Category Archives: Previous Lectures

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 – Lucy Kemp-Welch: Painter of Horses

Wednesday 3rd May 2023

Lucy Kemp-Welch: Painter of Horses  

Lecturer – David Haycock

David Haycock introduced us to Lucy Kemp-Welch, known as the portrait painter of horses.  Lucy was very well known in her lifetime but fell out of favour when horses were not essential and cars and tractors took over.  Her lifelong passion was horses and she said “Horses are to me the breath of life”. One of her most well known paintings is usually hung in the Leamington Art Gallery and Museum but it on tour until the end of the year.

Wednesday 1st February 2023 – Bruegel: The Seasons of the World

Wednesday 1st February 2023

Bruegel: The Seasons of the World

Lecturer: Gavin Plumley

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was commissioned to create a series of paintings for a dining room in Antwerp. The images, charting the course of a year, changed the way we view the world through art. This lecture will explore how Bruegel pioneered a new way of thinking about the environment and our individual places within a shifting cosmos.

A writer and broadcaster, appearing on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and contributing to newspapers, magazines, and opera and concert programmes worldwide, Gavin Plumley lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent lectures have included those to the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Theatre, the British Museum and the Neue Galerie in New York.

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 – A Painter Looks at Cezanne

Wednesday 2nd November 2022

A Painter Looks at Cezanne

Lecturer: Ghislaine Howard

In this lecture Ghislaine Howard looked at the art and life of Cezanne with the understanding and knowledge that comes from having spent her own life making paintings.

Ghislaine is a painter of national reputation named as a Woman of The Year 2008 for her contribution to art and society. She has exhibited widely at many prestigious venues such as Manchester Art Gallery, Canterbury Cathedral and Imperial War Museum North and has work in major public collections including The Royal Collection.

She specialises in inspirational talks about the pleasure to be gained by an intimate contemplation of painting.

She has lectured widely and is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Wednesday 7th September 2022 – Frozen Breath of the Polar Night: An introduction to Art Nouveau Glass

Frozen Breath of the Polar Night: An Introduction to Art Nouveau Glass

Wednesday 7th September 2022

Justine Hopkins

‘Glass is a marvellous material. Everything about it makes it an incomparable plastic medium in the hands of an ingenious artist, offering his imagination and talent almost limitless scope for discovery’. [René Lalique].

Marguerite vase by Émile Gallé dated 1896

Glass: tough, fragile and unpredictable; colourful or colourless; capable of flowing like metal or being carved like stone. To be shaped it must be heated and reheated to extreme temperatures and as it cools it may shatter explosively without stringent precautions. No two pieces will ever be identical, and what you think you placed in the kiln will rarely if ever come out exactly as you expected and planned. Glass is dangerous, difficult and glamorous; a combination which has fascinated craftsmen and artists, chemists and collectors throughout history.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of the shift of glass-working from craft to art, and Art Nouveau glass remains some of the most spectacular ever produced. It offered a unique range of opportunities for translating the swirling energies and sinuous lines of Art Nouveau into objects to enchant the eye and intrigue the mind.

This lecture explored the achievement of the masters of Art Nouveau glass, Émile Gallé, Louis Comfort Tiffany and René Lalique, and their outstanding contribution to one of the most important movements of the last century.

Justine Hopkins studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. She has lectured regularly for Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, as well as to Oxbridge and Bristol Universities, Christies Fine Art, the Art Fund, and groups such as the Friends of Covent Garden and U3A. Her publications include ‘The Art of John Martin’ (2001), ‘Michael Ayrton: A Biography’ (1994) and articles for Apollo Magazine and Modern Painters.

Click here for additional notes for this lecture from Justine.

Wednesday 9th March 2022 – Lucian Freud: Portraits

Lucian Freud: Portraits

Note this lecture is on the second Wednesday of the month.

Wednesday 9th March 2022


Girl with a White Dog, 1951–1952
© Tate Gallery

Image from Wikipedia, Fair Use policy

Lydia Baumann

Lucian Freud was a British artist.

“I’ve always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories” (Lucian Freud )

In this lecture Lydia Bauman will trace Freud’s development as a portrait painter and question just how much he tells us about his sitters.

Lydia was born in Poland. She studied for her BA in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and for an MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute in London. She has lectured to diverse adult audiences, notably in London’s National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston USA. Herself a landscape painter, Lydia is the author of the forthcoming book Great Themes in Art.

Click here for our April lecture

Wednesday 4th May 2022 – Art After Windrush: Postcolonial Art in Britain After 1948

Art After Windrush: Postcolonial Art in Britain After 1948

Wednesday 4th May 2022

Detail of a work by Sir Frank Bowling

A detail from Middle Passage, 1970
by Sir Frank Bowling.

Photograph: Courtesy the Artist/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017 published by The Guardian

Barry Venning

This lecture will look at the contributions made by artists of African, Caribbean or Asian origin to British art since the HMT Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury from the West Indies in 1948. It will consider, among others, the work of Sir Frank Bowling, Francis Newton Souza, Eddie Chambers, Yinka Shonibare, Sonia Boyce, Rasheed Araeen, Lubaina Himid and the Singh Twins, all of whom have achieved international recognition and respect, their works collected by museums world-wide. They may not all be household names but their art is eye-catching and thought-provoking, and they have set much of the agenda for British art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Barry Venning is an art historian 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. His interests and his teaching extend from medieval architecture to contemporary art.  He is currently Associate Lecturer with the Open University and lecturing on a freelance basis for The Arts Society and Christie’s Education.

Click here for our June lecture

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 – The Land of the Midnight Sun: Norway’s Golden Age of Painting

The Land of the Midnight Sun: Norway’s Golden Age of Painting

Wednesday 2nd February 2022

North Cape, 1853

North Cape, 1853
Peder Balke

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Image in the public domain.

Stella Grace Lyons

The late 19th century marked a defining moment in Norway. For the first time romantic painters began to turn to their own land for inspiration. They painted the stormy seas, the towering glaciers and the raw, untamed nature of their homeland. Their aim was to draw attention to the beauty of their country and explore what it meant to be ‘Norwegian’.

This lecture will look at the artists from Norway’s ‘Golden Age’ who captured the far north with drama and romance and interpreted their wild country as a mythical, eerie entity. It will explore the stunning works of JC Dahl, Peder Balke, Nikolai Astrup and Harald Sohlberg. This is chance to discover some of art’s most underappreciated artists.

Stella Grace Lyons gained her BA in the History of Art from the University of Bristol and her MA in History of Art from the University of Warwick. She spent a year studying Renaissance art at the British Institute of Florence, and three months studying Venetian art in Venice. She also attended drawing classes at the prestigious Charles H. Cecil studios in Florence, a private atelier that follows a curriculum based on the leading ateliers of nineteenth century Paris.

Stella is a freelance Art History lecturer, speaker and writer who has lectured across the UK, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. She is also a part-time lecturer for the University of South Wales. She has written about art for several publications and her article on Norwegian art was recently featured on the front cover of The Arts Society magazine.

Click here for our March lecture

Wednesday 6th October 2021 – Faber and Faber: 90 Years of Excellence in Cover Design

Faber and Faber: 90 Years of Excellence in Cover Design

Wednesday 6th October 2021

Pile of books
© Photo “Thrift Store Books” by Kate Geraets. Used under Flickr Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Toby Faber

Since its foundation in 1925, Faber and Faber has built a reputation as one of London’s most important literary publishing houses. Part of that relates to the editorial team that Geoffrey Faber and his successors built around them – TS Eliot was famously an early recruit – but a large part is also due to the firm’s insistence on good design and illustration. This lecture will trace the history of Faber and Faber through its illustrations, covers and designs. Early years brought innovations like the Ariel Poems – single poems, beautifully illustrated, sold in their own envelopes. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an emphasis on typography, led by the firm’s art director Berthold Wolpe; his Albertus font is still used on City of London road signs. In the 1980s, the firm started its association with Pentagram, responsible for the ff logo. Along the way, it has employed some of our most celebrated artists as cover illustrators – from Rex Whistler and Barnett Freedman to Peter Blake and Damien Hirst. Slides will range from book covers, advertisements and photos of key individuals, to illustrations of the concepts behind the designs. Faber and Faber is the last of the great publishing houses to remain independent.

Toby Faber 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 four years as managing director of Faber and Faber, the publishing company founded by his grandfather, 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.

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

Click here for our November lecture

Wednesday 7th July 2021 – How to Get Down from a Yak: Adventures in Central Asian Nomadic Textiles

How To Get Down from a Yak:
Adventures in Central Asian Nomadic Textiles

How to Get Dpwn from a Yak

Photo provided by our lecturer

Wednesday 7th July 2021

Chris Aslan Alexander

Houses made from wool that warm in the depths of winter, carpets that tell stories, woven bands that appease ancestors, embroideries that ward off evil, kilims that store kitchenware – with everything ready to be packed and carried on a yak or camel at a moment’s notice.

The little-known nomadic textile cultures of the Kyrgyz, Turkoman and Karakalpak will be explored in this lecture, along with the rise and fall of nomadism and where nomadism fits within the modern world.

Our speaker will share his own experience of working for three years with nomadic yak herders in the High Pamirs.

Chris Aslan Alexander was born in Turkey and spent his childhood both there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, he spent two years at sea before studying Media and Journalism and then moving to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, where he established a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries. He became the largest non-government employer in town.

After a time in Uzbekistan, he spent three years in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came two years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied at Oxford, and is now based in Cambridge, focusing on writing fiction.

He is currently working on a new book on the Silk Road that marries travel and textiles. He leads tours to Central Asia, where a large chunk of his heart remains.

This lecture will be streamed online on Wednesday 7th July 2021 at 2:00pm. TAS RLS members will be invited by email to join the lecture.

This is a change to our original programme. The lecture, “Wonder Workers and the Art of Illusion: The History of Magic Through Art and Pictures” by Bertie Pearce will now take place in July 2022.

Click here for our September lecture

Wednesday 1st September 2021 – Paula Rego: Painting Women on the Edge, and Telling Tales of the Unexpected

Paula Rego: Painting Women on the Edge, and Telling Tales of the Unexpected

Wednesday 1st September 2021

Paula Rego

Image from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons Attribution

Linda Smith

This lecture will look at the life and work of Paula Rego, a British artist of Portuguese origin best known for her depictions of folk tales and strikingly unusual images of women.

Married to the British artist Victor Willing (1928-88), Paula Rego settled in this country permanently in the 1970s, but her career in Britain had effectively begun in the early 1960s, when she exhibited with artists like Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. Over the following twenty years her career and reputation built steadily, and in 1990 she was invited to become the first Associate Artist at the National Gallery. Her well-known series of paintings and prints based on nursery rhymes emerged from this residency, as did another series of large-scale paintings which is currently displayed in the National Gallery restaurant.

In her early days, Paula Rego experimented with many different styles, including abstraction, and was very much influenced by Surrealism, but her mature style places a strong emphasis on clear draughtsmanship and the human figure. She produces works which suggest complicated narratives full of psychological tension, drama, and emotion. Frequently she depicts women and girls in disturbing or ambiguous situations and poses, which has occasionally caused some controversy, but her insistence on the physicality of her female figures, and her refusal to idealise or revert to cliché has earned her global recognition and many prestigious awards. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010. 

Click here for details of the Paula Rego exhibition at Tate Britain.

Linda Smith holds two first-class degrees in Art History. She has a broad knowledge of art historical subjects, but specialises in British Art and twentieth century art. She is an experienced lecturer and guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern and has lectured to a wide variety of audiences, including school and university students, and independent arts societies in the UK and overseas.

This is the first lecture of our 2021/ 22 season.
Covid-19 restrictions permitting, we hope to hold this lecture at the Royal Spa Centre at 11:00am and 2:00pm.

Click here for our October lecture