The Day Parliament Burned Down

Wednesday 4th November 2020

Caroline Shenton

In the early evening of 16th October 1834, to the horror of bystanders, 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 would ever forget it.

This lecture will take us through the gripping hour-by-hour story of the fire through contemporary depictions of the disaster by Turner, William Heath and others.

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that a senior archivist at the National Archives.

Her book, The Day Parliament Burned Down, won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013. Its sequel, Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 4th November 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our December lecture

Banned: Savitsky and the Secret Hoard of Avant-Garde Art

Wednesday 2nd September 2020

Chris Aslan Alexander

Russian Avant-Garde Art flourished during the first thirty years of the 20th Century, but as Stalin rose to power all but Socialist Realist expressions of art were banned. To own anything else was dangerous, and to start collecting it was unthinkable; yet that is exactly what Igor Savitsky did: he amassed the world’s second largest collection of Russian Avant-Garde art.

The remote location of the State Museum of Karakalpakstan, near the south shores of the Aral Sea, meant that Savitsky was able to get away with such subversive activity because even the authorities in Moscow were a little hazy as to where exactly Karakalpakstan was. Savitsky promoted Russian artists sent to Central Asia in exile as well as the first Central Asian artists to paint their own people and landscapes.

Chris spent his childhood in Turkey and in war-torn Beirut. After school he spent two years at sea before studying media and journalism at Leicester. After university he moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, where he established a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries.

After a year in the UK writing A Carpet Ride to Khiva, he spent three years in the Pamirs in 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. Chris has recently finished rowing and studying at Oxford, and a curacy at St. Barnabas in North Finchley. He is now taking two years out to focus on writing fiction. As well as lecturing for the Arts Society he leads tours to Central Asia, where a large part of his heart remains.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 2nd September 2020 at 11:00am.

Just before the coronavirus lockdown in March, Chris recorded a YouTube lecture on Soviet Propaganda in Central Asian Monumental Art. This can be viewed by clicking on the following link:

Cotton Pickers and Cosmonauts

Click here for our October lecture

Great Railway Stations: Evoking the Spirit of Romance and Adventure

Wednesday 7th October 2020

Ian Swankie

When we think of St Pancras International or New York Grand Central, we imagine long romantic journeys. They are special places promising excitement and adventure. But there are dozens of other glorious stations in the UK and abroad.

In this lecture we will take a journey around some of the most evocative and splendid of them, looking not only at the magnificence of the architecture and the brilliance of the engineering, but discovering numerous artworks within the stations and examining many depictions of stations in art. These include Claude Monet’s Gare St Lazare and William Powell Frith’s Paddington.

Ian Swankie is a Londoner with a passion for art and architecture. He is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, an official guide at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral, and an active freelance London guide.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 7th October 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our November lecture

The Good Life: Gimson and the Barnsleys – Inventing the Cotswold Style

Wednesday 5th August 2020

Anne Anderson

Discover the talents of Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, influential figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. From setting up workshops to establishing ‘the Cotswold style’, these men have inspired generations of designers and makers.

Desiring to ‘live close to nature’, Gimson and the Barnsleys found Pinbury Park, near Cirencester.   In 1900, Gimson and Ernest Barnsley set up a small furniture workshop in Cirencester, moving to larger premises at Daneway House, Sapperton, an idyllic medieval manor house. Although their partnership dissolved, Gimson and his skilled cabinet makers established a ‘Cotswold style’ while Sidney Barnsley designed and made his own furniture.

With a first degree in archaeology and a PhD in English, Anne was a senior lecturer in Art and Design History at Southampton Solent University for fourteen  years.

She has held several prestigious fellowships and is currently a tutor for the V&A Learning Academy.  A specialist in Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, Anne’s book on The Perseus Series was published for the Edward Burne-Jones exhibition at Tate Britain in 2018.

Her career as an international speaker has taken her all over the world, including Spain, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, the USA and Leamington Spa in November 2012. We are looking forward to her return, even if only in cyberspace.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 5th August 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our next online event

Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees From Nazi Europe And Their Contribution To British Visual Culture

Wednesday 1st July 2020

Monica Bohm-Duchen

Despite the traumatic nature of their dislocation and the obstacles they often encountered on arrival in the UK, those who fled here from Nazi-dominated Europe in the 1930s and 1940s made a deep, pervasive and long-lasting contribution to British culture. Focussing on the visual arts, this new lecture will examine the nature of this contribution, embracing not only familiar names such as Gombrich, Kokoschka, Moholy-Nagy, Schwitters and Heartfield, but also lesser-known figures such as Albert Reuss, Josef Herman and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky.

At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, this lecture serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilisation and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.

Monica is an independent London-based writer and an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck College since 2005.  She has lectured for institutions such as Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Open University, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art.  She is the initiator and Creative Director of the Insiders/ Outsiders arts festival, and as such she hosted a whole series of online events earlier this month to mark National Refugees’ Week. Among her many publications, her book “Art and the Second World War” was nominated for the William M. B. Berger Prize for Art History and the National Award for Arts Writing, USA.

This lecture was streamed online at 11:00am on Wednesday 1st July 2020.
Members received an invitation by email to join the lecture.

Catherine de Medici: the Story of Three in a Marriage

Wednesday 3rd November 2021

Caroline Rayman

Catherine de Medici, the only woman ever to rule France, married Henry, second son of King Francis I. This was a dazzling match for a Florentine “daughter of a merchant”. But the young bride arrived in a strange country to find a third person in the marriage, and her new husband completely uninterested in her.

She had enemies in the French court and life was a great struggle. After many unhappy years, she became ruler of France (three of her sons would rule after her) and mother-in-law to Mary Queen of Scots.

Caroline Rayman has lectured for many years to universities and art organisations in America and on cruises. She was an official guide at the British Museum and has published articles on samplers. Her lectures range from the role of the royal mistress in history to more scholarly lectures on Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Women Behind the Lens: Outstanding Female Photographers and Their Contribution to the Art of Photography

Wednesday 7th April 2021

Brian Stater

The work of women photographers has often been unfairly neglected. This lecture seeks to correct that by examining the contribution of three outstanding British practitioners; Victorian pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron, portraitist Jane Bown and landscape photographer Fay Godwin – and that of two influential Americans – Dorothea Lange, with her documentary images, and contemporary photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Brian Stater is a Senior Teaching Fellow at University College London. His principal academic interest lies in the appreciation of architecture, while a strong personal enthusiasm is for photography. An exhibition of his own photographs has been held at University College London. He is a member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography and works with a pre-war Leica camera, as used by his great hero Henri Cartier-Bresson and many others.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 7th April 2021 at 11:00am.

Click here for our May lecture

Peggy Guggenheim

Wednesday 1st June 2022

Alexandra Epps

Peggy Guggenheim was the ‘poor little rich girl’ who changed the face of twentieth century art. Not only was she ahead of her time but she was the woman who helped define it. She discovered and nurtured a new generation of artists producing a new kind of art. Through collecting not only art but the artists themselves, her life was as radical as her collection.

Alexandra Epps’ background is in design, having practised as a graphic designer running her own business for many years.  She now works as a guide to the City of London, and as a guide and lecturer to Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Guildhall Art Gallery and Pallant House Gallery.

Click here for our July lecture