This lecture will celebrate the inspirational work of one of Britain’s best known artists whose work is instantly recognisable and speaks directly to us of the joys and challenges of being alive.  We will share the journey of his life from Bradford to London; to New York and Los  Angeles and back to Yorkshire and then his return to LA. His art is a sounding board of his vivid and colourful life and a reminder of the joys of looking, making . . . and living. Original works by Hockney and other relevant artists will be available for viewing at the lecture.

Image: David Hockney, Wolgate Woods, 2006. © David Hockney,  photo. Richard Schmidt

This is the gripping and sometimes hilarious story of how a band of heroic curators and eccentric custodians saved Britain’s national heritage during our Darkest Hour. As Hitler’s forces gathered on the other side of the Channel to threaten these islands, men and   women from London’s national museums, galleries and archives forged extraordinary plans to evacuate their collections to safety.

Having had access to the jewels designated Heirlooms of the Crown and with a spectacular collection of her own, the Queen Mother had so much jewellery to choose from over the course of her long life that it would be almost impossible to describe it all. In this talk, Jeremy, a former Equerry to the Queen Mother chronicles her passion for jewels by concentrating on a selection of items which are of particular gemmological and historic interest … and have an intriguing story attached.

Image: Richard Stone, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, 1986, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Gulbenkian Museum is Lisbon's finest museum, yet the man behind this collection, Calouste Gulbenkian was an enigmatic and publicity-shy figure. Gulbenkian was known as "Mr Five Per Cent", on account of his personal holding of 5% of Middle East oil production. This talk weaves together the history of a great        European collection (featuring Rembrandts, Lalique glass, carpets, Iznik ware and Renaissance paintings) with that of the emergence of the modern oil industry. The talk is based on the speaker’s biography of        Gulbenkian, "Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man" (2019) – which was the inspiration for Wes Anderson’s recent film, “The Phoenician Scheme” (2025).

Image: Dirk Bouts, The Annunciation, c.1480-90. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE TO LECTURE PROGRAMME FOR TUESDAY 12 MAY

Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances, the scheduled lecturer is unable to to be with us on Tuesday 12. We are very grateful to Simon Seligman who has agreed to step in at the last minute. Simon's talk is titled:

Passions, Personalities and Patronage: Chatsworth and the Story of the Devonshire Family Collection 1549 - present. 

This lecture examines Oscar Wilde’s great literary & theatrical successes.

We give special attention to his greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the funniest, most performed and most frequently quoted plays in the English speaking world. Described as ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, it satirised the shallowness and superficiality of upper class Victorian society.  We explore some of its hidden elements and discover that for the author, this glittering triumph heralded the beginning of his own fatal final act.

Image: Oscar Wilde, photog. by Napoleon Sarony, c.1882 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Wallace Collection owns over 330 miniatures dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In Britain it is unique in the range and quality of its French miniatures, though it also contains fine and important examples by artists of other schools, particularly the British, Swiss and Italian. This lecture explains what miniature painting is. It also looks at the formation of the miniatures collection and considers in depth some of its greatest works, by for example Samuel Cooper, Richard Cosway, Peter Adolph Hall and Jean-Baptiste Isabey.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Isabey, The Duke of Wellington, 1818

The Silk Road extends 8,000km from China through Central Asia to the Mediterranean. The route was a highway for beliefs, ideas, inventions and art, whilst silk was just one of the commodities traded for 1,400 years. Silk, jade and ceramics were traded in exchange for horses, pearls and gold. The wonderful paintings in the Magao caves at Dunhuang are evidence of the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road. Samarkand and Bukhara are the beginning of the great Islamic buildings that continue through Persia and Syria.

Image: Christopher Bradley, 'Suzaneh' embroidery in central Asia

With a façade more than twice the length of Buckingham Palace and some of the finest 18th century rooms anywhere, Wentworth Woodhouse, seat of the Marquesses of Rockingham and then of the Earls Fitzwilliam, is being awakened from more than half a century of slumber. The history and architecture of the house are laid out alongside the story of the warring families that built and owned it – a story of political execution, madness, child-substitution, socialist vindictiveness, royal visits…and badminton.

Image: Wentworth Woodhouse, east front

Charles Rennie Mackintosh reputedly said of his wife, I had talent, Margaret had genius, but her place in the history of art was long overshadowed by his renown. However, she produced some of the most iconic works of the Glasgow Style, the uniquely Scottish variety of Art Nouveau.

This talk will tell her story from Glasgow School of Art to a studio with her sister Frances and into a marriage, also very much an artistic partnership.

Image: Margaret MacDonald, Embroidered Panels, 1902. (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

From earliest times man has linked gold with the life-giving light of the sun. This talk illustrates 4,000 years of the history of gold in medicine. The Egyptians used it for its magico-religious properties. Mediaeval alchemists strived to produce it as a source of eternal youth. Today it is used in medical instrumentation, investigation and therapies.

This lecture illustrates how artists, goldsmiths and instru-ment makers, have defined medicine’s relationship with gold togeth-er with the ultimate ‘medical gold’, the Nobel Prize in recognition of fundamental advances in medical science.

Image: Goa Stone in Gold Case C17-C18. (Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons)

Political turbulence between 1870 and 1929 led to the end of Russian and European monarchies and the consequent dispersal of astonishing art and jewel collections.

The coincidental creation of American industrial millionaires meant they were able to create and furnish palaces of their own and to adorn their wives and daughters with royal jewels. Some of these heiresses then married into the British aristocracy bringing their treasures with them. The subsequent decline of aristocratic power resulted in a further dispersal of these legendary jewels into the world’s great museums where they can now be seen by everyone.

Image: bandeau by Cartier, 1924 (natural pearl, diamonds, and platinum). Originally owned by Nanaline Duke, wife of tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke. It was inherited and worn by their sole child, heiress and socialite Doris Duke. (Image licenced under Wikimedia Creative Commons)

What other city can match the glories of the Three Graces along the waterfront? Inland there are monumental Egyptian ventilation shafts, banking palaces, dock warehouses, and the finest neo-Classical hall in the country. Oh, and two Cathedrals.

Image: Scenes from the Mersey Ferry crossing 24: The Three Graces and Museum of Liverpool by Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=166594072

Vanessa Bell was a founding and leading member of the Bloomsbury Group. Despite producing some of the most important art of C20, and being matriarch of the Bloomsbury Group, her art and biography have been overshadowed by the renown of Roger Fry (her lover), the writings of Clive Bell (her husband), the paintings of Duncan Grant (her soul mate) and the books of her sister Virginia Woolf.

This lecture will place Vanessa Bell’s paintings in context and tell of a life well lived, but according to her own rules.

 Image: George Beresford, portrait of Vanessa Bell, 1902. . (Image in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

William Morris considered a beautiful home to be the most important production of Art and much of his working life was devoted to the making of household goods intended to bring art and beauty into the home. In his own homes - Red House in Bexleyheath, Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, and finally Kelmscott Manor, he created interiors that exemplified his ideas about art and design.

This lecture explores not only the decoration, but also the relationships and lifestyles associated with each of these very different homes.

Image: Jo Banham, William Morris, bedroom, Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire

For almost 200 years coal powered the industrialisation of Britain and transformed the land-scape, working practices and social lives. The mines were filthy, dark and dangerous, yet many men found a beauty and a majesty underground, as well as in the pit yards, and in their homes and communities, that they wanted to express in art.

This is an account of how miners told the stories of what it felt like to be a miner.

Image: Robert Olley, Off the Way, 2000 © Artist's Estate. Mining Art Gallery, Bishop Auckland. (Reproduced with permission)

This examination of dyeing and social history begins with the devel-opments in natural colour at the end of the C18 and then looks at developments in the C19. These include: the work of Michel Chevreul at the Gobelins factory in Paris, the impact of the great international exhibitions, and the serendipitous discovery of coal tar colours by William Perkin which resulted in hundreds of new colours and shades used in everything from fashion to painting and house-hold items.

Image: Michel Chevreul, Cercle Chromatique, 1861. (Image in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

This lecture explores how artists across Europe responded to the climactic phenomenon of ‘The Little Ice Age’ which swept across the Northern Hemisphere from 1300 to around 1870.

We will look at iconic images from the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures manuscript, and the paintings of Pieter Breu-ghel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp, amongst others. This exploration of the ‘art of winter’ will conclude with a brief look at how contemporary artists use winter as both a subject and medium.

Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (Winter),1565 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) (Image licenced under Creative Commons)

Vincent van Gogh’s life as an artist spanned an all-too-short ten years – the art that inspired him in London and Paris was not just that of his contemporaries but also Old Masters and the newly imported works by Japanese printmakers. An art world of galleries, magazines, a network of friendships and even a shop are at the root of Vincent van Gogh’s ideas – but how did they come together in London and Paris?

Juliet follows Vincent to London and Paris, looking at how the people he met and the art he saw, and collected, influenced his work. The National Gallery is to mark its bicentenary with a blockbuster exhibition on Vincent van Gogh – September 2024 to January 2025.

This draws on Elizabeth’s time in Morocco in visits spanning more than 25 years. The lecture focuses particularly on the stories behind the blue pigment used for the fishing boats and doorways of photogenic Essaouira on the Moroccan coast, and Majorelle Blue developed and patented by French artist Jacques Majorelle in Marrakech in the 1920s.

The story of Morocco’s blues takes us from Berber veils to Yves Saint-Laurent who restored Majorelle’s Marrakech garden, via Modernist Orientalist art and a protected mollusc…

This collection of gold, silver and Italian mosaics was formed over forty years by Arthur Gilbert in Los Angeles. Formerly at Somerset House, it is now displayed in a magnificent group of galleries at the V&A. For some years Dr Schroder was curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and played a key role in the development of the collection.

This lecture will focus on some facets of the collection: silver, gold and snuffboxes and allude to enamelled portrait miniatures, Italian micromosaics and pietre dure, and a unique insight into the man who formed it.

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of garden design as they evolved through the ages. Nature and seasons show in paintings and gardens of all scales: palaces, Buddhist temples and Zen-inspired dry landscapes with their symbolic content.

This lecture will also draw upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens globally.