Lecture

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) was a key player in early twentieth century avant garde art, design and literary/theatrical circles in Paris. As a widely travelled polymath, Dufy's charismatic personality, wit and curiosity about the world was infectious. His imagination and technical virtuosity - across a range of media including painting and lithography, posters, book illustration, theatrical set design, textiles and fashion, ceramics and large murals - cut across all conventional boundaries. Whether a small intricate woodcut illustrating a love poem, or the truly gigantic 1937 world fair murals depicting the role of electricity in the modern age, the effect is mesmerising.

Lecturer Mary Alexander

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) was a key player in early twentieth century avant garde art, design and literary/theatrical circles in Paris. As a widely travelled polymath, Dufy's charismatic personality, wit and curiosity about the world was infectious. His imagination and technical virtuosity - across a range of media including painting and lithography, posters, book illustration, theatrical set design, textiles and fashion, ceramics and large murals - cut across all conventional boundaries. Whether a small intricate woodcut illustrating a love poem, or the truly gigantic 1937 world fair murals depicting the role of electricity in the modern age, the effect is mesmerising.

Lecture

In the early evening of 16 October 1834, to the horror of bystanders in London, a huge ball of fire exploded through the roof of the Houses of Parliament, creating a blaze so enormous that it could be seen by the King and Queen at Windsor and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs. In front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses, the great conflagration destroyed Parliament's glorious old buildings and their contents. No one who witnessed the disaster at Westminster would ever forget.

Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist, historian and an award-winning writer. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her books, lectures and study days focus on political art and heritage in peril. Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2017, has appeared at many literary festivals and on radio and TV. In 2023 she was appointed by the government to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), which considers whether national heritage destined for sale overseas should be saved for the nation.

Awards, Qualifications & Memberships: Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Winner of the Political Book of the Year Prize for 'The Day Parliament Burned Down' (2013)

Image:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-The_Burning_of_the_Houses_of_Lords_and_Commons,_16_October_1834_-_1942.647_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art.jpg

Lecture

Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg – it reads like a list of the great and good in classical music – but the amazing thing is that every one of these musical geniuses lived and worked in Vienna. 

With slides showing Viennese art and architecture as well as audio excerpts by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Johann Strauss and Mahler, this talk brings Vienna in its heyday to life.

Emma Johnson

With 30 CDs to her name, Emma Johnson is one of the few clarinettists to have performed as a soloist all over the world.

She also enjoys giving talks about music - Woodwind Wizardry and The Poet John Milton were both broadcast by BBC radio and she has lectured about composers Gerald Finzi and Malcolm Arnold for the internet company Tonebase, as well as about Schubert and Brahms for Martin Randall Travel.

Johnson studied Music and English at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where she was the first woman to be made an Honorary Fellow. She was honoured by the Queen with an M.B.E. in 1996.

Her charity, the Emma Johnson Music Foundation, gives workshops in primary schools to introduce children to instrumental music. 

Lecture

Christmas at the National Gallery

Simon Whitehouse

Simon is a (recovering) actor, lecturer, presenter, Alexander Technique and voice teacher and award winning London Blue Badge guide. He has worked as a guide lecturer in house at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Opera House, the BBC and the National Gallery guiding both public and private tours. He is on the faculty of Ithaca College and also lectures for the Blue Badge Guide training course on the performing arts and English literature. Simon’s specialisms and passions are theatre, literature, fashion and art history but whatever the subject, Simon will weave a wonderful story from it.

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ "

Lecture

In 1882 Gertrude Jekyll wrote a short but seminal article in The Garden in which she urged the readers to “remember that in a garden we are painting a picture”.  As an accomplished watercolour artist, Miss Jekyll was familiar with the principles of using colours, but she felt that in gardens these principles “had been greatly neglected”.  This talk looks at how to apply these principles 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 evolved in parallel with ideas about what a garden or border should.

Timothy Walker

I read Botany at University College Oxford. After graduation, I worked as a trainee at Oxford Botanic Garden, the Savill Garden Windsor, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. In 1985 I was awarded a Master of Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society of London. From 1988 to 2014 I was director (Horti Praefectus) at the Oxford Botanic Garden. Between 1992 & 2000 the OBGHA won 4 gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show London. In 2009 the Botanic Garden was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for providing imaginative educational programmes for adults, students, children, and the general public, thereby breathing new life into education for people of all ages and enriching their lives. In 2010 I was elected as a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. In the same year I presented a 3-part series of films on the history of botany on BBC4. Since 2014 I have been a tutor in Plant Biology at Somerville College, Oxford.    

Image: Claude Monet - The Magpie - Google Art Project

Lecture

This lecture explores Art Deco jewellery during the 1920s and 30s. These were decades when jewellery was still widely worn in society and diamonds predominated. The title quotation - and indeed the term Art Deco - comes from the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs, at which a breathtaking selection of jewellery was shown. The lecture covers work by the finest makers of the period, especially those from Paris (Cartier, Boucheron, Fouquet, Van Cleef & Arpels and Chanel) alongside other major houses like Tiffany in New York.

Lecturer

Clare Phillips (MA Royal College of Art) has been a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1989. As a jewellery historian, she is a key part of the small team dedicated to the V&A’s jewellery collection. She has written extensively on jewellery: from Jewels & Jewellery, the definitive account of the V&A’s collection, and Jewelry - from Antiquity to the Present, Thames & Hudson’s accessible introductory text, to definitive works on the jewellery of Tiffany for Yale University Press and on Chaumet's tiaras for Thames & Hudson. In 2006 she curated the exhibition Bejewelled by Tiffany at Somerset House. In addition to her work with the V&A's permanent collection, she has been responsible for jewellery content within major V&A exhibitions, including - amongst many others - Art Nouveau: 1890-1914 and Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up.  

Image: Clare Phillips