcome and the cost will be £6. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and to receive the Zoom link.

In 'The Art of the Cartoonist' Harry will be tracing the history of his profession with examples from early practitioners like Cruickshank and Hogarth, to more contemporary artists such as Giles and Schulz, bringing events right up to date with cartoons produced fresh on the page that day!

Yes, Harry will be drawing live. Prepare to hear some tricks of his trade, learn where to put eyebrows for maximum effect and discover exactly what the Eskimo brothers said in The Funniest Joke Ever (possibly).

Harry Venning has been a professional cartoonist for thirty years, during which time he has provided cartoons for several high-profile UK publications (The Guardian, Radio Times) as well as for countless more obscure titles (British Journal Of Wound Care).

He was awarded UK Strip Cartoonist of The Year for his Guardian strip Clare In The Community, which he adapted into a Radio 4 sitcom.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. We would appreciate it if everybody attending could take a Lateral Flow Test prior to coming.

The lecture will also be live-streamed on Zoom and details of how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. If guests would like to join on Zoom they would be most welcome and the cost will be £6. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and to receive the Zoom link.

Between 1885 and 1916, Carl Fabergé made fifty jewelled eggs – Easter presents from Russia’s last two emperors to their wives. Since the brutal murder of the last tsar and his family in a Siberian basement, these eggs have become the most famous surviving symbols of the Romanov Empire: both supreme examples of the jeweller’s art and the vulgar playthings of a decadent court. After going missing in the Revolution, most of the eggs re-emerged in the storerooms of the Kremlin, where they were immediately identified as a source of much-needed foreign exchange. Their subsequent history holds up a mirror to the twentieth century and encompasses Bolsheviks and entrepreneurs, tycoons and heiresses, con-men and queens. Eggs have been sold and smuggled, stolen and forged. Now, as they return to Russia, their history – like that of Russia itself - seems to have come full circle. Then there are the eight eggs which remain missing. What prospect is there that they will ever emerge, and if they do, will anyone believe that they are genuine? Toby Faber wrote Fabergé’s Eggs: One Man’s Masterpieces and the End of an Empire, described by P.D. James as a ‘fascinating story which combines unique decorative art, contemporary culture, history and the murder of the Romanovs with the excitement of a crime novel’. The lecture is illustrated with pictures of the eggs today and their owners, and with archival material showing some of the missing eggs.

Toby is an experienced lecturer and public speaker who has been accredited by The Arts Society since 2012. His career began with Natural Sciences at Cambridge and has been through investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, where he remains on the board. He is also non-executive Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music and a director of Liverpool University Press.

Toby has written three narrative histories: Stradivarius – Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius; Faberge’s Eggs; and Faber & Faber – The Untold Story, as well as a novel, Close to the Edge. Of these, only the obvious one is published by the family firm.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Non-members welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. We would appreciate it if everybody attending could take a Lateral Flow Test prior to coming.

The lecture will also be live-streamed on Zoom and details of how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. If guests would like to join on Zoom they would be most welcome and the cost will be £6. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and to receive the Zoom link.

Walter Sickert was the most charismatic British artist of the early C29th. Ever conscious of his public image, he cultivated a variety of personae: aesthete; provocateur; sage, painter of modern life. He was drawn to shocking or notorious subjects (those more likely to garner attention), especially the sensational ‘Camden Town Murder’ of 1907. This lecture examines the series of paintings and prints Sickert produced in response to the crime and its aftermath. These are compelling images, among the most original by any British artist of the period. How was Sickert able to create great art out of murder? Why was he, and much of the British public, so fascinated by the case? What did the Camden Town Murder series do for Sickert’s reputation and career?

Steven has a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, Liverpool School of Art; MA in History of Art, Birkbeck College, London. He has been a lecturer at the National Gallery since 2004. Steven has also lectured on the history of European art and architecture at Somerset House, taught courses on art and architecture at London colleges (The City Literary Institute and Bishopsgate Institute) and is a regular gallery and museum guide for U3A. He is also a painter.

The bar will be open from 7pm and the lecture will start at 8pm. Guests welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are fully vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid-19 symptoms. We would appreciate it if everybody attending could take a Lateral Flow Test prior to coming.

Widely known for his outlandish appearances dressed as his feminine alter ego, Claire, Grayson Perry is now a core part of the art establishment, a Turner Prize winner, Royal Academician, popular broadcaster and colourful character. He’s possibly one of the world’s best-known contemporary artists. His works of ceramics, textiles, tapestries and prints are highly sought after. Often controversial, he tackles difficult subjects in a poignant yet witty way and holds a mirror up to society. This talk will examine Grayson Perry’s work, his exciting and thought-provoking exhibitions, and the unique character inside the flamboyant frocks.

Ian Swankie is a Londoner with a passion for art and architecture. He is an official guide at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral, and gives tours around each venue. He is also a qualified and active freelance London guide and leads regular tours for various corporations and organisations. Since 2012 he has led a popular weekly independent art lecture group in his home town of Richmond in West London and he gives talks on a variety of subjects.  He is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, one of the City livery companies.

The lecture will start at 8pm. Bar open from 7.00pm. Guests welcome - £10 on the door.  We request that you are double vaccinated and that you do not currently have any Covid 19 symptoms.

Cleopatra, the woman for whose love’s sake Antony is imagined to have given up the chance to rule the Roman world, has been inspiring painters, poets and (more recently) film-makers for over two millennia. Their gorgeously voluptuous depictions of her offer insights into changing concepts of beauty, and into the racial and sexual assumptions underlying them.  Showing images ranging from Roman portrait busts, through medieval illuminations, the glorious works of Renaissance masters like Michelangelo, the splendour of Tiepolo and the exoticism of Gustave Moreau to 20th century film stars (Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and the Carry On team’s Amanda Barry), I will show how Cleopatra became a screen onto which artists have projected their wildly differing fantasies about exotic danger and erotic bliss.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio - which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award - and of Cleopatra and Heroes. Her novel, Peculiar Ground was described as 'almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance' (The Guardian) and 'full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’. (New York Times)

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she has reviewed for all of the UK’s serious newspapers and for Radio 3’s Night Waves, judged five literary prizes, and spoken at numerous literary festivals. She teaches Creative Writing at Arcadia University and at Arvon.   

MEMBERS ONLY - Lecture starts at 8pm

The role of sculpture has changed substantially in recent times. Here, I consider how the concept of monument and memorial, familiar since classical antiquity, shifts towards other concerns.  I discuss how sculpture now plays a vitally important role in terms of site in the city; how the sculpture park comes into being in Britain in the mid-20th century, thanks to the efforts of Sir Henry Moore, and grows exponentially across the globe; how water has attracted artists to make exceptional works in or alongside it; and not least, how sculpture has become a challenging and exciting space for social encounter.  Among others, I include Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg, Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread - artists who also feature in my book, Sculpture Now.

Anna Moszynska is a London-based lecturer and writer specialising in contemporary art. During the 1990s, she oversaw the development of the first British Master’s Degree in the subject at Sotheby’s Institute. She has also taught at institutions including The City Lit, the Royal Academy and Tate London, as well as lecturing in cities ranging from Dubai to New York. She currently teaches at academic institutions in London and Paris and run her own courses. Her books include Abstract Art (1990, enlarged ed. 2020) and Sculpture Now (2013), both published by Thames & Hudson. She enjoys introducing art to audiences in a lively and approachable way to make modern and contemporary art both accessible and interesting.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email visits.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

This lecture explores the birth of the Soviet mosaic from its roots in Islamic mosaics and Communist propagandist posters through to the question of preservation in post-Soviet Central Asia. We explore why Soviet thinking was so keen to bring art out of galleries and into public spaces, and how, in an era when Socialist Realism was the only permitted artistic expression, every public artwork came with a message, a value and an agenda. How did Soviet artists deal with the uncomfortable reality that Muslim Central Asia was a Russian colonial conquest? In what ways were gender, race, work, leisure and achievement important when it came to shaping Central Asians’ ideas of their own identity within the wider Soviet family, and what agency did Central Asians have in portraying themselves in art?

Chris was born in Turkey and spent his childhood there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, Chris spent two years at sea before studying Media and journalism at Leicester University. He then moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. After a year in the UK writing A Carpet Ride to Khiva, he moved to the Pamirs in Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down, spending three years there. Next came two years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Chris has recently finished rowing and studying at Oxford and survived his curacy at St. Barnabas in North Finchley, but is now taking two years out to focus on writing fiction, with several novels published and more on the way. He also lectures for The Art Society and leads tours to Central Asia to pay the bills. He is missing a large chunk of his heart which will forever remain in the -stans.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

The story of one of the greatest creative collaborations of all:  Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose team of dancers, choreographers, and costume and set designers transformed expectations of what a night in the theatre could be, and the circumstances behind its most notorious stage work of all. Sandy examines the build-up to the Rite of Spring’s première in Paris, takes a look at the original costumes, plays excerpts from this fascinatingly inventive score, and explores what divided opinions of that first-night audience quite so dramatically.  No, nothing could top the riot at the Rite in 1913…

Sandy is one of the UK’s most versatile music commentators, enjoying a career that combines broadcasting, performing and lecturing. After studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and working as music director for the RSC, National Theatre and in London’s West End, Sandy Burnett spent a decade as one of the core team of presenters on BBC Radio 3. Combining engaging scholarship with hands-on expertise, he devises and leads cultural holidays all over the world, is the author of the Idler Guide to Classical Music, is a highly sought after double bassist.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

Founded in 1919 in Weimar, the Bauhaus was a progressive art school. Under the directorship of architect Walter Gropius, its students studied a broad range of artistic disciplines. The Bauhaus lasted for a 14-year period, with bases in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, and during that time it not only came to typify an age but also dictate matters of style for decades to come, through its art, architecture and design. This talk looks at some of the movers and shakers behind this hugely influential movement, including Marianne Brandt, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, as well as exploring their legacy in our world and homes today.

Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, appearing on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and contributing to newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes worldwide. Lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Recent talks include the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Trust, the National Theatre, the British Museum, the V&A, the Southbank Centre, the Tate and the Neue Galerie, New York, as well as for history of art societies and The Art Fund. 

Photo © Gavin Plumley

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

When Goya moved to the so-called house of the deaf man, he began painting the walls with some of the most extraordinary art ever seen and subsequently dubbed The Black Paintings not just for their dark colour but also for their often dark and disturbing subject matter. This lecture will consider the laborious yet not always careful process of taking Goya’s Black paintings off the walls of his home and eventually transferring them to the Prado in Madrid. It will chart the extraordinary difficulties of removing them, consider why he painted such black visions and whether he wanted them ever to be seen. It will consider his state of mind at the time; removed from the court, deaf and isolated.

Jacqueline is Managing Director of an art tours company, running residential courses in Andalucía, Southern Spain in the art and culture of the region. Jacqueline is a course director and lecturer at the V&A and also lectures at The Royal Academy, Christies Education, The Art Fund, The London Art History Society and has recently toured New Zealand for The Arts Society and Australia fror ADFAS, where she will return next year. Her specialist field is Spanish Art, but she also lectures on European Art 1790-1950. She has recently published A Taste of Art, London (Unicorn Press 2019). Jacqueline films her lectures and is currently delivering lectures, study days and courses online.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

Years of working as an artist within the Criminal Justice System in England and Germany have given Angela unique insights into the destructive and costly cycle of crime, prisons and re-offending. In this thought-provoking talk she offers a deeper understanding of the minds, lives and challenges of offenders. With extraordinary slides of art projects and prisoners' art, she demonstrates how within the process of creating art of any discipline, there are vital opportunities for offenders to confront their crimes and develop the key life skills so essential in leading a positive and productive life. A frequent response to this talk has been “I had no idea!” and indeed it casts light onto areas of our society where the Arts not only are visual, decorative or commercial, but absolutely vital, hugely relevant and potentially life-changing.

This talk is moving, informative and very original. Interspersed with personal accounts of humorous or slightly horrifying situations, these talks have kept audiences across the country engrossed. 

Angela Findlay is a professional artist, writer and freelance lecturer with a long career of teaching art in prisons in Germany and England. Her time ‘behind bars’ and later as Arts Coordinator of the London-based Koestler Trust, gave her many insights into the huge impact the arts can have in terms of rehabilitation. Though novel, her ideas were effective and in 2016 she was invited by the Ministry of Justice to support the case for the arts to be included in new, progressive programmes of rehabilitation and education. Brexit unfortunately reversesd the direction of prison policy but Art's role is still vital. 

In the past decade Angela’s Anglo-German roots led her to research Germany’s largely unknown post-WW2 process of remembrance and the extraordinary culture of 'counter memorials' and site-specific artworks that emerged to express national shame and apology. With the current debates on statues and monuments, the ways Germany has tried to deal with its dark past is more relevant and inspiring than ever.   

Angela has a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, a Diploma in Artistic Therapy (specialising in colour) and her paintings are widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her book on the above subjects will be published by Penguin in early 2022.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm on Zoom. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance. 

If guests would like to join us, they would be most welcome. Please email treasurer.tasch@gmail.com for information about payment and receiving the Zoom link.

Les Parisiennes is a story about women’s lives during the dark years of Nazi occupation and beyond and includes British and American women caught in Paris as well as native born resisters who were eventually sent to camps, couturiers and jewelers, some of whom flourished in wartime, as well as actors, singers, night club dancers and housewives.

The lecture opens with a magnificent circus ball held by Elsie de Wolfe at the magnificent Villa Trianon, a chateau in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles; many of the guests could not believe that war was imminent and ends with Christian Dior’s lavish new look in 1947 as well as a perfume, Miss Dior, named after his sister Catherine, a resister, who had only just survived a prison camp and never wanted to talk about her experiences.

Anne Sebba is a biographer, historian and author of eleven books who lectures to a variety of audiences in the US and UK, including the English Speaking Union, Royal Overseas League, National Trust, British Library and Imperial War Museum. A former Reuters foreign correspondent, Anne is now a broadcaster - she presented a BBC R3 documentary about the pianist Harriet Cohen and for Radio 4 the documentary Who was Joyce Hatto? she regularly appears on television talking about her books, mostly biographies including Jennie Churchill, William Bankes, Laura Ashley and Wallis Simpson. The latter, published as That Woman, was an international bestseller. Her latest book is a history of Paris between 1939-49 through women's eyes published in 2016 as Les Parisiennes How the women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. Anne is a former chair of Britain's 9,000 strong Society of Authors.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm.

The French painter Girodet, spoke for all those who worked for Napoleon when he said “We were all conscripted, but not all of us wore the uniform”. Bonaparte’s brilliant exploits in the Revolutionary Wars attracted artists from the earliest stages in his career and he made systematic use of art as propaganda to reveal himself as soldier, peacemaker, lawgiver and the possessor of semi-divine imperial power. He was fortunate to have at his command the greatest artists of the era, including Jacques Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Antonio Canova and the lesser known Charles-Antoine, Baron Gros, who produced some of the most astounding Napoleonic pictures. The lecture concludes by looking at the less flattering images of Napoleon that were produced in Britain and Germany.

Barry Venning is an historian of British art with a particular interest in the work of JMW Turner, on whom he has published widely, including the volume on Turner in Phaidon's Art & Ideas series, and several catalogue essays for exhibitions in the UK, Germany, Italy and Poland. He was the BBC's script consultant on Turner's Fighting Temeraire and has recently taken part (2013) in a BBC documentary called The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution. He has also published a study of John Constable's paintings. His interests and his teaching extend from medieval architecture to contemporary British art. He is currently Associate Lecturer with the Open University and lecturing on a freelance basis for The Arts Society, Christie's Education and other organisations.

As promised, Barry has now given us a recommended reading list which can be found here.

This lecture will start on Zoom at 8.00pm. Details on how to join will be sent to members a day in advance.

The tragedy of Pompeii’s burial by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in AD79 provided an archaeological miracle that enables us to see how Roman villas were richly decorated with stunningly beautiful frescoes. It also gives us a glimpse into how luxury villas reflected their owner’s aspirations. They were also used as working estates for business and industry. Yet, even here, there is art in abundance.Their preserved remains and contents show us aspects of Roman life that archaeologists could never have guessed at without these remarkable discoveries.

Gillian Hovell has excavated at Oplontis, one of the great locations in the Pompeii complex of sites. Sharing her experience of digging at this stunning site, we visit a rich opulent villa and a Roman commercial wine producing centre and nearby shops as she brings to life the aspects of Roman Pompeii that we rarely see. Even here there were tragedies; 54 bodies were found clustered in one room, huddled together and buried for 2,000 year by Vesuvius’ eruption. These Romans are now brought to life for us by the powers that killed so many.

After studying BA (Hons) Latin and Ancient History at Exeter University Gillian Hovell branched out into archaeology. Formerly with the BBC, she is an award winning writer and author who specialises in relating the ancient world to our modern lives, in person, in the field, on line and in the media (most recently on Radio 4). Publications include Visiting the Past: A guide to finding and understanding Britain's Archaeology and Roman Britain. Forthcoming works are Latin Yesterday, Today and For Ever, and A Mediterranean Tour: Not just a Load of Old Stones. Gillian teaches adult education courses in Latin, archaeology and ancient history and lectures widely, on cruises, tours, at universities and literary festivals and for museums.

This lecture will start at 8.00pm.

We love standing in a museum gazing at a painting by Titian or Caravaggio, but we rarely question where it was before it came to be in that museum, or who in earlier times stood in front of it and gazed, nor by what practical means it got there. When Napoleon invaded Europe, he had the best of Europe’s works of art sent back to Paris for his new Musée Napoleon. But HOW did they get four life -size bronze horses of San Marco down from their place on the basilica in Venice,  over the Alps and all the way to Paris? What practicalities did shipping a painting over 15 feet high, or a statue such as Michelangelo’s David, involve? This lecture will delve into the astonishing history of the movement of art works.

Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe has a MA in History of Art from Edinburgh and a PhD from the Warburg Institute, London University. With 40 years’ experience as a lecturer, Chantal has taught at Sotheby Institute of Art on the MA in Fine and Decorative Arts since 1989, and as a freelance lecturer for a number of societies in London, Italy and America.  Having also trained as a paintings conservator, she brings an understanding of the making and the physical painting to her lectures and study sessions. 

This lecture will start at 8.00pm.

A highly topical lecture, given the current arguments about the multi-billion pound restoration planned for Westminster! The Houses of Parliament is one of the most famous and staggering buildings in the world. It rises serenely from the Thames at Westminster, on a site which has been the centre of power and government in England from the earliest times. It is a masterpiece of Victorian architecture and a spectacular feat of civil engineering: but from the beginning, its design and construction were a battleground for its architect, Charles Barry. The practical challenges, even by the standards of Victorian invention, were immense. Battling the interference of MPs and royalty, coaxing and soothing the genius of his partner Pugin, fending off the mad schemes of a host of crackpot inventors and busybodies, and coming in three times over budget and twenty-four years behind schedule, this lecture will tell the story of how Charles Barry created the most famous building in Britain.

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives and a senior archivist at the National Archives, and a fellow of a number of learned societies. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won top prize at the inaugural Political Book Awards in 2013, and its sequel Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of Parliament, was a book of the year for the Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine in 2016. She was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2017, and is currently working on her third book.

Our lecture will start at 6.30pm.

From the Edwardian era to the outbreak of World War II millions of artist-drawn humorous postcards were produced not just for entertainment but to bolster morale, to inspire, instruct, motivate and persuade. Discover the popular themes and styles of the period by the masters of the medium such as Mabel Lucie Attwell, Dudley Buxton, Donald McGill and Fred Spurgin, and the reasons why their popularity waned with the British public. 

James Taylor studied at the Universities of St Andrews and Manchester, and is a former curator of paintings, drawings and prints, and co-ordinator of various exhibitions and galleries, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, also lecturer and ships' historian on board cruise ships. Publications include illustrated histories of Marine Painting (1995) and yachting art Yachts on Canvas (1998), The Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin’s extraordinary adventure aboard FitzRoy’s famous survey ship (2008), Careless Talk Costs Lives: Fougasse and the Art of Public Information (2010) and Your Country Needs You: the Secret History of the Propaganda Poster (2013). Completed his PhD at the University of Sussex in 2015 on the voyager artist William Westall (1781-1850) who sailed with Commander Matthew Flinders aboard HMS 'Investigator' (1801-1803) the first ship to circumnavigate Australia. Guided tours of the buildings and artworks of the National Maritime Museum can be arranged for groups.

The lecture starts at 8.15pm. Available to members only.

Our first online Study Day will consist of two one hour sessions with a 30 minute break in between.  

LECTURE 1   4PM -5PM 

A chronological history of the outstanding and diverse Devonshire collection, told through the interests, characters and tastes of its collectors over 16 generations, from Elizabethan beginnings to the current Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and their family. Each generation left its mark on the collection and it is fascinating to see how the diverse personalities have contributed to what is now considered to be one of the finest family collections in Europe.

LECTURE 2   5.20PM - 6.30PM

A look at the life of Deborah Devonshire, the youngest of the Mitford sisters and wife of the 11th Duke of Devonshire who through her marriage took on one of Europe’s greatest treasure houses, Chatsworth. In the second half of the 20th Century, in partnership with her husband, she imbued it with spirit, elegance and a sense of welcome that transformed it from being a worn-out survivor of decades of taxation, war and social change into one of the best-loved, most emulated and popular historic houses, gardens and estates in the country. She also became a bestselling author, champion of the countryside, its skills, traditions, livelihoods and food, trustee and patron of numerous charities, businesses and good causes and the most famous poultry keeper in the country. She met Hitler and Churchill and a dazzling array of her contemporaries including President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and other luminaries from the world of Culture and Art. She had a lasting impact upon Chatsworth and everyone she met. Our lecturer was lucky enough to work with her for 20 years and this lecture pays tribute to her life.

Our study day lecturer is Simon Seligman. Simon studied art and architectural history at Warwick University, including a semester in Venice. From 1991 to 2010, he worked at Chatsworth in a variety of roles, latterly as Head of Communications. He lectured about Chatsworth, the Devonshire Collection and associated topics, throughout the UK and on several US tours. Simon gave numerous public presentations and interviews with the late Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. Alongside his lecturing, he has worked part time for John Ruskin’s charity, the Guild of St. George, is a trustee of three arts festivals and is a Life Coach in private practice.

**No charge to members but a donation to help cover our costs would be much appreciated.

This is the story of the epic rivalry between the two giants of British art, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. As unlike in background and temperament as their paintings were in style, these two creative geniuses transformed the art of landscape. This lecture sets them head-to-head and examines their differences, their similarities, their battles and their shared triumphs. But who will ultimately be crowned star painter? As well as giving an overview of Turner and Constable, the subject provides an enjoyable overview of the British art world during the nineteenth century.  

Nicola Moorby is an independent art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She studied at the University of York and Birkbeck College, London. Formerly a curator at Tate Britain she has curated a number of exhibitions and has published widely on J.M.W. Turner, including contributions to the online catalogue of the Turner Bequest. She is also co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing, 2010). In addition, she has published on Walter Richard Sickert and is co-author of Tate's catalogue of works by the Camden Town Group.

The lecture start at 8.15pm. Available to members only.

Lights, Camera, Action! – inside stories of the art and artifice of the early decades of Hollywood. This lecture covers the work of stills photographers, costumiers, publicists, actors, actresses and the movie moguls who made it all happen.

Dr Geri Parlby is a former Fleet Street journalist and film PR. She has a first-class honours degree in History and Theology, a Masters in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute and a Theology doctorate from Roehampton University in London. She has been lecturing for the past 14 years both in the UK and internationally. She is also principal lecturer on the Arts Society South West Area’s History of Art course and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Roehampton University.

This lecture will start at 8.15pm. Available to members only.

In 1888 Gertrude Jekyll wrote a short but seminal article  in which she urged the readers to “remember that in a garden we are painting a picture”.  This talk looks at how to apply this principle in designing a border, but it also looks at the ways in which a border is different from a painting. However, it goes further than this and looks at how contemporary work of the likes of Turner, Monet, Rothko, Jackson Pollack and Hockney evolved in parallel with ideas about what a garden or border should look like.

Timothy Walker: Director of the Oxford University Botanic Garden from 1988 to 2014. Since 2014 he has been a college lecturer and tutor at Somerville College Oxford. Gardens are often thought of a place where science and art meet on equal terms. His lectures investigate this relationship.

This lecture will start at 8.15pm. Available to members only.

Raphael is often referred to as one of the three giants of the High Renaissance in Italy, alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, yet his fame and position in the canon of art history may seem hard to explain. He made no discoveries like those of his celebrated rivals: although undoubtedly a draughtsman of exceptional talent he made no great progress in the fields of anatomy, science and construction nor did he share the wide-ranging talents which Leonardo and Michelangelo demonstrated in so many disciplines. Furthermore, his career was short-lived as he died tragically young, aged only 37. Yet in this relatively short space of time Raphael managed to move from humble initial commissions in and around his home town of Urbino to the covetous position of one of the leading artists at the court of the most important patron in Italy, Pope Julius II, for whom he created some of the most sublime and influential frescoes of the early 16th century. We explore how Raphael achieved this extraordinary rise in status, tracing the development of early works and influences to the masterpieces created in Rome.

Sian Walters studied at Cambridge University. She is a lecturer at the National Gallery and The Wallace Collection and taught at Surrey University, specialising in 15th and 16th century Italian painting, Spanish art & architecture, and the relationship between dance and art. Sian also teaches private courses, and organises lectures, study days and art holidays abroad. She has lived in France and in Italy, where she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.

The lecture will start at 8.15pm. Available to members only.

when we will be streaming live on Zoom.

Raphael is often referred to as one of the three giants of the High Renaissance in Italy, alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, yet his fame and position in the canon of art history may seem hard to explain. He made no discoveries like those of his celebrated rivals: although undoubtedly a draughtsman of exceptional talent he made no great progress in the fields of anatomy, science and construction nor did he share the wide-ranging talents which Leonardo and Michelangelo demonstrated in so many disciplines. Furthermore, his career was short-lived as he died tragically young, aged only 37. Yet in this relatively short space of time Raphael managed to move from humble initial commissions in and around his home town of Urbino to the covetous position of one of the leading artists at the court of the most important patron in Italy, Pope Julius II, for whom he created some of the most sublime and influential frescoes of the early 16th century. We explore how Raphael achieved this extraordinary rise in status, tracing the development of early works and influences to the masterpieces created in Rome.

Sian Walters studied at Cambridge University. She is a lecturer at the National Gallery and The Wallace Collection and taught at Surrey University, specialising in 15th and 16th century Italian painting, Spanish art & architecture, and the relationship between dance and art. Sian also teaches private courses, and organises lectures, study days and art holidays abroad. She has lived in France and in Italy, where she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

The world’s first underground railway has a unique heritage of architecture, ingenious design, powerful advertising posters and unique calligraphy. This talk plots the early development of the Underground, examines the legacy of Frank Pick and Charles Holden, looks at some of the iconic posters, and celebrates the award-winning architecture of the modern Tube in the Jubilee Line Extension. We’ll also take a peek at a few of the new Elizabeth Line (Crossrail) stations, designed by some of the world’s top architects.

 A Londoner with a passion for art and architecture, Ian Swankie is an official guide at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral, and gives tours around each venue. He is also a qualified and active freelance London guide and leads regular tours for various corporations and organisations. Since 2012 he has led a popular weekly independent art lecture group in his home town of Richmond in West London. He is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, one of the City livery companies.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

In June 1520 Henry VIII and Francis 1 met to ratify an Anglo-French alliance and celebrate the betrothal of Henry’s daughter Mary to the Dauphin. The two handsome ‘Renaissance Princes’ are in their 20’s with similar reputations in military prowess, sport and patrons of the arts.  Both have imperial ambitions and are eager to display themselves as magnificent nobleman and warrior kings.  Each brings an entourage of 6,000 to a field south of Calais for 18 days of various events and entertainments staged to display the skill and splendour of each King and country.  The logistics of transporting, accommodating, ordering, feeding and watering, protecting and entertaining the English contingent for this spectacular event is staggering and the supply chain, often through the City of London Guilds, is equally fascinating. 3,217 horses shipped across the ‘Narrow Sea’ to Calais; a vast quantity of wood sourced from Flanders and floated along the coast; a huge temporary palace is built on stone foundations with brick and timber-framed walls reaching to 40 feet.  Royal palaces were virtually emptied of their silver, gold, tapestries and furniture to decorate the temporary palace, other principal tents and a chapel (with an organ); gold and silver cloth, velvet and sables, jewels and pearls were imported to ‘dress and impress’.

How was it all achieved?

Jo Mabbutt is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and Freeman of the City of London. Originally a trained singer, pianist and orchestra administrator, she is now a decorative artist who gilds antique lace and crochet, often combining with hand printing and painting.  She works to commission, sells through galleries and exhibitions and collaborates with other designers. 

Jo trained in wood graining, marbling, gilding, specialist paint finishes and interior design and was awarded the City & Guilds Silver Medal for Excellence in 2000. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Famously, every morning of his adult life, Beethoven measured out exactly 60 coffee beans for his breakfast.  A man who is capable of such discipline over a cup of coffee can surely apply that exactness elsewhere in his life; and in Beethoven’s case, it was applied to his compositions.  In fact, the detail found in his music is often so subtle that most people don’t even know it’s there.  This lecture explores Beethoven’s genius as a writer of music, at the same time setting his extraordinary story against the backdrop of 19th century warfare, revolution and dramatic social changes. 17th December 2020 is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s death.

Peter Medhurst appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

In this lively presentation to end the year John shares his knowledge and enthusiasm for wine and the contribution that ‘wine art’ makes to our colourful world. Wine can be a civilising influence upon us and it is made to be shared and enjoyed. As a consequence there are numerous wonderful paintings of wine being made and wine being drunk in celebration plus wicked cartoons and striking posters. In addition we shall examine wine labels from around the world which now display such style and creativity.

John Ericson was formerly a lecturer at the University of Bath where he was Director of Studies in the School of Education with responsibility for the professional development of teachers. He has worked extensively overseas as an educational consultant and this has given him the opportunity to give lectures and presentations at conferences all over the world. In 2008 and again in 2011 he undertook extensive lecture tours of Australia and he has been a popular speaker on The Arts Society's circuit for a number of years. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

As part of the Habsburg Empire, Prague was beloved of kings and princes. During the 19th century, however, the Czechs sought to reclaim the city for their own. Looking back at ancient mythology, they imagined a new future by means of art, architecture, literature and music. From Romanticism to cubism, the Czechs re-conceived various artistic movements in specifically patriotic ways. Looking at painter and decorative artist Alfons Mucha, artist Karel Svoboda and composers Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, this talk shows how the Czechs created a capital that was fit for a new independent nation.

Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, appearing on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and contributing to The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian. He lectures widely on the culture of Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, including to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the V&A, the Southbank Centre, the Tate and the Neue Galerie, New York, as well as for Art Societies and The Art Fund. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Eric Ravilious was only 39 when he died on active service as a war artist in 1942, yet he had already achieved amazing things. A brilliant wood engraver and designer, he is best known today for his haunting watercolours in which lighthouses, white horses, empty rooms and downland paths become marvels. Based on a decade of research, this entertaining illustrated talk illuminates the life and work of a playful, enigmatic artist, with plentiful examples of his work in watercolour, wood engraving, lithography and ceramics. The paintings are a delight, the Ravilious story funny, sad and full of surprises. 

James Russell studied History at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but was galvanized into writing about art by a lengthy stint selling contemporary paintings and sculpture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A passionate advocate of 20th century painting and design, he writes and lectures widely. His books include the popular 4-volume series Ravilious in Pictures, about British watercolourist and designer Eric Ravilious (1903-42), and other titles devoted to Paul Nash, Peggy Angus, Edward Bawden and Edward Seago. He curated the 2015 exhibition Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery and has lectured all over the country, from Rye to Glasgow and from the V&A to the Royal West of England Academy. 

 Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

2019 marks the 450th anniversary of the death of Bruegel in 1569. The political and social background during Bruegel’s lifetime was one of the most turbulent and destructive in the history of the Netherlands. The work of his short career introduced and developed the new subject matter of landscape and everyday life, yet these joyous and apparently innocent pictures are likely to contain subtle political and social comment and were painted for important patrons in Antwerp and Brussels. Who were they? Why is Bruegel’s work so timeless in its messages and how would his pictures have been “read” by his contemporaries. These are some of the questions to be addressed in this overview of a fascinating painter.

Clare Ford-Wille has an honours degree in History of Art from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her regular commitments include Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust plus study tours abroad.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

It is 500 years since Leonardo died on 2 May 1519 and to celebrate this, Guy will give a lecture on how Leonardo used the hand in his paintings and drawings.

The hand has been an underestimated but nevertheless central component of visual art. Leonardo stated that the hand could be as expressive as the face and acknowledged that the structure and function of the hand was the organ through which an artist expresses himself. His remarkably accurate drawings of the six layers of anatomy of the hand are testament to his pursuit of detail. He used this knowledge in the narrative of the Last Supper. In Leonardo’s version of the Vitruvian Man the hand is used as the unit of measurement to demonstrate the concept of divine proportion.  This talk reviews the way in which Leonardo investigated the form and function of the hand. His paintings and narrative art are reviewed to demonstrate how he used this knowledge to depict the hand as a form of expression.

Guy Rooker says “I come to The Arts Society not with a background in the arts but from the world of science in general, and surgery in particular. I describe myself as a retired surgeon with a lifelong passion, fascination, and admiration for the work of Leonardo da Vinci. I consider that the contribution he has made to both the world of art and the investigation of scientific concepts to be quite unique and extraordinary in the way that so many of his pioneering investigations have contributed to the understanding of our world today.”

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Hogarth brings pots, crocks and all manner of chinaware onto his stage as bit-part players in his social dramas. From the Harlot’s dingy garret to milord’s swanky mantelpiece, ceramics teeter, tumble, or merely stand helplessly by, symbolic commentators on the goings-on around them. We delve into the stories, we reveal and even identify particular ceramics and show how Hogarth’s images themselves became sources for the ceramic workshops of Europe and China. A unique and stimulating talk colliding material culture and moral commentary. You will look at Hogarth and ceramics with new eyes. 

Lars Tharp is a Ceramics as well as a Hogarth specialist. Most of his current talks focus on the European and the East-West China trade and the material world of the 17th and 18th century. He is a regular lecturer and broadcaster and leads occasional tours to China. Born in Copenhagen, he read Archaeology at Cambridge, was at Sotheby's for sixteen years, and is today London's Foundling Museum's 'Hogarth Ambassador'. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in Art, is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and sits on the court of The Company of Weavers, London's oldest guild. He has served twice on the Art Fund's Annual Prize to Museums and Galleries. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

The lecture includes a brief history of frames and focuses on their design and construction. Julia also discusses the conservation of frames, and how to choose the right one to transform a painting and display it to its best advantage. 

- The History of Frames – including how frames have developed in Europe, influenced often by prevailing architectural styles.

- The Design & Making of Frames – an insight into their design & selection; gilding techniques over time, together with the materials used in the workshop. 

Julia Korner is a specialist and lecturer in fine art conservation and the restoration of paintings, sculptures and frames. She is also a valuer, passionate collector, advisor and curator of paintings and works of art. Julia trained in art history, sculpture and graphic illustration in Cambridge, England. Then, for twenty years, she worked for Christie's as a paintings specialist, building extensive knowledge of Old Masters, and of British, European and American paintings from the 1700s onwards. She set up Christie's Maritime Department in 1987, followed by the Frame sales, the Aeronautical, Exploration and Travel and the Polar sales. Julia was elected Huntington Fellow of the Mariners' Museum, Newport New, Virginia, USA, in 1997. A seven year commitment saw her catalogue this collection and  its sister organisation, the South Street Seaport Museum, New York. Julia has worked independently in her own studio in West London for almost twenty years. Here, she and her small team give specialist conservation work personal and expert attention. Damaged paintings, polychrome statues, frames, over-mantles, traditional gold leaf and gesso frames all emerge restored and transformed under her expertise, knowledge and care. Julia acts as an advisor, valuer and exhibition curator for public and private collections, in the UK and abroad. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Shakespeare described actors in Hamlet, writing ‘they are the abstract and brief chronicles of our time’. Actors tell stories that reflect the hopes and anxieties of our times from Greek tragedy to the Royal Court. Often seen in the past as rogues and vagabonds, the road to respectability was a long and lively journey with some fascinating characters along the way. The start of the 20th century established the actor as an ‘honourable’ profession with the knighthood of Sir Henry Irving and the great generation of actors emerged including John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft and Edith Evans.

Malcolm Jones studied at University of London, King’s College, London & RADA. He has worked as an actor, director and teacher and backstage at the Royal Opera House. He was Workshop and Events Manager at the V&A Theatre Museum in London for 10 years and since 2009 he has lectured for the V&A on the Short and Year Course Programme on Theatre.

He has taught at Rose Bruford College, Mountview Theatre School, The Actors Centre and RADA and works for Age Exchange Community Arts in Blackheath. He has written material for The National Theatre Education Department and has contributed as a speaker on theatre to many television programmes. He lectures for Road Scholar USA Theatre Courses and has lectured in America. He also devised and taught an adult Acting Course at New Wimbledon Theatre from 2015 to 2018.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

On the basis of sensational new evidence from archaeological fieldwork, Neil will contrast the legend of Lawrence of Arabia with the true story of what happened in the famous desert war of 1916 to 1918. Is the legend a myth? Was Lawrence, as some claim, a liar and a charlatan? Or does the legend reflect reality? Was he, in fact, a brilliant military commander and a sincere advocate of the Arab national cause? Neil will analyse the invention and re-invention of the legend from 1919 onwards through memoirs, photos, films, paintings, biographies, and documentaries.  The historical context for the legend was the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918. The numerous well-preserved archaeological remains of the conflict, mainly along the line of the former Hijaz Railway, have been the subject of a ten-year programme of field research led by Neil and his close colleague Professor Nick Saunders. Neil will summarise the key findings. Some representative archaeological objects will be on display.  He will also offer a new narrative and analysis of the war based on the archaeological evidence, leading to a new assessment both of Lawrence’s role and achievements and of the relationship between art and reality in the creation of ‘celebrity’.

Dr Neil Faulkner and Professor Nick Saunders, both of Bristol University, are the joint academic directors of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP), which has been exploring the archaeology of the First World War in the deserts of southern Jordan since 1996. They are leading First World War archaeologists, and GARP has been at the forefront of new approaches to the investigation of modern conflict using archaeological and anthropological techniques. Neil”s book “Lawrence of Arabia’s war”, a new politico-military history of the war in Sinai, Arabia, Palestine and Syria between 1914 and 1918, was published in 2016.

Wallpaper is often regarded as the Cinderella of the Decorative Arts – the most ephemeral and least precious of the decorations produced for the home. Yet, the history of wallpaper is a long and fascinating subject that dates back to the 16th century and encompasses a huge range of beautiful patterns created both by anonymous hands and by some of the best-known designers of the 19th and 20th centuries. This lecture explores the history and development of this product from earliest times up to the present day. It includes a discussion of the changing ways in which wallpaper was made and a survey of designs from the first black and white patterns, the creation of elegant flock hangings, the fashion for Chinese hand-painted papers, the introduction of machine-printing, the designs of Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the taste for Modernist and Contemporary designs in the 20th century. It also includes a discussion of the ways that wallpapers were used within grand and more ordinary homes and hopes to justify the claim that they were indeed a truly Decorative Art.

Jo Banham is a freelance curator, lecturer and writer. From 2006-2016 she was Head of Adult Learning at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Prior to that Head of Learning and Access at the National Portrait Gallery, and Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain. She has also been Curator of Leighton House and Assistant Keeper at the Whitworth Art Gallery. She has published on many aspects of Victorian and early 20th century decoration and interiors. She is currently curating an exhibition on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement for the Juan March Fundacion in Madrid and the Museu Nacional d’Art Catalunya in Barcelona. She is also Director of the Victorian Society Summer School.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

A whistle-stop tour of the history of food as an artistic medium; starting with 16th century sugar sculpture and venturing all the way up to 3D dessert printing and beyond. This exploration into the realms of dessert as spectacle includes an accompanying display to illustrate and enhance the historic subject. 

Tasha Marks is an award-winning food historian and artist, who explores the relationship between food, art and history. Her practice, AVM Curiosities, champions the use of food as an artistic medium, with projects ranging from museum-style exhibitions and sculptural installations, to interactive lectures and limited-edition confectionery. Recent academic achievements include publication in the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, where Marks authored the entry on Mrs Beeton, one of the Victorian era’s most influential cooks. www.AVMcuriosities.com.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

London’s great drivers have always been finance and culture. But while the arts are celebrated in the capital, physical culture is often overlooked. In this lecture, Simon traces London’s sporting culture back to the 12th century, taking in manuscripts in the British Library, records of jousting at the College of Arms, and the obscure game of Pall Mall, from which the current thoroughfare takes its name. Much of this story concerns the battle for open space, an issue for the Finsbury Archers of the 17th century no less than campaigners for playing fields in the 20th century East End slums. Other themes include the story of the German Gymnasium, boathouses on the Thames and the mania for lidos in the 1930s. This lecture will cover London based national sporting events such as the Olympics, Lord’s, Wimbledon and the University Boat Race. A number of references to Chiswick will also be included.

Writer and historian Simon Inglis specialises in the architecture and heritage of sport and recreation. Since 2004 he has edited the Played in Britain series for English Heritage. Although sport and recreation might seem an unlikely subject for The Arts Society, non-sporty types need have no fear. Simon’s themes are architecture, design, heritage and popular culture. After a history degree at University College London, he freelanced for various publications, including The Guardian, The Observer and Radio Times. He has curated exhibitions for the Building Centre and the British Council, been a regular contributor to radio and television, has travelled and lectured extensively, and written a number of books. Two were shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, while another, on British football grounds, was chosen by journalist Frank Keating as the best sports book of the 20th century. A recent highpoint in his work for English Heritage was the listing of a 1970s skate park in Essex, a world first that made the 10 o'clock news.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

The City of London churches are astonishing in their variety, yet often overlooked by visitors and workers in the City, who regularly pass them by, unaware of the treasures that lie within.  Not only are the churches of great architectural significance, they are also guardians of the City’s history, holding countless stories of  medieval kings and queens, famous statesmen, religious leaders, poets, playwrights and novelists, explorers, academics and even modern film stars and other celebrities.

This lecture explores a wide range of these churches, from St Bartholomew the Great, a survivor from Norman times, through to the classical designs of Wren and Hawksmoor.  Photographs are featured to illustrate the magnificent steeples and domes as well as the craftsmanship of the great woodcarvers, stonemasons and plasterers who created such beautiful interiors.

Tony Tucker has an MA in Modern History from Oriel College, Oxford, Qualified City Guide and is former Chairman of the City of London Guide Lecturers Association and Trustee of the Friends of the City Churches (FCC). Lectures to various City institutions, the FCC, U3A, and various historical associations.  Leads regular guided walks for the City of London Corporation, the Friends of the City Churches and numerous private groups. Publications include The Visitor’s Guide to the City of London Churches  (2006) and regular contributions to Cityguide magazine and the FCC Newsletter.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

The greatest site from the pre-Islamic period is at Persepolis, whose bas-reliefs are a unique blend of styles from all over the Achaemenid Empire, including Egypt, Greece and India.

Many Persian art forms predate the Arab conquest, but as their peak was reached within the Islamic era, religious influences are rarely completely absent. Calligraphy, geometrical patterns and Islamic architecture combined to reach unparalleled heights in the 17th century in a series of highly decorated palaces and mosques in Isfahan, at that time, one of the largest cities in the world. Throughout many centuries of occupation, it has been the respected poets who have kept the traditions of the Persian language and religion alive, particularly Sufism. Sa'di is the Persian equivalent of Shakespeare, and with his successor Hafez, both have ornate mausoleums in Shiraz. This lecture will explore the ancient monuments of Persia and Islamic art.

Christopher Bradley is an expert in the history and culture of the Middle East and North Africa. As a professional tour guide and lecturer he has led groups throughout the Middle East and Asia. Has written extensively on Arabia and is the author of The Discovery Guide to Yemen, Insight Guide to the Silk Road and Berlitz Guides to Libya; The Red Sea; Cairo; Abu Dhabi and Nile Cruising. As a photographer has pictures represented in four photographic libraries. A broad range of lecturing experience, including to the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects. As a film producer and cameraman he has made documentaries for the BBC, National Geographic TV and Channel 4.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

This lecture provides an introduction to the rich repertoire of Russian opera, including Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and an overview of the masterpieces from the 19th and 20thcenturies.  As well as discussing why Russian opera is different and the particular contours of its history, we will explore the subjects from history and literature that Russian composers chose to bring to life on the stage. This lecture is illustrated with historic and contemporary recordings, period photographs and brief clips from recent productions.

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, scholar and translator with expertise in Russian and European art, literature and music.  She completed her doctorate at Oxford, and has held a number of senior university appointments, most recently at the European University Institute in Florence.

She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia and Shostakovich in Context, as well as biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy.  She has also been commissioned to write articles for a wide range of publications, both scholarly and popular, such as The Daily Telegraph, the international art magazine Apollo, and the programmes of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.  She has in addition received recognition as a translator, having published two volumes of Chekhov’s stories and the first uncensored edition of his letters. Her new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics was published to acclaim in 2014. 

She has lectured at public institutions around the world, ranging from the National Theatre in London to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, collaborated with the organisations such as the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Salzburg Festival, and contributed to Proms events and radio broadcasts on the BBC.  She led the campaign to save Chekhov’s house in Yalta, and was awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Medal by the Russian government in recognition of her educational and charitable work.   

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Dame Zaha Hadid died on March 31st 2016 at the age of 65. Architectural historians of the future will surely recognise her as one of the most important architects of the early 21st century. She was born in Iraq and her reputation was global, but she made Britain her home. This lecture tells the story of her career from the visionary projects of the 1980s, through the years of frustration when her designs were considered unbuildable, to the prolific crop of successful projects built all over the world in the last decade of her life.

Recommended reading:

“The Complete Zaha Hadid” by Aaron Betsky. Thames & Hudson 2013

"A new History of Modern Architecture" by Colin Davies.  Laurence King 2017

Colin Davies is Professor of Architectural Theory. Former editor of Architects’ Journal and contributor to magazines worldwide. His published books are - Thinking About Architecture, Key Houses of the Twentieth Century, The Prefab Home, High Tech Architecture and monographs on work of Foster, Hopkins & Grimshaw. 

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Please be seated by 7.45pm when we will hold our AGM prior to the lecture.

One hundred years ago a group of American musicians docked in London, bringing with them for the very first time one of the twentieth century’s most important musical genres: jazz, a fascinating blend of rigorous structure, free-wheeling creativity, close-knit ensemble work and improvisation. To tie in with The Age of Jazz exhibition; a collaboration between The Arts Society and The Bulldog Trust at London’s Two Temple Place running from January-April 2018, Sandy Burnett’s lecture covers the early years of jazz from its beginnings through to the start of the Second World War. Drawing on his practical experience both as musicologist and gigging musician, Sandy is able to shed light on jazz from the inside. His illustrations range from early pre-impressions by Maurice Ravel and others and the very earliest jazz recordings through to classics by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and the dawn of the Swing Era.

After studying music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and working as music director for the RSC, National Theatre and in London’s West End, Sandy Burnett spent a decade as one of the core team of music presenters on BBC Radio 3. He enjoys a varied career that embraces broadcasting, conducting, playing double bass and communicating his passion for music. His radio series for Ireland’s RTÉ Lyric FM, Great Moments in Classical Music, recently won silver in the Specialist Music category of the PPI Radio Awards. He regularly leads cultural lecture holidays, and is the author of the Idler Guide to Classical Music. There’s more information at www.sandyburnett.com.

Our lectures start at 8pm. Bar opens at 7pm.

Poet, playwright and theatre entrepreneur William Shakespeare became one of the wealthiest theatre impresarios of the Elizabethan age. A shrewd businessman, his career coincided with the emergence of the English playhouses and the beginnings of theatre as a commercially viable form of popular entertainment. He also wrote some of the most brilliant plays the world has ever known. Giles examines how theatre moved into the modern era.

Giles Ramsay is an independent theatre director and producer who specializes in creating new work with artists in developing countries. He is the Founding Director of the charity Developing Artists (www.developingartists.org), a Fellow of St. Chad’s College, Durham University and Course Leader in Theatre at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  Giles has run theatre projects in Botswana, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Kosovo, Palestine, Mexico, Thailand and Zimbabwe and given numerous talks for institutions ranging from The Foundation for Mexican Literature in Mexico City to The Royal College of Physicians in London. He regularly lectures on the history and practice of theatre on the Queen Mary 2 as it sails from New York to the UK. Giles combines academic analysis with hands on experience to bring a unique insight to the world of the theatre.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

This sumptuously illustrated lecture traces the fall of the Roman Empire in the West through both its art and one of its most intriguing heroines. At the centre of a perfect storm of Goths, Vandals, Huns and contesting Romans, stood an orphan girl of ‘nobility, beauty and chaste purity’ called Galla Placidia, half-sister of Roman Emperors, the hostage wife of a Gothic King, who became one of the world’s most powerful women. Not only did she leave her mark on the history of Rome, but she was also the driving force behind some of its most impressive art and architecture.

Stephen Kershaw is a Classics Tutor for Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, Professor of History of Art for the European Studies Program of Rhodes College and The University of the South. He has spent much of the last 30 years travelling extensively in the world of the Greeks and Romans both physically and intellectually. He has published A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths (Robinson, 2007) and A Brief Guide to Classical Civilization (Robinson, 2010) and is currently working on A Brief Guide to the Roman Empire.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

One hundred years ago the Viennese artists who led the famous Secession were struck down by the Spanish influenza: Schiele, his wife and unborn baby died.  This talented artist was only 28. Otto Wagner, the architect who attempted to transform Vienna into a City Beautiful, also died as did the painter Gustav Klimt. In 1897 Klimt had led the Secession, a ‘break-away’ group who strove to live by their manifesto ‘To each age its Art, to Art its freedom’.  These words were inscribed above the door of the Secession Building where the very latest modern art was shown: paintings by Klimt and Schiele shocked and dismayed the Viennese. They were accused of creating pornography, of reveling in the ugly and bringing art down into the gutter. Both tackled taboo subjects; Klimt celebrated the femme fatale, while Schiele was fascinated by the fragility of youthful innocence. Their paintings can be mysterious and baffling. The surface of Klimt’s The Kiss (1907) is richly covered with complex patterns that are esoteric and hard to decipher. Yet we are fascinated by such images, as we are by the man himself; Klimt’s obsessions spilled over into real life, his amorous liaisons the stuff of legend.  ‘Fin de siècle’ Vienna continues to fascinates us.

Anne Anderson graduated in Art History and Archaeology from Leicester University in 1978 and worked as an archaeologist for 8 years - elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1997. 1993-2007 senior lecturer on the Fine Arts Valuation degree courses at Southampton Solent University, specialising in the Aesthetic Movement, Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Modernism. She is currently Hon. Research Fellow at Exeter University and a course director at the V&A Learning Academy and consultant for Leighton House, Kensington.  She has published books on Roman pottery, Art Deco teapots and Edward Burne-Jones. A lecturer for The Arts Society since 1993, Anne toured Australia in 2000, 2006, 2009 and has lectured on cruises. Her television credits include BBC's Flog It! 

Our lectures start at 8pm.

One of the most derided towns in England, renowned for its dullness, Basingstoke is distinguished only by its numerous roundabouts and absurd Modernist architecture. Rupert explains that the post-war planners, who inflicted such features as ‘the Great Wall of Basingstoke’ on the town, were politically-motivated and bent on destroying all traces of its past. He reveals the nobler Basingstoke that is buried beneath the concrete, and the few historic gems that have survived the holocaust. Hilariously told, it is a story that neatly illustrates the ugliest episode in England’s architectural history. As Betjeman wrote prophetically, “What goes for Basingstoke goes for most English towns”. 

Rupert Willoughby is a prize-winning historian who specialises in the domestic and social life of the past. A graduate with First Class Honours in History from the University of London, he is the author of the best-selling Life in Medieval England for Pitkin, of guides to castles owned by English Heritage and Hampshire County Council, and of a series of popular histories of places, including Chawton: Jane Austen’s Village and Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture. He contributes regular obituaries to The Times and The Daily Telegraph, writes privately-commissioned histories of houses, and is an experienced lecturer - and occasional broadcaster - on a broad range of topics, with a particular interest in architecture, interior decoration and costume.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

The horse is so rooted within the psyche of the Western imagination that it has maintained its expressive power, as the current production of War Horse so eloquently testifies. The lecture traces major themes from Stubbs, the greatest horse painter of all time, to Degas. It features Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse, a modern metaphor of horsepower, Munning’s horses as defining images of Englishness, and Picasso’s agonised horse in its death throes in Guernica (1937), which expresses the horrendous destruction of the city in the Spanish Civil War. The lecture concludes with the very diverse ways in which our leading contemporary artists have made use of the expressive power of the equestrian image. Mark Wallinger’s gigantic 50 metre high horse will soon loom over the Kent countryside in Ebbsfleet. 

Nicholas Watkins is Emeritus Reader in the Department of the History of Art and Film, University of Leicester, curator, critic, author and lecturer. His numerous publications include Matisse (1984), Bonnard (1994), Bonnard Colour and Light (1998), The Genesis of a Decorative Aesthetic (2001), Marino Marini (2007), Behind the Mirror: Aimé Maeght and His Artists (Royal Academy, London 2008), Bonard Peindre L'arcadie (Musee D'Orsay, Paris 2015). TV 'Pierre Bonnard: A Love Exposed' (1998). Regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine and other leading art journals. Lectures extensively to universities, museums, art galleries and art societies.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

David Bowie needs no introduction. He has become a household name since he died; he even got a mention on Radio 4 Today programme. T-shirts of his face are available from H&M and his records on vinyl can be purchased in Sainsbury’s for about £20. There is an ever-growing library of books to purchase, and according to Record Collector (2016) one of his most expensive singles to buy is £3,000, titled Space Oddity/Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud, 69 Philips BF 1801 (sadly she does not have). On eBay the Speed of Life book now goes for about £3,000 and if she wanted to sell the original Man Who Fell to Earth film poster, that could get up to £400: bought for about £60 in a café in Cornwall and transported back to London. In more ways than one David Bowie has been for her a good investment artistically, musically and now it seems financially. Find out more about the many faces of David Bowie that has inspired many generations of music fans, designers, authors, actors, and a personal account of that impact from an academic children’s cancer nurse.

Faith Gibson is a Professor of Child Health and Cancer Care at the University of Surrey and at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust in London. In her professional life, through her programme of research, she is committed to improving the care and experience of children and young people with cancer and their families. She has published extensively, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications and four textbooks; she is much sought after to speak with multi-professional international audiences about her work. In her personal life, alongside a range of ‘arts’ related social activities, she is an aficionado of the late David Bowie. For her, as for many, the 6th of July 1972 performance of David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars on Top of the Pops was a major turning point. Viewed on a very small colour TV set in a relative’s sitting room in Ushaw Moor, Durham, she was thinking ‘Wow’; her cousins were thinking ‘What is that?’. There was, as many have said before her, no going back. To be named, although in a list of about 2,000 other loyal supporters, in a book (990/2,000) titled Speed of Life (2012), has to be listed as one of her most important accolades; personal of course, not professional.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Recent turmoil in much of the Near East and North Africa means that many of the most impressive sites in the Roman Empire can no longer be visited. Sam Moorhead was privileged to have been able to work and travel in parts of the Eastern Mediterranean which are now too dangerous to explore – in fact, he was in Syria in March 2011 when the civil war began. This lecture will provide an outline of Roman activity in the region, focussing on cities which have been largely destroyed (for example Hatra in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria), sites which have been heavily looted (Apamaea and Dura Europus in Syria), and places which are now too dangerous to visit (Leptis Magna and Cyrene in Libya). Some of finest architecture, sculpture and mosaics from the Roman world will be presented, highlighting both the richness of eastern Roman culture and the lives of the people who lived in these exotic places. (Fees for this lecture go directly to the British Museum.)

Sam Moorhead is the National Finds Adviser for Iron Age and Roman coins in the Portable Antiquities and Treasure Section at the British Museum. Before joining the British Museum in 1997 as Staff Lecturer for Archaeology, he taught Classics and Archaeology; he is an Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. He has excavated widely in the Mediterranean and Britain, concentrating on the Roman and early Mediaeval periods. Serving on numerous councils, he has been Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Honorary Secretary of the Roman Society. He has lectured to numerous organisations in Britain, including learned, literary, historical and archaeological societies, and has been a Guest Lecturer on many cruises. Recently, he has written The Roman Empire and The Frome Hoard, and co-written AD 410 – The Year that Shook Rome (all British Museum Press), The Romans who shaped Britain (Thames and Hudson), 31 BC, Antony, Cleopatra and the Fall of Egypt (British Museum Press) and A History of Roman Coinage in Britain (Greenlight Publishing). He is currently rewriting the standard reference for the coinages of the emperors Carausius and Allectus and is involved in a fieldwork project in Devon.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Artists were never far behind the explorers who opened up the west of America in the 19th Century. Sometimes they painted what they saw. Sometimes they painted what they wished they saw. Either way, painters like Alfred Miller, Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt have left us a powerful, if romanticised, record of the country and people that the settlers found. Now we can use their pictures to chart the  history of the opening of America’s west - the arrival of the railroad, the confinement of native Americans into reservations, and the extermination of the buffalo.

This is a story on a big scale and it seems appropriate that among the pictures illustrating the lecture are some of the largest and most grandiloquent paintings of the era. After a period of deep neglect, they are now very much back in vogue, but whatever one thinks of their artistic merits, I hope audiences will agree with me that they are, above all, great fun. 

Toby Faber has written two works of narrative history, Stradivarius and Fabergé's Eggs, published by Macmillan in the UK and Random House in the US, and given lectures associated with these two subjects at venues including The Victoria and Albert Museum, Bath Theatre, The Library of Congress and the Huntington Library, as well as a number of literary festivals. His career began with Natural Sciences at Cambridge and has been through investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, where he remains on the board. Is also non-executive Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music, a trustee of Yale University Press (UK) and a director of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Over 4.6 billion years ago a star was born and our sun started to shine. Soon after this the Earth and our other planets were formed and light began its eight minute flight to Earth. Science and art have moved forward together in the quest to understand light as can be seen in representations of rainbows or contemporary Black Holes.

For artists light can express emotions, from El Greco’s light of spiritual ecstasy to the dangerous darkness of Caravaggio, from Turner’s sublime sunlight to Samuel Palmer’s melancholy moonlight. Australian Impressionism uses a different colour palette to European Impressionism. 

Stonehenge was built to worship the sun, and today James Turrell makes light temples in art galleries and Dan Flavin makes altarpieces from fluorescent tubes.

Let me enlighten you as to how artists have painted temporal and spiritual light through the Ages. 

Alexandra Drysdale is an art historian and a professional artist specialising in painting, sculpture and performance. Her lectures combine art historical knowledge with personal expertise in aesthetics and artistic techniques. Art from all periods, including examples of her own work, is examined from an artist's point of view. This entails a perceptive analysis of a painting's structure, its meaning, and its relationship to the history of art. She puts a particular emphasis on studying the symbolic language of the imagination.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Why were foreigner painters preferred by the aristocracy in London to native-born English painters, why did foreigners come in the first place, what was their motivation, and what was the impact of foreigners in London on English art and art practise?

The lecture will look at the various formats and uses of art, tracing foreign artists from the Tudor period through to the Renaissance and Baroque, looking at their origins and how they came to work in England. It will examine the contributions of artists such as Holbein, Gerrit van Honthorst, Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout, Isaac Oliver, Paulus van Somer, van Dyck, Peter Lely, and Rubens. This lecture will look at how these artists influenced the British School of painting and assess their legacy.

Leslie Primo holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Renaissance Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. He was Visiting Lecturer in Art History at the University of Reading in 2005 and 2007, and gives lectures and guided tours, plus special talks, at both the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Leslie also lectures at the City Literary Institute, and has presented a series of talks at the National Maritime Museum and the Courtauld Institute.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

There's more to the world of street art than Banksy. Hidden Canvases is a beginner's guide to the biggest art movement since pop art.  From train writing in New York to interactive technology that brings murals to life, the concept of un-commissioned public art is a very different beast to that which it once was.  Hidden Canvases explores the key stages in street art's growth, examining the different elements and styles that comprise the scene with no rules.  From the international superstars to the local underground heroes, you're guaranteed to leave knowing your Invader from you Aryz - and who knows you might even start looking at the world a little differently.

Doug Gillen is heavily involved in documenting the street art scene in London and abroad through his project Fifth Wall TV, and can offer a genuine insight into this world. Previously, Doug lectured for London Art and More, and when not filming he is an East End tour guide for Alternative London, specialising in culture and art.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

The Library is primarily used by the Queen to show to her guests after dinner parties at Windsor Castle. This is because it is so full of a great range of fascinating objects associated with the history of Britain and the Royal family. The lecture gives a tour of the Library similar to that experienced by the Queen's guests. The Library is open to academic researchers but not to the general public. The lecture therefore constitutes a rare opportunity to see its rooms and treasures. These treasures include beautiful and rare books and manuscripts; books with personal royal associations; old master drawings (Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Holbein, Canaletto) and watercolours; jewellery; insignia of Orders of Chivalry; miniature paintings; clocks; fans; maps; the shirt in which Charles I was executed; and the Queen's description (when Princess Elizabeth, aged 11) of her father's Coronation in 1937. 

Oliver Everett was Assistant Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales,1978-80; and then Private Secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, 1981-3. He was Librarian in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle from 1984-2002 and is now Librarian Emeritus following his retirement in 2002. He wrote the official guidebook and audio tour on Windsor Castle, taught a course on its history and advised on a television programme about it. He has specifically written articles on the Royal Library and helped with two books on aspects of the Royal Collection. Oliver is currently advising on a possible history series for television and lectures widely, both in Britain and abroad.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

From the early sixties, when he left the Royal College of Art more famous than his teachers, Hockney's paintings have shown a charm and humour that sets them apart from others of his generation. A naturally gifted draftsman, his love of ingenious visual devices has led him to experiment with a whole range of techniques, from stage design to coloured paper making. From the early abstract expressionist images, through his famous Californian scenes of swimming pools to the photo-montages of the mid-eighties, this lecture follows the career of an artist whose wit and imagination has never faltered.

Douglas Skeggs read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 4000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of  'The New Academy of Art Studies' for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at 'The Study Centre', 'Christie's' course 'The History of Art Studies' and other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hangar in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He helped set up the Abercrombie & Kent “Private Label tours” and is presently cultural adviser to Ultimate Travel.

He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on 'Whistler' and the exhibition video on 'William Morris'. Three one-man exhibitions of his paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, 'River of Light', has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

The Art of Illusion

Our pre-Christmas lecture – the history of magic through art and pictures.

“…in which it is the very trickery that pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.”                             Seneca (3BC-65AD)                 

From the beginning of time the fascination with magic and the impossible has been widespread. Egypt was the cradle of magic. Sorcerer Priests used scientific principles to create illusions for the edification of worship and to hold power over the people. Where there was power there was magic. Then there is the age-old skill of sleight of hand, which proves that ‘the hand is quicker than the eye’. Magicians were known as ‘Jongleurs’ lest they be sentenced to death for ‘witchraft and conjuration’ under the edicts of Henry V111.

With the emergence of the Music Hall, Magic gained a new respectability and audiences flocked in their thousands to watch the extraordinary feats of The Great Illusionists. This gave birth to legendary tricks such as pulling a rabbit from a hat and sawing a lady in half. And if magicians guarded their secrets with their lives, how was the Magic Circle formed? – home to 10,000 secrets.

Even today in our super technical age of iPods and broadband, the wonder and surprise of magic are as popular as ever, not forgetting the Harry Potter craze.

Wonder Workers and the Art of Illusion is a whistle stop tour of the history of mystery from 3000bc to the 21st century and be careful! – you might be amazed and bewitched.

Bertie Pearce has a BA (Hons) in Drama from Manchester University, and a Diploma Internationale from the École Internationale du Théatre, Jacques Lecoq. A member of the Inner Magic Circle, with Gold Star. Past experience includes lecturing to cruise ship audiences, the Women’s Institute, theatre clubs and the Sussex Magic Circle, as well as NADFAS. In addition, has toured the world with a magic cabaret show and a one man show entitled ‘All Aboard’. Has written an article on entertainment for the Guardian newspaper.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Rome is a city of many glories, from distant antiquity onwards, and amongst her remarkable churches, fountains and monuments are the spectacular works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This complex, driven artist was the friend and confidant of  popes and princes, a child prodigy and a prolific, if understandably arrogant, genius. Find out about his architecture, sculpture, paintings, fountains – even plays – but also discover why such exuberance and magnificence became powerful weapons in a religious and political propaganda war.

Jo Walton has combined teaching and lecturing with a career in art bookselling and has been a volunteer guide at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She is now a freelance lecturer for NADFAS, the Art Fund, and Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery and local art societies.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Frank Matcham (1854-1920) was the architect of many of Britain’s best-known theatres, including the London Palladium, the Hackney Empire, Buxton Opera House, Cheltenham Everyman Theatre, Bristol Hippodrome and the London Coliseum. His designs were noted not only for their exuberant interiors but also for setting new standards in sightlines and safety.

Simon Rees has worked in many of Matcham's theatres and gives an insider’s view of Matcham’s architectural legacy. The lecture is illustrated by present-day and period photographs, postcards from the turn of the century and Matcham’s own fascinatingly detailed architectural drawings.

Simon Rees studied at Colchester Royal Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving a BA and an MA in English Literature. Taught in Italy and Japan, exploring the art and architecture of both countries. From 1989 to 2012 was Dramaturg at Welsh National Opera in Cardiff, working with set, costume and props designers and giving lectures on their work in opera production. Now a freelance writer and lecturer, lectures widely on opera, art history and literature, travelling extensively with travel companies. He has published several novels (including the award-winning The Devil's Looking-Glass), poems and opera librettos.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

The temple complex of Angkor is the greatest archaeological site in Asia. There are many temples, some covered in jungle, but the most important is Angkor Wat. Built in the 12th century, it is the biggest religious monument in the world, a recreation on earth of the Hindu cosmos, aligned with the sun and moon and covered with exquisite carvings.

This lecture will focus on Angkor’s artistic heritage and religious symbolism. It will reveal the history of the Khmer empire and its flowering of sculptural art. Other temples will feature, such as the mysterious Bayon, and Banteay Srei, carved in pink sandstone. It concludes with contemporary Cambodia and the living arts, especially classical dance, performed at the temples in celebration of the gods. Gorgeous dancers in shimmering silk re-enact the Ramayana as the setting sun turns the temples from crimson to gold. 

Denise Heywood is an author, lecturer, photographer and journalist. She worked in Cambodia as a journalist for three years and has also lived in France and America.

Her books include one on the Buddhist temples of Laos, Ancient Luang Prabang, also in French, and her latest one is Cambodian Dance Celebration of the Gods, with a foreword by Princess Buppha Devi, daughter of King Sihanouk.

Now based in London, she is a lecturer for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies (NADFAS), The Art Fund, The School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) on their post-graduate Asian Art Course and Madingley Hall (University of Cambridge). She has lectured all over Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, South Africa and Europe at universities, colleges, schools, art institutions and travel organisations including the Royal Geographical Society, The British Museum, and The National Trust.

She writes for many art, literary and travel publications, has appeared on television and radio, leads art tours to Southeast Asia and France and lectures on cruise ships sailing throughout Asia.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Hieronymus Bosch’s (c.1455-1516) nightmarish monsters and demons, his bizarre allegories, and the amorous exploits in his Garden of Earthly Delights have intrigued viewers for centuries. Little is known about this remarkable painter, although it has been claimed that he was a member of a heretical sect, a dabbler in alchemy and even a drug-user! This lecture unravels the meanings of Bosch’s enigmatic paintings in the context of his own time, explaining them in terms of social satire, medieval folklore and pre-Reformation spirituality, while also revealing the beauty and inventiveness of his images.

Paula Nuttall is Director of V&A Medieval & Renaissance Year course. Author of 'From Flanders to Florence: the Impact of Netherlandish Painting 1400-1500' (Yale, 2004). Also lectures for the Courtauld Institute, Christie's Education, the Art Fund and the National Gallery. Formerly lecturer at the British Institute of Florence.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Born in the small village of Kirkharle, Northumberland, Lancelot Brown rose to become the most famous landscape designer in England. Working with contours, water and trees, he created landscapes so breathtakingly natural the poet Whitehead commented that only Dame Nature could distinguish between his work and hers. At sites such as Stowe, Blenheim, Bowood, Luton Hoo, and Croome Court, Brown’s style gently echoed the Italian artists of the previous centuries, and was itself further popularised in contemporary paintings of landscape as fashions in late 18th century art turned from artifice to nature, or more correctly to artificial nature.

In the 300th year anniversary of his birth this talk will consider the life and work of Brown, and examine the accolades and the charges laid at his feet - genius or vandal, artist or copyist? The talk is illustrated with images of Brownian landscapes both in reality and in painting.

Dr Way is a garden historian, author, researcher and lecturer. She presented Lost Gardens for Channel 4 and has appeared on Gardeners' World as well as making media appearances on a wide range of garden history related topics. Carries out freelance research in the history of specific gardens and parks for bodies such as English Heritage, the National Trust and various private clients, and has a specific interest in the portrayal of plants and gardens in art and literature and the social aspects of garden history. Her publications include A History of Women in the Garden, the highly illustrated A Nation of Gardeners, and a short biography of Gertrude Jekyll, as well as the quirky History of Garden Gnomes! Currently working on the Eighteenth Century Diaries of the Marchioness Grey of Wrest Park and is also involved in the 2016 tercentenary celebrations of one of our greatest landscape designers Lancelot 'Capability' Brown.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Since the 1980s the collector Charles Saatchi has become one of the most powerful figures in contemporary British art. The lecture examines Saatchi’s rise to prominence as an advertising magnate and as a tastemaker, charting the changing shape of his collection and his effect on artistic reputations. Although he is most closely associated with Britart – the label attached in the 1990s to the work of younger British artists such as Gavin Turk, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman Brothers and Chris Ofili, his collection has changed considerably over the years because he sells as well as buys work. The lecture ranges widely over Saatchi’s collecting, embracing art from various countries and in many different media. Saatchi’s beautiful gallery, located in the former Duke of York’s Regiment HQ in Sloane Square, is one of the largest galleries of purely contemporary art in Europe and has been the venue for ground-breaking exhibitions of Chinese, American, Indian, Middle Eastern, Russian and German art.

Barry Venning is an historian of British art with a particular interest in the work of JMW Turner, on whom he has published widely, including the volume on Turner in Phaidon's Art & Ideas series, and several catalogue essays for exhibitions in the UK, Germany, Italy and Poland. He was the BBC's script consultant on Turner's Fighting Temeraire and has recently taken part (2013) in a BBC documentary called 'The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution'. He has also published a study of John Constable's paintings. His interests and his teaching extend from medieval architecture to contemporary British art. He is currently Associate Lecturer with the Open University and lecturing on a freelance basis for NADFAS, Christie's Education and other organisations.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

This lecture’s narrative revolves around my experience of having masterminded a British Government backed project to restore the magnificent George Gilbert Scott designed university buildings in Mumbai (Bombay), India. The chapters of this building’s story- its design (in England), construction, history and, of course, its restoration – provide useful start-points from which to consider the broader historical, cultural and architectural context. For instance the lecture looks into Bombay’s economic boom of the 1860s. This coincided with the high point of the Gothic Revival: Nowhere else in the world can claim to have as magnificent an assemblage of Gothic Revival buildings. Whilst examining the city’s colonial architecture study is made of the carvings of Bombay’s Jeejeebhoy School of Art (see above), whose Architectural Sculpture Department (during this mid-Victorian heyday) was headed up by John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling.

The story of the award winning project to restore the University of Mumbai’s Gothic Revival buildings provides an opportunity to touch upon philosophical approaches to conservation as well as traditional repair techniques. Account is also given of the work undertaken by those who took time away from their respective Cathedral workshops in the UK to transfer knowledge and skills to their Indian counterparts. Venturing beyond Mumbai to consider key colonial buildings in Delhi, Kolkata (Calcutta) and Yangon (Rangoon), the scope of the lecture broadens to examine evolving attitudes in India and beyond (as well as in the UK) towards the British empire and also towards the buildings which survive as testament to its achievements.

Anthony Peers is a freelance historic buildings' consultant, educated as an Architectural Historian at Manchester University and trained in building conservation at the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, York. After two years with SAVE Britain's Heritage, where he wrote 'Deserted Bastions', worked with the English Heritage Listing Division on the review of military buildings. In the mid 1990s was employed by the DTI in Bombay, India, setting up and running an innovative project to repair George Gilbert Scott's university buildings and training local architects and craftsmen in conservation techniques and philosophy. From 1998 until 2010, worked as Rodney Melville & Partners' historian, involved with research, analysis, assessment and conservation planning at such sites as The Workhouse, Southwell; Aston Hall, Birmingham; The Royal Institution, London and Cliveden. Published a book on the history of Birmingham Town Hall in 2012, to critical acclaim. Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Deputy Chairman of the Ancient Monuments Society.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Armour was one of the great Renaissance art-forms, but today it is usually overlooked by art historians, scholars and enthusiasts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries almost all of the richest, most powerful noblemen in Europe could be counted as dedicated patrons of the armourer’s art. This was an intensely personal art, both expressive and decorative. Its essence was the creation of a living sculpture, a process which demanded not only fantastic skill in the sculpting of iron and steel, but also mastery of all decorative techniques available to the Renaissance metalworker. The achievements of virtuoso master armourers like Kolman Helmschmid, Konrad Seusenhofer, Filippo Negroli, Pompeo della Cesa and Jacob Halder were not however just about splendour and richness. They also embodied more complex messages, about status and the social order, divine power, and attitudes and identities.

Tobias Capwell is the Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an internationally acknowledged expert on Medieval and Renaissance weapons. His book, Masterpieces of European Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection (2011) was named Book of the Year by Apollo Magazine in 2012. Appears regularly on television, most recently as presenter and armour advisor on Richard III: The New Evidence (2014), and as the writer and presenter of Metalworks: The Knight's Tale (2012). Recent publications include The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance Europe 1520 1630, ex. cat. (2012) and 'The Arming of an English Man at Arms, c.1415', appendix, in Sir Ranulph Fiennes' new book Agincourt: My Family, The Battle, and the Fight for France (2014). After fifteen years of research, his book Armour of the English Knight 1400 50 will be published in 2015; it will be the first of three volumes exploring the story of armour in late medieval England.

Our lectures start at 8pm.

Photos of Tobias Capwell jousting can be found in the Miscellaneous section of the Gallery.

Camille Pissarro, the founder of French Impressionism, paid four visits to England between 1870 and 1897, and produced some thirty fine paintings on his visits to London. His eldest son Lucien Pissarro moved to England in 1890, married an English girl in 1892, and stayed in England the rest of his life, producing over 500 paintings of West London and of country scenes. Another son Ludovic-Rodo spent many years here, and produced paintings of central and west London. Lucien’s daughter Orovida also became a well-known painter in her own right, but in a quite different style. The paintings of England by the Pissarro family stretch from 1870 to the present time, and make an interesting record of the country through three centuries.

Nicholas Reed is an art historian and archaeologist. In the 1980s he became Founder- Chairman of the Friends of Shakespeare's Globe. In 2005 he was one of two Lecturer Representatives on the NADFAS Advisory Council and also Vice-Chairman of Folkestone DFAS. He is the author of four books on the Impressionists in England, and one on the Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames. His latest book, My Father, the Man who Never Was, features in his latest NADFAS lecture, War Artists, Spies and the Art of Deception.

Even in ancient Rome people made complaints about the mid-winter Saturnalia celebrations remarkably like the ones we hear today about our commercialised Christmas. In a light-hearted historical review we discover some wonderful and some gloriously awful Christmas imagery, from Giotto’s painting of the first Christmas crib until Dickens meets Coca Cola amongst the movers and shakers who sometimes seem to have turned Christmas into Kitschmas.

Studied History at Oxford, and from 1968-82 worked for Nottingham Castle Museum. From 1982-98, Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art History at University of Manchester. Published a book about museum practice with Manchester University Press, 'Exhibiting Authenticity', 1997.

Thomas Heatherwick, has won many awards and honours: in 2004 he was the youngest practitioner to be appointed a Royal Designer for Industry; he won a Gold Medal for his British Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo in 2010, and in the same year he was designer of the year in Japan. Sir Terence Conran has described Heatherwick as “the Leonardo da Vinci of our times”. Heatherwick’s work received world-wide coverage in 2012 when with his studio team he designed the Olympic Cauldron at the London Olympics. The giant ring of fire rising up from the centre of the Olympic Stadium was a memorable sight, and in the lecture we’ll look at how they achieved that spectacular moment. The Heatherwick Studio has also designed the new red London bus, the first re-design of such an iconic symbol of London for 50 years. Heatherwick’s approach is multi-disciplinary, and with his colleagues he blends architecture, sculpture and engineering to produce elegant results, from large urban spaces to individual items. His proposed Garden Bridge across the River Thames, due to be completed in 2017, will add another dimension to London’s many parks and gardens.

Studied the Fine and Decorative Arts in London and continued her studies at Harvard University.It was while at Harvard, where there was great enthusiasm for American design, that she became interested herself in 20th century architecture. Since returning from America she has taught on courses in Oxford and London, lectured on the Country House course in Sussex, and for several private groups around the country. Special interest in the architecture and design of 20th century.

The Public Catalogue Foundation was set up in 2003 to catalogue every oil painting in public ownership in the UK. This ambitious project involved visiting 3,000 collections across the country and photographing over 212,000 paintings. These paintings are reproduced in an acclaimed series of 85 hardback catalogues entitled Oil Paintings in Public Ownership. In 2010 the PCF joined forces with the BBC to create the Your Paintings website (www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings) on which oil paintings in our national collection are now available to view online. The lecture offers an insider’s view of the project and describes some unusual collections visited, intriguing paintings uncovered, detective work involved and assistance given by NADFAS members.Each lecture is tailored to reflect the locality of the venue.

Gained a 1st class honours degree in History of Art and English Literature, and an MA (Distinction) in Victorian Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. Has written several arts-related articles and in 2010 contributed a chapter on the Victorian artist F.D. Hardy to Wolverhampton Art Gallery's exhibition catalogue. Is a volunteer guide at Dorich House Museum, studio-home of the Russian sculptor Dora Gordine, and at Turner's House, Twickenham. Since 2007 has worked for the Public Catalogue Foundation on an acclaimed arts project that is the subject of her lectures.

Marking the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, this lecture complements events and displays taking place throughout the country in 2015. The decisive allied victory over Napoleon brought to an end a series of wars that had convulsed Europe. Most people of the time experienced these conflicts not on the battlefield but through art. This lecture explores the contrasting views presented by British and French artists, including such masters as J. M. W. Turner and J.-L. David. We also consider the insatiable public appetite for rather less elevated art forms, ranging from ladies’ fans illustrated with the latest military news, to full re-enactments of naval battles played out on real water at Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

Related Exhibitions and Events:

• Waterloo at Windsor (Windsor Castle, 31 Jan 2015-13 Jan 2016);
• Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions (National Portrait Gallery, 12 Mar-7 Jun 2015)
• Bonaparte and the British (British Museum, 5 Feb-16 Aug 2015)
• Fighting History (Tate Britain, 9 Jun-13 Sep 2015)

Society members might also enjoy a visit to Apsley House (already planned in our 'Visits' programme), Stratfield Saye, the National Maritime Museum, Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and other venues related to Wellington and Nelson, both in the UK and in Belgium.

For a more complete list of special events marking the 2015 Waterloo bicentenary, see www.waterloo200.org

Dr Lois Oliver studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, completing an MA in Venetian Renaissance Art. She worked at the Harvard University Art Museums before joining the curatorial team at the V&A and then the National Gallery. Currently Assistant Professor in History of Art at the University of Notre Dame in London, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, she writes audio and multimedia tours for clients including the National Gallery, National Maritime Museum, Royal Academy and Tate, and has appeared on TV programmes for the BBC and Channel 5, as well as broadcasting on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Peter appears in the UK and abroad as musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Takes groups to Europe. Lectures include live music sung and played on piano, virginals or clavichord.

Architectural historian, trained at the Courtauld and specialising in 16th to 18th century English and Scottish architecture. Lecturer at the V&A on year courses and short courses, and lecturer for the Art Fund, and for the Royal Oak Foundation in the US. Researched and wrote a history of Kensington Palace. Contributed to a book on the Cecil family, and has written several articles on architectural and social history and the history of travel. Wrote London's Country Houses (2009).

Recently retired Chairman Turner Society. Author of thirteen bestselling books on Turner. Presently working on definitive biography of that artist. Also books on Hockney, Dalí, Warhol, Brancusi, the Impressionists in London, Pop Art. Lectured National, Tate, Clore Galleries. Many American tours

Louise Schofield has been working in Ethiopia since 2006, directing archaeological, conservation and development projects in that extraordinary country. Her current archaeological site – in Tigray province, northeastern Ethiopia – is a temple, probably dedicated to a moon god and dating to the 5th century BC – a time when this area of Ethiopia formed part of the kingdom of Sheba. Suggested Reading Stuart Munro-Hay, Ethiopia: an Unknown Land (2002) St John Simpson (ed), Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (2002)

Linda Smith holds two first-class honours degrees in Art History. She is an experienced guide and lecturer at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the Dulwich Picture Gallery and lectures to secondary school audiences and independent societies.

Antony Penrose has conserved and disseminated the work of his parents. He is director of the Lee Miller Archives and the Penrose Collection at Farley Farm House in Sussex. Antony lectures world-wide and has made documentaries for television. To attend this lecture which is free, you need to contact us for your invitation. Click on 'Home Page' to do this.