Walnut was much favoured by the Elizabethans and became extensively used for fashionable furniture well into the 18th century.  Stylistically, the age encompassed the Restoration, William & Mary, Queen Anne and Baroque styles.  Technically, the period saw the transition from the framed panel construction of the joiner to the dovetailed carcass work of the cabinet maker and the introduction of veneering, parquetry and marquetry as new and stunning forms of decoration.

After a 35 year-long career in higher education, Janusz Karczewski-Slowikowski is now a freelance lecturer and researcher in English furniture history.  He seeks to explain furniture in terms of the skills and materials employed in its design and construction and also its socio-economic significance.  As the one-time proprietor of an antique shop, his interest in collecting was such that he became known as the dealer who bought but never sold …

Photograph courtesy of Janusz Karczewski-Slowikowski

Jewellery and fashion are often seen as two entirely separate and distinct fields of design, but this is very far from the case.  In his lecture Andrew will guide us through the extraordinary decades between 1890 and 1929 when the great couturiers collaborated with the finest of jewellers to produce jewels and clothes of outstanding quality and glittering opulence.

Andrew Prince has had a passion for jewellery since he was a child.  After leaving school at the age of 16 he joined a Bond Street jeweller, started collecting vintage costume jewellery and soon began creating his own pieces.  He now creates some of the finest crystal jewellery in the world, from spectacular wedding tiaras to beautiful crystal earrings and unique bespoke jewels.  He has designed for film and television, including The Young Victoria, Downton Abbey and Disney’s Cinderella.

Necklace: Image from the Victoria and Albert Collection

It is over twenty years since the young Icelandic/Danish artist Olafur Eliasson stunned the public with his Weather Project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.  His extraordinary gigantic sun created its own climate inside the building and over two million people went to see it.  Since then, Olafur Eliasson has created hundreds of spectacular artworks around the world.  He uses light, air, colour, texture and water to bring some of the drama of Iceland into urban settings.  He also delivers powerful environmental and human messages.  In this lecture we will see highlights of his projects and examine his underlying philosophies.

With a contagious enthusiasm for art and architecture, Ian Swankie is an official guide at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral.  He is also a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, one of the London City livery companies.

 Tunnel for Unfolding Time Olafur Eliasson: Photograph courtesy of Ian Swankie

The architecture – domestic, commercial and spiritual – of Whitechapel and Spitalfields closely reflects the characteristics of its communities.  This lecture will take in three hundred years of East London history by exploring the enduring legacy of the Huguenot and Jewish communities.  At the heart of the story are wondrous buildings like the Nicholas Hawksmoor gem Christ Church Spitalfields, the new model dwellings built for the poor, and the exotic Moorish arcades of Fashion Street.  We will explore the impact on the architecture of those who dedicated themselves to improving the lives of the poor such as Willam Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and Samuel and Henrietta Barnett of the Toynbee House Settlement.

Mark’s interest in London developed at a very young age when his father, a London cabbie, drove him around the streets of the capital showing him how every building and stone of London bears witness to the past.  A passion for history led him to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and then a career in university teaching and research.  Between 2008 and 2024 he was Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent.  His specialism was the cultural history of late nineteenth century and twentieth century Britain with a focus on the architectural and horticultural work of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission.  During the First World War centenary he was director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Gateways to the First World War, designed to encourage public engagement with the centenary.

Hanbury Hall Spitalfields, Former Huguenot church built in 1719: images via Wikipedia Commons

John Ruskin was the most famous and well-respected art critic in Victorian England.  In the mid-1850s he met Lizzie Siddal, not only a model but a true rarity in being a female artist.  At the age of 20 she had received barely any artistic training, but Ruskin adored the vitality of her raw talent and offered to become her patron before he had even met her.  At the time of their meeting, Ruskin was recovering from the very public shame of his wife leaving him and revealing that their marriage had never been consummated.  The relationship between Lizzie and Ruskin was to prove pivotal to both their lives. 

Lucinda Hawksley is an author, broadcaster, lecturer and award-winning travel writer who has worked as an interviewee, consultant and presenter on television and radio shows worldwide.  She has written three biographies of female artists, Kate Perugini (née Dickens), Princess Louise and Lizzie Siddal.  Her other books include, Victorian Christmas, Letters of Great Women, Charles Dickens and his Circle, and March, Women, March: Voices of the Women’s Movement.  Lucinda is a great great great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens, and a Patron of the Charles Dickens Museum in London.  She is President of the International Dickens Fellowship and a Patron of the De Morgan Foundation,

Lizzie Siddal and John Rushkin: AI-generated illustrative image

In this lecture Dominic will tell the story of fine book bindings in Britain over the last hundred years.  The journey will begin with William Morris and the Kelmscott Chaucer, possibly the last great book of the printed age.  He will then show some of the amazing bindings from Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the finest bookbinders in the twentieth century, as well as work from their contemporaries.  He will discuss the new world of design binding which emerged after the second world war, as modern design entered this ancient craft, and finish with examples from some of the best artistic bookbinders working today. 

Dominic Riley is a bookbinder, artist and teacher.  He first learned bookbinding at 16 from Benedictine Monks at Douai Abbey in Berkshire and later at the London College of Printing.  He has worked at the V&A, and for binderies in London, New York and San Francisco.  He spends part of the year teaching across the United States of America.  His binding work is mostly the restoration of antiquarian books and Design Binding, and his bindings are in collections worldwide.  In June 2013 he won first prize in the prestigious Sir Paul Getty International Bookbinding Competition, with his winning binding being acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Bookbinding images: Images via Wikipedia Commons

This lecture will reveal how the United States of America covertly used both Modernist design and Abstract Expressionism as cold war tools against the Soviet Bloc in the 1950s.  In one of the most curious stories in art history, it will explore how America's new artists were unwittingly weaponised by the CIA, how Mid-Century Modern design was used in European exhibitions to demonstrate American cultural superiority to wavering intellectuals, and it will lay bare the secret agenda of the CIA, operating behind the back of Congress.  It will ask finally the hundred-million-dollar question: would abstract expressionism achieve record prices at auction today were it not for this secret political programme of the 1950s?

James Vaux took a law degree at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor before switching career.  As a managing director of the international bank Rothschild & Co, he set up and ran the bank’s Nordic operations, living and working in Scandinavia before gaining an MA in Scandinavian Studies at University College London.  He has studied interior design and art history at the Inchbald School, Mid-Century Modern at Sotheby’s Institute and electronic music at Point Blank.  He has also been a DJ, promoter, record label owner, hosted a local radio show for four years and ran a community cinema.  He is now a freelance lecturer.

 “Agony” by Arshile Gorky, 1947: Public domain image

Living and working in Montmartre and Montparnasse in turn of the century Paris, Modigliani embodies the quintessential image of the bohemian artist: handsome, impoverished, living hard, engrossed in his own distinctive mode of expression, dying young only to be celebrated after his short life ended.

Lucrezia Walker studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge and has been a lecturer at the National Gallery for over 20 years.  She has lived, studied and worked in Italy and leads cultural tours in major European cities.  She is adjunct professor of art history for the University of North Carolina's Study Abroad semesters in London and was Lay Canon for the Visual Arts at St Paul's Cathedral between 2010 and 2014.  Lucrezia is the author of several books and was previously Galleries Correspondent for The Tablet.

Amedeo Modigliani:Portrait of Juan Gris, 1915 :Public domain image

How many times have you heard someone say, ‘I don’t like THE bagpipes?’  But the question is WHICH bagpipes?  Of course, they usually mean the Scottish Great Highland bagpipes but, while the Highland pipes certainly dominate the bagpipe landscape, they are by no means the only one.  In the British Isles alone historically we have about 10 different kinds of bagpipe, and they are to be found all throughout Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Sophie 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 also plays a variety of early woodwind instruments such as shawm, rauschpfeife, crumhorn and recorder.  She’s 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 Green Matthews, 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 her instruments.

This lecture will take place at 11:15am following our Annual General Meeting at 10:30am.  There will be no afternoon lecture.

Danse Macabre by Bernt Notke late fifteenth century (detail) : In public domain