Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun was an eighteenth century artist, painting the aristocracy of France during the Revolution and in the shadow of the Guillotine. She created portraits for the nobility of Europe and even travelled to England. She also painted over twenty-five self-portraits throughout her life, and wrote her memoirs. I will focus on three aspects of Elisabeth’s life – Mother, Heroine and Artist – illustrating her story with her art and her own words. The search for Elisabeth will take us to France, Italy and England during the exhilarating and dangerous time of the French Revolution.

Dr Alison Barker taught History and Art History at further and higher education for over twenty years and currently works at the University of Essex. She speaks widely to diverse groups on many historical and art historical topics, and has led guided tours at the British Museum and the National Gallery.  Alison wrote her PhD thesis on the depiction of Saint George in art and has published work on his image in both England and Italy.  She has presented Papers for the Renaissance Society of America in both Boston and Dublin.  Her book, The Dissemination of Saint George in Early Modern Art has been recently published by Routledge.

Explores the central mystery embodied by the inimitability of Stradivari's violins by following some of his instruments from his workshop to the present day.

Two hundred and fifty years after Antonio Stradivari’s death, his violins and cellos remain the most highly prized instruments in the world. Loved by great musicians and capable of fetching fabulous sums when sold, their tone and beauty are legendary. Every subsequent violin-maker has tried to match them. Not one has succeeded. How can that be? 

This lecture explores that central mystery. It begins with an overview of Stradivari's life and methods, and then allows the violins themselves to tell the story, following three through a succession of players, dealers and collectors to the present day, travelling from the salons of Vienna to the concert halls of New York, and from the breakthroughs of Beethoven’s last quartets to the first phonographic recordings. 

Toby Faber’s book Stradivarius: Five violins, one cello and a genius, was described in The New York Times as ‘more enthralling, earthy and illuminating than any fiction could be.’ The lecture includes some short musical recordings.   

Toby 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 five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, 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. Toby has written three narrative histories: Stradivarius – Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius; Faberge’s Eggs; and Faber & Faber – The Untold Story, as well as a novel, Close to the Edge. Of these, only the obvious one is published by the family firm.

The arrival of Christianity in Ireland brought about a fusion of Celtic and Christian cultures. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, these strands  met in the production of a wide variety of liturgical objects for the new rituals of the recently established Irish church. To the native love of abstract ornament, the monks in their scriptorium added the human figure, culminating in the glory that is the Book of Kells. Such was its fame and beauty that it was widely regarded as the work of angels.
 

After a generation in University life, Tom has now retired from teaching to concentrate on lecturing to a wider public, and to leading tours to his major areas of interest: the architecture and archaeology of Ireland, and the Mediterranean basin.

The Ancient Greeks invented the human portrait and their sculpture formed the basis of European art. Arguably, it has never been bettered. They produced statues of such beauty and realism that men are said to have fallen in love with them. A Classical scholar and teacher, Rupert elucidates some of their finest artistic expressions, including the controversial Parthenon or ‘Elgin’ marbles (the story of which is recounted in detail) and the Venus de Milo, celebrated survivor of a craze for ‘naked Aphrodites’. Here is a chance to meet the Ancient Greeks in the raw. Contains nudity!

Rupert Willoughby is a writer, researcher, lecturer, Latin-whisperer and impresario of ancient Greeks, with a passion for castles, lakes and uncovering the layers of the past. 

A graduate with First Class Honours in History from the University of London (where he immersed himself in the ‘Byzantine’, or medieval Greek Empire), he is the author of Mountain Gunner: The Wartime Adventures of Tony Fowle, M.C., of the best-selling Life in Medieval England for Pitkin, and of a series of popular histories of places, including Chawton: Jane Austen’s Village, and the whimsical, yet scholarly Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture; one reviewer described this as ‘a most entertaining and enlightening enterprise. It makes you want to visit Basingstoke, and that is quite some achievement.'

Rupert is also an itinerant Classics master and he contributes regular obituaries to The Daily Telegraph. An experienced lecturer, accredited by The Arts Society since 2011, he is known for his light, humorous touch, his love of narrative and his vivid evocations of the past.

Rupert’s forefathers were Vikings and his foremothers were Tatars.

Nicola Moorby is an independent art historian and curator, specialising in British art of the nineteenth century. She studied at the University of York and Birkbeck College, London. Formerly at Tate Britain, she has curated a number of exhibitions including, most recently, Constable: The Dark Side at The Arc, Winchester in 2023 and Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts for Turner's House in 2025. She has published widely,  including as co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing, 2010) and as a major contributor to the online catalogues of the Turner Bequest and the Camden Town Group. She is an experienced lecturer and regularly teaches short courses at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has appeared as an expert on television and radio including ‘Great Paintings of the World with Andrew Marr’ (2020 and 2021) and ‘Art on the BBC’ (2022). Her book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape will be published by Yale University Press in 2025.

J.M.W. Turner was arguably the greatest practitioner in watercolour the world has ever seen and his achievements still represent the benchmark for artists working today. Yet he left frustratingly few written records of his processes and was notoriously reticent about his methods. One brave soul apparently once asked him the key to being a successful artist and it is recorded that he rather grumpily replied ‘The only secret I have is damned hard work’! This lecture examines Turner’s watercolour practice in detail, unlocking the mysteries behind his exceptional effects.

A graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge, Nicholas trained for the Anglican ministry at Ripon Hall, Oxford. Inspired by a period working on the staff of Coventry Cathedral he has gained a wide experience of international matters. He was formerly Bishop-elect for the Diocese of Lake Malawi in Central Africa (2005-2009) and undertook his doctorate on Lay Anglican Ecclesiology - a study in five countries, with the University of Wales. Nicholas has a particular interest in the period of the English Reformation and the associated cultural, architectural and social changes it has produced. He lectures regularly and assists as a priest in London.

It is possible to ‘read’ the passage of time, movements, cultures and peoples in the architecture and art forms evident in many of our English country churches. These lectures take us through four overarching eras from the pre-Christian era, through the arrival of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans and onwards to the sixteenth century and the epoch changing Tudors. Beyond the Tudors we move into the establishment of a new Protestant England. Later the profoundly destructive changes of the seventeenth century Commonwealth era are followed by restoration and liturgical change.

Anne has been a lecturer and guide at the Victoria and Albert Museum for more than 20 years and has given regular gallery talks at the British Museum. She was a lecturer for the Royal Collection Trust for 14 years, including 10 years guiding private tours of the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace. She is a visiting lecturer for Sotheby's Institute and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Since 2008, she has been a member of the London faculty of Eckerd College, Florida, teaching Art History. She lectures extensively for private groups, including the Arts Society and has lectured on William Morris for the British Council and British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. After studying Modern History at Durham University, she trained and became a senior specialist in ceramics at the head offices in London of Bonhams (1981-1986) and Christie's (1987-1995). From 1995 to 2002, she was resident in Shanghai, China and gave lectures on the history of the China trade and European Chinoiserie to the international community of diplomats and expatriates in Shanghai and Beijing. On returning to London in 2002, she worked on a short project cataloguing Chinese ceramics at Kensington Palace and became Hon Membership Secretary and Treasurer of the French Porcelain Society.

Sèvres was the most illustrious and innovative porcelain factory in 18th Century France, employing brilliant artisans as painters, modellers, gilders and technicians. Spectacular vases and finely decorated dining services made at Sèvres added lustre and glamour to the grandest of state rooms and the most intimate of boudoirs in the nearby Palace of Versailles. These objects of desire were sought after by the nobility during Europe's Ancien Régime, by English collectors such as the Prince Regent and, generations later, by a new moneyed aristocracy in America's 'Gilded Age'. However, the origins of this most fashionable porcelain factory were very different.

Dr Graham Jones started his professional life as a musician in the British Army and over a glittering career spanning nearly forty years he retired as the Senior Director of Music, Household Division and Director of Music, Coldstream Guards a position unequalled throughout military music in Great Britain. During his illustrious career he has recorded over 40 albums and been responsible for the largest commissioning programme of wind band music in recent history commissioning over 30 new works for wind band. He pioneered a music education programme with the University of Salford for military musicians resulting in a new Master of Music in performance degree. Graham was made a Member of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace for outstanding service to military music in 1993. Having retired, at the start of 2012, from military service Graham is enjoying a second career as a guest conductor, adjudicator, guest speaker, lecturer, clinician, recording consultant and educator. He is also the Artist Director of London International Band Week, music consultant to Henley Music Festival, resident conductor of the British Imperial Orchestra, visiting conductor in residence at Troy University, Alabama, USA and guest lecturer on cruise ships.  Graham’s charitable work includes event planning in support of the Royal British Legion and sitting on the London fundraising committee of the Army Benevolent Fund - the Soldiers Charity. 

Find out, in this very light-hearted lecture, about the various ceremonial events that take place around Christmas time. Carol services, concerts and even Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace and Windsor all play their part. How do the Chelsea Pensioners prepare and celebrate the festive season? All will be revealed so, come along and feel wrapped in a blanket of Christmas loveliness.

For 17 years from 2007 to 2024 Susan was Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Chartered Institute of Marketing and in 2015 was made a Fellow of the Society of Dyers and Colourists in recognition of her work on the history of dyes. Susan has a longstanding interest in textiles, especially colour, and published her first book, The Story of Colour in Textiles (Bloomsbury) in 2013. She has extensive lecturing experience across the world as well as for the V&A and across the UK. In 2022 she published An Unbroken Thread: the 150 year history of the Royal School of Needlework, a second edition of which was published in 2024 to include the RSN's work on the coronation. She is currently the President of the Society of Dyers and Colourists. and is now getting back to research into the history of colour in textiles.

The RSN’s royal connections began from the outset when Princess Helena became its President and in 1875 Queen Victoria became its Patron. This lecture tells the story of the RSN’s  royal connections and especially focuses on the RSN’s role in the past five coronations: Edward VII, George V, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III and the work we did for each of them. Learn why the RSN made the funeral pall for Queen Victoria and of the weddings we worked on from Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester in 1935 to the Princess of Wales in 2011. 

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is an award-winning author whose book on the 17th century Duke of  Buckingham, The Scapegoat, was published in October 2024 and has been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. Her previous biography, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio was described in The Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include Cleopatra and Heroes.  

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she has written on books and the arts for publications including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman and the TLS. She was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize. 

The lecture is about George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was the favourite of King James I - addressed him as ‘my sweet child and wife’ - and subsequently chief minister to King Charles I. Buckingham was a beauty, and he surrounded himself with beautiful things. He enjoyed exquisite clothes, like the fabulous white silk suit encrusted with diamonds that he wore to visit the Queen of France. He was a superb dancer. When he cut capers during a court masque King James startled visiting ambassadors by shouting out ‘By God, George, I love you!’ 

Dr Antonia Gatward Cevizli is an independent art historian specialising in both Italian Renaissance art and Ottoman art. She gained her PhD from the University of Warwick. Her publications focus on cultural and diplomatic exchange between the Italian city-states and the Ottomans. Antonia has lectured for a number of institutions including Sabancı University, Istanbul; Sotheby’s Institute of Art; the National Gallery; the V&A Academy and The Courtauld summer school. Her interests are wide-ranging and she also worked across the collections of both Tate Modern and Tate Britain as a professional guide. She has lived in Siena, Venice and Istanbul.

Immerse yourself in a world of carnations, tulips, hyacinths and roses as you discover the history of the famous Turkish Iznik ceramics. From its origins imitating Chinese porcelain to its 16th-century heyday and subsequent decline. The focus on flowers makes this an ideal subject for spring but it works equally well at any time of year.

Isabelle is an academic and educator specialising in the baroque, with a particular focus on Spain and its empire. She received a BA and MPhil in History of Art from Trinity College, Cambridge, where she is currently completing her PhD on the art of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán. From 2017 to 2019 she worked as the Enriqueta Harris Frankfort Curatorial Assistant at the Wallace Collection and in 2020 her book Collecting Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in Britain and Ireland was published by CEEH. Alongside her academia, Isabelle is an expert guide for a travel company, leading groups around Spain and beyond, and she also teaches regularly for the V&A, Art Fund, Royal Academy, Chelsea Arts Club, Wallace Collection and University of Cambridge.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is the last great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, yet today his works are often maligned as “cute” and “saccharine”. This lecture reassesses his paintings in the context of 17th-century Seville, the great port city for the Spanish empire and a centre of catholic reform. By looking at Murillo’s most innovative and beautiful paintings we will see how his art blends faith and empire, from his grand cycle in Santa Maria la Blanca to his small works painted of imported Aztec mirrors.  

Born in Australia, Professor Raymond Holden AM studied at Sydney, Cologne and London and is both a critically acclaimed and a multi-award winning writer, conductor, broadcaster and lecturer. He has performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Emilia Romagna and the New Symphony Orchestra of London, and has been published regularly by Oxford, Cambridge and Yale University Presses, the Royal Academy of Music Press, Hans Schneider Verlag (Vienna) and by ICA, EMI and Warner Classics. Professor Holden has appeared on BBC Television and Radio, Servus TV (Germany), RAI Television and Radio, ABC Classic FM, 3MBS FM, Vision Australia Radio, SRF (Switzerland) and Classic FM (South Africa), and has spoken at many of the world’s leading music and literary festivals, universities, conservatoires and research institutes. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours List and is currently Emeritus Professor of Music at the Royal Academy of Music, London.

Sir John Barbirolli was one of British music's greatest interpreters. For him, the works of Elgar, Bax, Rubbra, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Walton and Britten were shining examples of creative excellence, and were worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the music of their Continental contemporaries and predecessors. Whether he was performing in Manchester, Melbourne, Moscow, Milan, Milwaukee or Munich, he showcased the compositions of his fellow countrymen and became their strongest advocate. Using sound examples, rare film clips and other performance artefacts and memorabilia, this lecture will trace Barbirolli's commitment to the music of his fellow Britons and will shed new light on an artist who did so much to shape the musical life of the United Kingdom. 

Pamela has a MA Hons Art History from St Andrew's University. 

She has over 30 years of lecturing experience to undergraduates, adult groups, and to Friends and Patrons of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the RA’s Adult Education Department. She has conducted numerous guided tours, residential trips and focused gallery talks on individual works of art. She specialises in British Domestic Architecture and Modern British Art - with a particular love for the 1920s and 1930s. She had a permanent career at Royal Academy of Arts for 12 years.

She has work experience also undertaken at Bonhams, Art Loss Register and the National Trust. She now works as a freelance art consultant and lecturer and recently curated a collection for the Lansdowne Club.

Pamela's Lecture is about the 1925 PARIS EXPO - The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. What would we have seen in this landmark exhibition, if we had been one of those visitors? What drew the Crowds? And how did this seminal exhibition play a fundamental role in giving rise to a new international and truly GLOBAL style that we have come to know as ART DECO? 

Over a six month period, visitors were treated to 15,000 exhibits from 20+ different contributing nations INCLUDING Britain, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Japan. These nations also built substantial pavilions to illustrate their ideas of modern architecture and to house the various exhibits.  We will study some of these exhibits which will include furniture by Emile-Jacques Rulhmann; glassware by René Lalique; modern period sculpture by François Pompon and paintings by the artist JEAN DUPAS. 

We will also spend some time focusing on the stately Grand Salon of the Hotel du Collectionneur that was a principal feature at this 1925 exhibition and showcased stunning examples of objets d’art, furniture, crystal and fine art. 

Pamela will explain why the USA were not represented but the Soviet Union was.

Roger was a chorister at Wells Cathedral School and a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with an honours degree in English. He combined a teaching career with professional singing in London, and after obtaining a further degree in Music became Director of Music at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College in Edinburgh. After retiring in 2003 he returned to the south of England. He is President Emeritus of The Stoke Poges Society.

This lecture will examine Holst’s life, the background to “The Planets” and will explore many of his other works, including his ‘Oriental’ suite “Beni Mora” which was inspired by hearing a flute-player in Algiers, his choral masterpiece "The Hymn of Jesus" and the settings of the Rig Veda, some of the most important Hindu texts for which he provided his own translations.  His so-called serious orchestral works do not always follow convention.  For example, his concerto for oboe and flute suddenly breaks into a nursery rhyme. Gustav Holst was a true original and not fully understood in his own time.  It will be a surprising and revealing lecture, which is richly illustrated with musical examples. 

The Isenheim Altarpiece is an extraordinary work of art containing many sections and images of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ this altarpiece is the most famous work of the German Renaissance, and one of the most recognised religious paintings in the world, combining fantastic beasts, as well as images of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Canon Chris Newlands is a retired Anglican priest, having ministered across England from Portsmouth to Durham, and from Essex to Lancashire. Before ordination, he worked for the British Council in Algeria, and after ordination was posted to Romania and Bulgaria as Embassy Chaplain and Envoy of the Anglican Communion to the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe. Chris is a guest lecturer on cruise ships where his lectures relate to the destinations in the Baltic, Black Sea, and Mediterranean regions.

This lecture celebrates the 400th Anniversary of Charles I’s accession to the throne in 1625. Charles I’s obsession for collecting works of art began when as a 22-year-old prince he travelled to Spain and saw the magnificent collection of the Spanish king, Philip IV.  On becoming King in 1625 Charles purchased the fabulous collection of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua which included works by Titian, Raphael and Andrea Mantegna’s astonishing series of paintings “The Triumphs of Caesar”.  Charles engaged Peter Paul Rubens to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall and he appointed Anthony van Dyck as his Court Artist.  By the end of his reign Charles had amassed over 2000 works of art but in doing so he had bankrupted England and alienated his people.  His life ended on the scaffold in 1649 and most of the collection was sold in what was known as “The Commonwealth Sale” in 1650. While many works were retrieved by Charles 2nd during the Restoration others now hang in the great Art Galleries of Europe.

Barbara grew up in Eton with Windsor Castle as part of her daily view. She graduated with an honours degree in History and taught History for 15 years before qualifying as a Blue Badge Guide. Barbara is a lecturer for the Arts Society, and an acknowledged expert on Windsor Castle, for which she has been the Blue Badge Guides’ Site Liaison Representative since 1990.
Barbara is also the coordinator of tours of Eton College.
Barbara was the only Tourist Guide to be invited to the weddings of Prince Harry and Princess Eugenie and offers historical and royalty-themed tours of Windsor Castle and Town, Eton and Eton College.

Mexico has a vast range of festivals. Visually splendid, many feature lavish processions and masked dances with richly decorated costumes. Although some festivals commemorate national events, most are religious in inspiration. After the Spanish conquest of 1521, priests used theatrical representation as a method of instruction. Traditionally, people display elaborate nativity scenes in their homes. The Christmas story is acted out in towns and villages: adults and children perform as shepherds and shepherdesses, hermits and devils. Other important celebrations include Saints' Days, All Souls' Day, and Carnival. Chloë Sayer's book 'Fiesta' was published in 2009 by The British Museum Press. 

Chloe is a freelance specialist in the art and culture of Latin America. She has lectured in the UK, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. She has curated exhibitions, and assisted on TV documentaries for BBC and Channel 4. She has made collections in Mexico and Belize for the British Museum, and is Research Associate in the Department of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Ohtli medal by the Mexican government for her long-standing commitment to Mexican culture. Her many publications include Mexican Textiles (British Museum Press, 1990), Arts and Crafts of Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 1990), Focus on Aztecs and Incas  (Watts Books, 1995), The Incas - The Ancient World (Wayland, 1998), Textiles from Mexico (British Museum Press, 2002), and Mexico: Clothing and Culture (Royal Ontario Museum, 2015). She has also published articles in travel guides, newspapers and magazines. 

Monica is a London-based freelance lecturer, writer and exhibition organiser. She has lectured for the Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Open University, Sotheby's Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has been an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck College since 2005, and has led many tours. Her publications include Understanding Modern Art (1991), Chagall (1998/2001), The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2001),The Art and Life of Josef Herman (2009) and Art and the Second World War (2013). She is the initiator and Creative Director of the nationwide Insiders/Outsiders arts festival, and contributing editor of the companion volume, Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (2019).

Ever since the emergence of the avant-garde in the second half of the nineteenth century, art and controversy – not to say, scandal - have often gone hand in hand. This wide-ranging and thought-provoking lecture (which can also be offered as a Day of Special Interest) will examine the complex reasons for this phenomenon, and in so doing also grapple with the important issues of freedom of expression, blasphemy, censorship and taboo. As will become evident, sex, religion, politics, morality and money – either by themselves, or in combination - lie at the heart of most of these controversies – as does the power of modern art to challenge and subvert the social and aesthetic status quo.

We have all heard about audacious art heists that are more like blockbuster movies than run-of-the-mill burglaries. In this lecture, we are going to look at famous art thefts, discuss what motivates art thieves as well as examine what aspects the thefts have in common. We will also look at where the burglars made mistakes, which enabled investigators to swoop in and recover stolen masterpieces. In many cases, the police sting operations were just as daring as the thefts.

Shauna Isaac has been active in World War II art restitution for several years and has worked with families and government organisations to recover Nazi looted art. She set up the Central Registry on Looted Cultural Property and served as a member of the Working Group for the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague. Shauna studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in the UK and Smith College in the USA. She is a regular lecturer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Her publications include articles for The Art Newspaper, The Times Literary Supplement and Art Quarterly. She is a contributor to the book Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their contribution to British Visual Culture.

William Morris considered a beautiful home to be “the most important production of Art” and much of his working life was devoted to the production of household goods that were intended to bring art and beauty into a wide range of homes.  He also expended enormous time and energy on beautifying his own homes, creating first at Red House in Bexleyheath, and then at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, and finally at his country home, Kelmscott Manor, a series of 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.

Jo Banham is a freelance curator, lecturer and writer. From 2006-2016 she was Head of Adult Learning at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and before that Head of Learning and Access at the National Portrait Gallery, and Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain. She has also been Curator of Leighton House and Assistant Keeper at the Whitworth Art Gallery. She has published on many aspects of Victorian and early 20th century decoration and interiors. She recently curated an exhibition on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement for the Juan March Fundacion in Madrid and the Museu Nacional d’Art Catalunya in Barcelona and she is currently writing a book on the History of Wallpaper. She is also Director of the Victorian Society Summer School.

The Stirling Prize has celebrated the very best contemporary buildings since 1996. Some winners, such as Norman Foster’s Gherkin, of 2004, have become enormously successful and appreciated by the wider public. Others have proved harder to love. This entertaining lecture looks at some of the hits, some of the misses, and several buildings that arguably should have won, but didn’t.

Brian Stater lectured at University College London for 25 years, retiring in 2021 as a Senior Teaching Fellow. His principal academic interest lay in the appreciation of architecture and he has a lifelong enthusiasm for photography. He therefore offers lectures to The Arts Society on each of these subjects. He has written on architecture for a wide range of publications and an exhibition of his own photographs was held at UCL. Brian is a former member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography. He works with a range of cameras, including a pre-War Leica as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others. Brian is an engaging and amusing speaker who seeks to entertain as well as inform his audience.

How was one of the most important books in the English Language created by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors seven years after his death? How was the book put together, what was missing and without it would we have truly have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays? This lecture looks at the creation of the book, its structure and design, the people involved in the extraordinary project and the subsequent history of some of the copies and their distribution across the world.

Peter has a History of Art degree, an MA in London history, a PhD in the cultural history of an English Criminal, and qualifications in the teaching of adults. Until recently Principal Librarian at Guildhall Library, he has for 20 years lectured on a broad range of topics including the history of English books, portraiture, and London history. Peter has appeared on TV and radio as a consultant on the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard,  on the history of English food, and on Shakespeare’s First Folio. His most recent publication, The Curious Cookbook, was published by the British Library. Peter is currently writing a book on Eating out in Georgian London. 

Clare has an honours degree in History of Art from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her regular commitments include Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust. She also runs study tours abroad.

After nearly 20 years in the British army, Imogen went to the University of Kent to study Anglo-Saxon & Medieval History and Art, graduating with 1st class honours, followed by an MPhil from the University of Birmingham. She works as a freelance lecturer across Britain and Europe as well as lecturing on small cruise ships and running study tours and courses on land. She has written Stone on Stone: the Men Who Built the Cathedrals, published in 2019. She was made a Freeman of the City of London, being a Member of the Company of Communicators.

Nicola is an independent art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She studied at the University of York and Birkbeck College, London. Formerly a curator at Tate Britain she has curated a number of exhibitions and has published widely on J.M.W. Turner, including contributions to the forthcoming online catalogue of the Turner Bequest. She is also co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing, 2010). In addition, she has published on Walter Richard Sickert and is co-author of Tate's catalogue of works by the Camden Town Group.

This is the story of the epic rivalry between the two giants of British art, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. As unlike in background and temperament as their paintings were in style, these two creative geniuses transformed the art of landscape. This lecture/study day sets them head-to-head and examines their differences, their similarities, their battles and their shared triumphs. But who will ultimately be crowned star painter? As well as giving an overview of Turner and Constable, the subject provides an enjoyable overview of the British art world during the nineteenth century.  

Nicholas is an art historian and archaeologist. In the 1980s he became Founder- Chairman of the Friends of Shakespeare's Globe. In 2005 he was one of two Lecturer Representatives on the The Arts Society Advisory Council and also Vice-Chairman of Folkestone. He is the author of four books on the Impressionists in England, and one on the Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames. His latest book My Father, the Man who Never Was features in his latest lecture.

There were four major Frost Fairs held on the Thames between 1621 and 1814. They were depicted by distinguished foreign and British artists, sketched in prints and drawings, and described in great detail. They are also depicted in a modern mural, and described in a modern novel. A wide variety of remarkable, enjoyable or scandalous activities went on at the Fairs. Various winter sports were arranged, after which one could eat or drink at coffee-houses or taverns set up on the ice. Bonfires were lit on the Thames to roast meat, souvenir leaflets were printed and a rich variety of Christmas food was on offer. Now that Somerset House holds skating events in the quadrangle every Christmas, a look at previous Frost Fairs gives us an interesting glimpse of one of the most dramatic events witnessed by our ancestors.

Aaron is a professional scientist and researcher with the University of Cambridge and a prize-winning London Blue Badge Guide, a Green Badge Guide for the City of London and Oxford, and a City of Bath Mayor's Guide. As a palaeontologist, he is an expert on fossils and prehistoric life from the first animals to appear on our planet to the evolution of early humans. He has published research on the origin of marine animals 480 million years to the Jurassic World. After degrees in Geology & Palaeobiology, he gained a PhD from the University of London and went on to pursue an academic career working first as a research fellow in France, Germany and Japan and then as a Senior Lecturer in Malaysia and Western Australia. He has a passion for archaeology, history, architecture and the history of art. He gives lectures that encompass these subjects looking at the interface between the arts and sciences.

The National Gallery is home to one of the best collections of art in the world. Its incredible diversity allows you to progress through the history of art in a relatively small space. The gallery gives us the opportunity to discover the science behind fine art. How has scientific innovation changed the way we create art? From the development of prospective in the early Renaissance, to the evolution of different paint types. We will look at the genius of Leonardo da Vinci bringing original scientific knowledge into art. We will see how trade brought new copper minerals to Europe that would change the composition of paintings as seen in the work of Titian. Will explore the development of the landscape where artists experimented with optics and life like environments. The industrial revolution meant that science and innovation became the subject of art, with industrial scenes by Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby and the life like recreation of horse anatomy of George Stubbs. Finally, the 20th century brings modern chemistry that takes painting out of the studio and into the open air where we can see the impact of Impressionism.

Roger was a chorister at Wells Cathedral School and a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with an honours degree in English. He combined a teaching career with professional singing in London, and after obtaining a further degree in Music became Director of Music at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College in Edinburgh. After retiring in 2003 he returned to the south of England. He is President Emeritus of The Stoke Poges Society.

This lecture will examine how the peculiar geniuses of these two very different men, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, came together under the guiding hand of the impresario, Richard D’Oyly Carte, to create one of the most individual and enduring forms of theatrical entertainment. The Savoy operas, with their gentle satire, celebrate the quirks and foibles of the British nation, and are as alive today as in the 1880s. The lecture is fully illustrated with musical examples. 

Martin studied History of Art at Manchester University and afterwards spent three years in the editorial department of a fine art publishing company. His later career took a detour into the world of information technology, during which time he had the opportunity to work and live for several years in both continental Europe and North America. Having 'retired' from his field of endeavour he now devotes time to researching mainly English eighteenth and late nineteenth century French art and architecture.

Paris is probably the most beautiful city in the world. Its famous monuments, wide boulevards and open spaces are instantly recognisable, and the city epitomises a skyline of grandeur, grace and sophistication. However, until the middle of the nineteenth century the centre of Paris had changed little since the Middle Ages, with narrow streets that were dark and dangerous, and the population living in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions.

In a period of only seventeen years, between 1853 and 1870, Paris was transformed into the city we know today. We owe the creation of this ‘work of art’ to the genius and diligence of one man, Baron Georges Haussmann, the Prefect of Seine. He was not an architect or an engineer but a career civil servant who had the organisational skills to employ and direct hundreds of experts and tens of thousands of workmen to rebuild and modernise the city Haussmann was directed by the then ruler of France, Emperor Napoleon III, to undertake this monumental task. 

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.

In this lecture Simon looks at Oscar’s great literary successes, beginning with The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 followed by 4 smash hit plays in 3 years. 
He focuses especially on 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 was of its time and yet ahead of its time, satirising the shallowness and superficiality of upper class Victorian society. 

Simon explores some of the hidden elements which the audience then (and perhaps now) were not aware of and discover that for the author, this glittering triumph heralded the beginning of his own fatal final act…

2025 marks the 130th anniversary of the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Bertie Pearce is a Member of The Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star. He has performed all over the world in weird and wonderful places including: The Magic Castle in Hollywood; The Kulm Hotel in St Moritz and The Bertie and Boo Cafe in Balham, London. 

Bertie is an Arts Society Accredited Lecturer who has toured the country extensively. 'We are amused' is one of his many lectures he has given to our society.

Even though ‘work’ was the bedrock of Victorian progress and improvement, Queen Victoria’s reign saw the greatest upsurge in leisure pursuits ever witnessed. People earned more money and worked shorter hours than ever before and with the birth of the Railways and a desire to be health conscious it was a golden age for the art of entertaining oneself and being an amateur in the true sense of the word. This talk celebrates a pre-television age when the ability to amuse and entertain was paramount.

Ann and David Freese are going to give an insight as to the Art they experienced during their many trips to North America.

The AGM starts at 7pm.

Dr Caroline Levisse is an art historian based in London. She was born in France where she studied art history before moving to Copenhagen. In Denmark, she focused on research work and completed a PhD on the relations between art and religion in contemporary Scandinavian art. After graduating in 2013, she moved to London and started teaching art history with adult education providers. She has since developed a range of courses focusing on 19th and early 20th century Western art. She has published articles in French and English in academic journals as well as magazines and newspapers, such as Church Times and Arts sacrés.

There is something special about Nordic nature. Its vastness, wilderness, and remoteness are some of the reasons it is so fascinating. Let’s not forget the exceptional light conditions, such as the midnight sun and auroras. Surely, nature has been a cornerstone of life in the Nordic countries. This importance is reflected in the history of art by the significant place held by landscape painting. We will explore various ways in which nature has been represented by Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish painters from 1840 to 1910. As we will see, nature was rarely just represented in a transparent, unmediated manner. It mirrored a national identity or an artist’s inner world.

Ian gained a First Class degree from Oxford University, qualified as a Chartered Accountant and then became a professional magician. He is a Member of The Inner Magic Circle. In 2014 he published Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters & Literature. He now divides his time between performing magic, giving talks and researching and writing. His latest book, The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England, is to be published in September 2021.

Charles Dickens was an amateur conjurer for around seven years of his life, from the time he wrote A Christmas Carol to David Copperfield.  His best known show was on the Isle of Wight in 1849 when he produced a highly amusing, and informative, playbill to promote his appearance.  This playbill, in which Dickens called himself the 'Unparalleled Necromancer', provides the focus to talk about how Dickens was inspired to take up magic, which other conjurers influenced him, whether he was any good as a conjurer and how he depicted, and wrote about, magic in his own books, articles and letters.   The talk includes some Dickensian tricks performed by Ian.

Dr John Stevens is a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and a member of academic staff at the SOAS South Asia Institute. His PhD in History is from University College London. He teaches British Imperial history, Indian history and Bengali language, and is a regular visitor to India and Bangladesh. He publishes widely in the fields of British and Indian history. His biography of the Indian guru Keshab Chandra Sen – Keshab: Bengal’s Forgotten Prophet - was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2018. He appears regularly in the Indian media, and was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s In Our Time, discussing the poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore.

Before the British arrived in India, the Indian subcontinent was ruled by the Mughal Emperors. The stunning buildings and gardens they constructed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century have left an indelible stamp on India’s architectural and cultural landscape. Mughal architecture fused elements from Islamic, Persian, Turkish and Indian architectural traditions, and gave rise to some of the most beautiful and iconic buildings in the world. From the Jama Masjid in Delhi, to the Taj Mahal in Agra, to the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, this lecture will take you on a tour of some of India’s greatest buildings, and provide insight into the historical contexts and colourful personalities involved in their construction.

Peter appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

The celebration of the period following Christmas can be traced back several millennia, and to at least two cultures – neither of them Christian. One of them is the southern Roman feast of Kalends on the 1st January, and the other, the northern Nordic festivals of Yuletide surrounding the celebrations of the Winter solstice. However, it was Pope Julius I who decided to subvert the gluttony, drunkenness and sun worship to Christian purpose, and by choosing the 25th December to celebrate the birth of Christ, he neatly bridged these cultures and paved the way for future Christmas festivities. And so it is that many of our modern Christmas customs and carols bear references to traditions that have nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Nonetheless, each year, Christ’s birthday on 25th December signifies the beginning of twelve festive days of celebrations and music making. In this lecture-recital Peter Medhurst explores the wealth of Christmas music, traditions and curious legends that are connected with them. Music performed includes: Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly, The Coventry Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, The Wassail Song, The Three Kings – Cornelius. 

Clare Ford-Wille has an Honours degree in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is an independent art historian, well known to members for her courses at Birkbeck and Morley College as well as a lecturer at the National Gallery, the V&A and The Arts Society groups in Britain and Europe. She has led many tours abroad. Clare is a Vice President of The London Art History Society.

After nearly 20 years in the British army, Imogen went to the University of Kent to study Anglo-Saxon & Medieval History and Art, graduating with 1st class honours, followed by an MPhil from the University of Birmingham. She works as a freelance lecturer across Britain and Europe as well as lecturing on small cruise ships and running study tours and courses on land. She has written Stone on Stone: the Men Who Built the Cathedrals, published in 2019. She is a Freeman of the City of London, being a Member of the Company of Communicators.

This lecture takes the audience on a tour of some of the extraordinary images that exist in over 700 churches in England. The art form was in vogue mainly from C13th – C15th and rarely includes religious images despite the misericords being positioned so close to the high altar. The secular, sometimes bizarre and often profane nature of their subjects meant that many survived the Reformation and later religious enthusiasts. Much social comment can be gleaned from these carvings even though there are no records describing why particular images were chosen and very often it is not possible to date them accurately. 

Professor Marie Conte-Helm is a long-established Arts Society Lecturer with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic posts at various UK universities. She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, and as a member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts. She is widely published and has lectured throughout the UK and abroad. She is also an experienced cruise speaker and a Resident Historian with Viking Ocean Cruises, lecturing on many aspects of Asian Art and East-West Encounters. She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette by the Government of Japan in 2019.

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japanese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in the subject matter of paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with their strikingly symbolic content. Nature and artifice are intriguingly combined in such examples to capture the very essence of the landscape. Historical developments and religious and philosophical influences have informed the Japanese approach to the visual arts. This lecture will also draw upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach that has been successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad. 

Brian Stater is a Senior Teaching Fellow at University College London, where he has lectured since 1997. His principal academic interest lies in the appreciation of architecture, while a strong personal enthusiasm is for photography. He therefore explores both business and pleasure by offering lectures on each of these subjects.

He has written on architecture for a wide range of publications and an exhibition of his own photographs has been held at UCL. He is a member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography and he works with a pre-War Leica camera, as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others.

Brian is an engaging and amusing speaker who seeks to entertain as well as inform his audience.

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; Julia Margaret Cameron, a Victorian pioneer; Jane Bown, a brilliant portraitist; and Fay Godwin, who excelled in landscape photography. We also explore the work of two highly influential Americans: Dorothea Lange, who produced brilliant documentary images and Annie Leibovitz, who continues to both surprise and delight her audience.

Ray has had a life-long love of art. From 2014 to 2017, he studied art history at the Open University, and then at the University of Buckingham, from where he has an MA in the History of Art. Since 2011, he has been a guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, where he leads public tours of all the permanent displays and also undertakes exhibition tours. In his twenties, Ray studied social sciences at the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, from where he was awarded a BSc and a MSc respectively. These degrees led to a career in health and social care, with art being an evening and weekend passion. They also gave Ray a grounding in evidence-based approaches, which he now uses to ensure his art lectures are well-researched and well-informed. Ray is an experienced public speaker who, over many years, has given presentations and lectures on a range of health, art and other themes to diverse audiences in the UK, and abroad from San Diego to Hong Kong. In mid-2020, Ray began organising, hosting and presenting at many on-line art-based seminars for fellow Tate guides and other art lovers. Ray is a member of his local Arts Society in Blackheath.

While Joseph Wright of Derby painted fine portraits, and some very interesting ones of himself, he is best remembered as a painter of the new technologies and scientific discoveries that arose in, and transformed, Britain in the 18th century. His memorable works include A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, 1766, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, 1771, and his Blacksmith and Iron Forge paintings of the 1770s. This lecture will describe his involvement in the industrial scene and the enlightenment, and how it affected his relationship with the Royal Academy. It will also explain how he achieved his dazzling effects of light and shade, and how the women, children and old men who populate these paintings might be interpreted. While he lived most of his life in Derby, the importance of his short stays in London, Liverpool, Italy and Bath will be explained. The lecture will be jargon-free with audience engagement, backed by high quality images. 

Mary Rose gained an MA (Distinction) in Victorian Art and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2007 started working part-time for the Public Catalogue Foundation, now called Art UK. Accredited lecturer for The Arts Society and has given lectures all over the UK and in Europe. In 2020 presented eight lectures in New Zealand via Zoom webinar. Volunteer guide at J.M.W. Turner’s House in Twickenham and Dorich House Museum in Kingston. Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars, one of the City of London’s livery companies.

Sculpture has the power to stop us in our tracks. It can be awe inspiring, thought provoking or fun and amusing.  Many sculptures are imbued with historical and cultural reference; statues, for example, representing remarkable men and women of the past. Modern sculpture sees the world from different perspectives that may be perplexing or enlightening.

The UK’s national collection of sculpture is arguably the finest in the world and is being catalogued in a unique and ambitious project called Art UK (www.artuk.org). The lecture explores a range of works from across the country and recounts some of the fascinating stories behind them.

Having successfully completed a BA (hons) in Fashion at Reading School of Art, Jacob took up a position as an assistant for womenswear designer Donald Campbell. In 2010 he returned to education and obtained a postgraduate degree (Distinction) in Fashion Curation from London College of Fashion. Shortly thereafter Jacob joined The Fan Museum, the UK’s only Museum dedicated to the history of fans and craft of fan making. 

As the Museum’s Curator, he is responsible for co-organising its temporary exhibition programme and overseeing loans from the Museum’s extraordinary collections to organisations such as the Palace of Versailles and Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017 he curated ‘Street Fans’, a pioneering project linking street art and fan making which drew record audiences to The Fan Museum. Looking forward to 2021, the year in which The Fan Museum celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, Jacob will curate a special exhibition of fans at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion and Film, Atlanta, Georgia. 

Fans were arguably at their most prevalent in the eighteenth century and the subjects which decorated their pleated leaves convey the spirit of the age and lay bare its quirks and conventions.

Printed fans, produced in quantity and at relatively little expense, were a popular option in the eighteenth century and, according to an anonymous fan painter enjoyed by ‘ladies of quality down to kitchen maids.’

The leaves of printed fans are decorated with an especially wide variety of subjects such as ‘educational’ prints instructing women on the art of ‘Fanology’ (speaking in code by way of the fan), political trials, royal anniversaries and military victories.

Discover some of the printed fans in The Fan Museum’s collections and learn about the subjects which decorate them and the fan makers and printers who sold them.

Sarah Cove is an accredited paintings conservator-restorer, technical art historian and lecturer with more than 35 years’ experience working on paintings for the heritage and private sectors. She is based in London and Falmouth and is a specialist in British portraits, 19th-20th century British landscapes and oil sketches on paper and board. In 1986 she founded the Constable Research Project and she is now the leading authority on Constable’s materials and techniques. She has appeared in several TV programmes for the BBC notably Constable in Love with Andrew Graham-Dixon and twice on Fake or Fortune? where she was instrumental in the discovery of 3 ‘lost’ Constables. Other research interests include Tudor and Jacobean Portraiture, the 19th century Newlyn and St Ives schools and early-to-mid 20th century British painting generally. She has been a lecturer for The Arts Society since 2003 and is an experienced international speaker having lectured independently at major public and gallery venues across the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand. Her presentations are lively and enthusiastic as she speaks without notes with an inimitable passion that comes from presenting her own work and research with wonderful images.

Nigel Bates has been a performer for more than forty years in and out of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, including seventeen years as Principal Percussionist with the Orchestra and eight years as the Music Administrator of The Royal Ballet.

 He has worked with many of the leading figures in the classical music industry and was also a producer for both the BBC's Maestro at the Opera and Pappano's Classical Voices documentary series. He is a regular contributor to the printed and online content of the ROH.

He has given lectures for over thirty years, including many arts societies and conservatoires in the UK and across Australia.

The Nutcracker ballet has delighted audiences at Christmas for many decades yet it was deemed a failure at its initial performances. Based upon the current Royal Ballet production by Sir Peter Wright, this lecture takes a close look at how this well-loved ballet now takes its rightful place on stage and how the music of Tchaikovsky along with story-telling, design, dance and a little bit of stage ingenuity all come together to make the most magical escape for young and old alike. Includes several performance video clips.

Ian gained a First Class degree from Oxford University, qualified as a Chartered Accountant and then became a professional magician. He is a Member of The Inner Magic Circle. In 2014 he published Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters & Literature. He now divides his time between performing magic, giving talks and researching and writing. He is presently writing The Century of Deception: The Birth of Hoaxes in the Eighteenth Century, due to be published in the Autumn of 2020.

The first time the word cartoon was used in the sense that we know it today was in 1843 in Punch magazine.  But the employment of satire, caricature, speech bubbles and the writing of captions had been around long before then.  In this talk Ian tracks the early stages of cartoons and how, through the works of Hogarth and James Gillray, they gradually evolved.  Copious illustrations abound  from the masters of their craft such as John Tenniel, John Leech, David Low, Vicky, Ronald Searle, Heath Robinson and Giles; and, bringing it right up to date, with Gerald Scarfe, Steven Bell and Peter Brookes.

Sue was originally in art and design publishing (Phaidon and Yale University Press), and now lectures for the National Trust, U3A and City Literary Institute. She is a qualified Blue Badge Guide and gives guided walks on various themes and has published work on the lost world of the River Fleet.

Welcomed at first with open arms and bringing luxury skills, the Huguenots’ fortunes fluctuated wildly. Sue talks about their early 18th-century houses that still stand, how they were decorated and lived in; she discusses the fashionable patterned silk dresses – who designed and made them. And how, finally the trade died out, with some weavers literally dying in poverty at their looms. One of the weavers’ houses can still be visited today.

Sandy is one of the UK’s most versatile music commentators, enjoying a career that combines broadcasting, performing and lecturing. After studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and working as music director for the RSC, National Theatre and in London’s West End, Sandy Burnett spent a decade as one of the core team of presenters on BBC Radio 3. Combining engaging scholarship with hands-on expertise, he devises and leads cultural holidays all over the world, is the author of the Idler Guide to Classical Music, is a highly sought after double bassist on the London jazz scene, and was appointed the Academy of Ancient Music’s Hogwood Fellow for the 2018-19 season.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, born in December 1770, Sandy guides us through the life and work of this brilliant, cantankerous, visionary and astonishingly original composer, a man who tore up the rule book of classical music. Visual illustrations include a selection of contemporary portraits, while musical examples are drawn from his genre-busting piano sonatas, quartets and symphonies, and from the revolutionary opera Fidelio. We’re talking about much more than just a musician here – Beethoven was a true Romantic artist, or as he preferred to describe himself, a “poet in sound.”

Janet has been for eight years the Church of England’s Director of Church Buildings and Secretary of the Church Buildings Council and Cathedrals Fabric Commission, has written two illustrated paperbacks to encourage greater enjoyment of these amazing buildings, Director's Choice, Churches of the Church of England and Director's Choice, Cathedrals of the Church of England and produced and presented on a TV series on cathedrals for PBS.

She is a Cambridge graduate in History and History of Art, worked at Sotheby’s for nine years, was a trustee at the Churches Conservation Trust, the Museum of Fulham Palace and the Friends of the V&A and guided and lectured at the V&A. Janet set up and ran an architectural history course around visits to significant buildings. Janet has also given tours and lectured on secular architecture and fine and decorative arts.

She is currently a trustee of the Priory of St John (Hospitallers) and a commissioning editor for Scala Heritage Publishers, Janet received an OBE for services to heritage in January 2017.

As former Director of churches and cathedrals for the Church of England, Janet has chosen one church from every Church of England diocese to illustrate the incredible story of our churches bound up with the story of England over the last 1400 years and shares with the audience how they might select their own favourites, together with the many joys and some of the challenges in maintaining England's extraordinary ecclesiastical heritage.

Author of The Origins of Beowulf (1993) and The Reckoning of King Rædwald: The Story of the King linked to the Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial (2003). He has lectured widely around the country and has contributed much to television and radio. He is a Director of the study-centre at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk and a Time Team historian.

Who was the king who lay in state in the richly laden burial-mound discovered at Prittlewell? Preliminary indications suggest that he may have been the first Christian king of the East Saxons, Sæberht, who died c.616. We shall consider this suggestion and explore the culture of the early 7th century.

Tim's involvement in art began with the practical; for a number of years he was a professional painter and ceramicist in Scotland and Wales, before returning to university to study literature and the history of art, then training to teach adults. For the last 20 years he has been a freelance cultural art historian, specialising in 17th and 19th century art and society. He now lectures for the universities of Cambridge, Nottingham and Hull; the WEA, the Art Fund and presents residential study courses in Britain and Europe. He has recently completed a month long lecture tour of Western Australia.

Intoxicated by that most medieval of towns, Oxford, reading Chaucer, Mallory, Tennyson and Ruskin they dedicated themselves, “to a crusade and holy warfare against the age”. Morris’s determination that beauty in every day objects should be the norm rather than the exception, though impractical, was part of a Utopian idealism that touched all his creative endeavours. Burne Jones’ philosophy “only this is true, that beauty softens and comforts, inspires and rouses and lifts up… and never fails” was his shield against the harsh realities of Victorian life. Theirs was a fight that neither of them won, but their stand against materialism, ugliness, industrialisation and philistinism, can still inspire today. 

Rosalind has a BA and MA from Goldsmith’s College, and an MA (distinction) from Birkbeck College. She is an experienced guide at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy and Greenwich. She lectures at Tate, to independent art societies and on cruises. She also leads art appreciation holidays.

In 1936 Dame Laura Knight became the first woman to be elected as a full member of the Royal Academy in London, 168 years after its establishment. In her extraordinary career she painted landscapes, portraits and seascapes, as well as scenes from the circus, the ballet and the theatre. She was the only woman to be given War Commissions in both the First and Second World Wars and the only British artist to cover the Nuremberg Trials of 1946. This lecture provides an overview of her fascinating career and some of the remarkable achievements of her long life. 

Karin is known for her entertaining lectures on writers and diarists connected with the arts from the mid-18th to 19th century, and moving forward in time with Virginia Woolf. Extensive research into diaries and letters bring lectures to vivid life. Karin illustrates them with slides of contemporary pictures and portraits from varied sources.

Until late in her short life, Jane Austen’s time was spent “no more regarded in society than a poker or fire-screen.” She was sustained by a crazy sense of fun; by a love of country life, of writing and reading; and by her sister Cassandra. “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on having hers cut off too!” (Mrs. Austen) With slides of paintings, drawings, portraits, mementoes and silhouettes including Jane’s childhood copy of Goody Two Shoes, coloured by her own hand; illustrations by Cassandra for her young sister’s comic History of England; patchwork quilt made by Jane and her mother and sister; fashion plates of the day from the magazine The Gallery of Fashion; topaz crosses given to Cassandra and Jane by sailor brother Charles; lively watercolour sketches by Jane’s contemporary, Diana Sperling, from the book Mrs Hurst Dancing; a performed reading of 15-year-old Jane’s short story The Three Sisters. 

Bertie has a BA (Hons) in Drama from Manchester University, and a Diploma Internationale from the École Internationale du Théatre, Jacques Lecoq. He is a member of the Inner Magic Circle, with Gold Star. Past experience includes lecturing and performing on cruise ships, and to U3A, historical societies, festivals, schools and colleges. In addition, he has toured the world with a magic cabaret show and a one man show entitled All Aboard. He has written articles for newspapers and magazines on entertainment and theatre.

This is one of the quirkiest lectures you will ever hear. There is a universal delight in being deceived and in this lecture Bertie Pearce takes his audience on a whistle stop tour of art which fools, surprises and amuses the viewer. Beginning and ending with the Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, it encompasses Trompe L’eoil, Banksy, Bridget Riley, Arcimboldo and Escher to name a few. Hold on to your seats and get ready to be visually fried.

Roger was a chorister at Wells Cathedral School and a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with an honours degree in English.  He combined a teaching career with professional singing in London, and after obtaining a further degree in Music became Director of Music at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College in Edinburgh.

After retiring in 2003 he returned to the south of England.  He is President Emeritus of The Stoke Poges Society and Chairman of Windsor and Maidenhead Decorative and Fine Arts Society.

The lecture is about how our royal families have celebrated Christmas throughout their long history, from William the Conqueror making sure of his claim to the English throne by being crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. Feasting on a spectacular scale characterised medieval Christmases – we read of extraordinary culinary delicacies served to Henry II, crane’s flesh, peacocks and herons. Present-giving always marked the season, from the extravagant – the City of London presented Richard II with a camel and a pelican – to the witty – Mrs. Thatcher sent the Queen a pair of yellow washing-up gloves having seen Her Majesty doing the dishes without any. This lecture explores these traditions and other delights, many of which we have adopted as a necessary part of our own celebrations.

Helen Ritchie is Curator of Modern Applied Arts at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Recent exhibitions include Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, Flux: Parian Unpacked and Designers and Jewellery 1850-1940: Jewellery and Metalwork from The Fitzwilliam Museum, for which she wrote the accompanying catalogue.

Helen is also the author of A Passionate Collector: Mrs Hull Grundy and Jewellery from the Harrogate Collection (2014). She studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and the University of the Arts London, and has worked at numerous institutions including the Royal Collection Trust, Christie's, Harrogate Museums and the British Museum. She is a Trustee of the Society of Jewellery Historians.

This lecture is an overview of the work of this dynamic period of design, featuring key historicist, neo-Gothic, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Modern jewellery and metalwork, beautifully-illustrated with works from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection.

Nigel Bates is the Music Administrator of The Royal Ballet and has been a performer for nearly forty years in and out of the Royal Opera House, including seventeen years as Principal Percussionist with the Orchestra. He has worked with many of the leading figures in the classical music industry and was also a producer for both the BBC's Maestro at the Opera and Pappano's Classical Voices documentary series. He is a regular contributor to the printed and online content of the ROH.

He has given lectures for over twenty years, including arts societies and conservatoires in the UK and across Australia.

This lecture takes a look at life backstage at London's Royal Opera House and the tribulations and triumphs of working with The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet companies. We look at the way artistic inspirations, the people involved and the very special Victorian building all function together to create world-class opera and ballet in a unique environment.  Includes several performance video clips.

Professor Conte-Helm is an established Lecturer of The Arts Society with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art.  She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group and as Visiting Professor at Northumbria University. She is currently a Member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic positions at various UK universities. She is widely published and has lectured throughout the UK and abroad. She is also an experienced cruise speaker and a resident historian with cruise companies, lecturing on many aspects of Asian Art and East-West Encounters. She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations.

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japanese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in the subject matter of paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with their strikingly symbolic content. Nature and artifice are intriguingly combined in such examples to capture the very essence of the landscape. Historical developments and religious and philosophical influences have informed the Japanese approach to the visual arts. This lecture will also draw upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach that has been successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad. 

Karin is known for her entertaining lectures on writers and diarists connected with the arts from the mid-18th to 19th century, and moving forward in time with Virginia Woolf. Extensive research into diaries and letters bring lectures to vivid life. Karin illustrates them with slides of contemporary pictures and portraits from varied sources.

Until late in her short life, Jane Austen’s time was spent “no more regarded in society than a poker or fire-screen.” She was sustained by a crazy sense of fun; by a love of country life, of writing and reading; and by her sister Cassandra. “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on having hers cut off too!” (Mrs. Austen) With slides of paintings, drawings, portraits, mementoes and silhouettes including Jane’s childhood copy of Goody Two Shoes, coloured by her own hand; illustrations by Cassandra for her young sister’s comic History of England; patchwork quilt made by Jane and her mother and sister; fashion plates of the day from the magazine The Gallery of Fashion; topaz crosses given to Cassandra and Jane by sailor brother Charles; lively watercolour sketches by Jane’s contemporary, Diana Sperling, from the book Mrs Hurst Dancing; a performed reading of 15-year-old Jane’s short story The Three Sisters. 

Mary gained an MA (Distinction) in Victorian Art and Literature at Royal Holloway at the University of London. In 2007 she started working part-time for the Public Catalogue Foundation, now called Art UK.  She is an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society and has given lectures all over the UK and in Europe. She is also a volunteer guide at J.M.W. Turner’s House in Twickenham and Dorich House Museum in Kingston. She is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars, one of the City of London livery companies.

Sculpture has the power to stop us in our tracks. It can be awe inspiring, thought provoking or fun and amusing.  Many sculptures are imbued with historical and cultural reference; statues, for example, representing remarkable men and women of the past. Modern sculpture sees the world from different perspectives that may be perplexing or enlightening.

The UK’s national collection of sculpture is arguably the finest in the world and is being catalogued in a unique and ambitious project called Art UK (www.artuk.org). The lecture explores a range of works from across the country and recounts some of the fascinating stories behind them.

Having obtained a postgraduate degree in Fashion Curation from London College of Fashion in 2010, Jacob Moss took up a position at The Fan Museum, Greenwich, the UK’s only Museum dedicated to the history of fans and craft of fan making.  As the Museum’s Curator, he is responsible for co-organising the temporary exhibition programme.

In May 2018 he was awarded an Art Fund Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant in support of a collections management project to be launched later this year in collaboration with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

Fans were arguably at their most prevalent in the eighteenth century and the subjects which decorated their pleated leaves convey the spirit of the age and lay bare its quirks and conventions.

Printed fans, produced in quantity and at relatively little expense, were a popular option in the eighteenth century and, according to an anonymous fan painter enjoyed by ‘ladies of quality down to kitchen maids.’

The leaves of printed fans are decorated with an especially wide variety of subjects such as ‘educational’ prints instructing women on the art of ‘Fanology’ (speaking in code by way of the fan), political trials, royal anniversaries and military victories.

Discover some of the printed fans in The Fan Museum’s collections and learn about the subjects which decorate them and the fan makers and printers who sold them.

Rosalind has a BA and MA from Goldsmith’s College, and an MA (distinction) from Birkbeck College. She is an experienced guide at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy and Greenwich. She lectures at the Tate and Dulwich Picture Gallery, to independent art societies and on cruises. She also leads art appreciation holidays.

In 1936 Dame Laura Knight became the first woman to be elected as a full member of the Royal Academy in London, 168 years after its establishment. In her extraordinary career she painted landscapes, portraits and seascapes, as well as scenes from the circus, the ballet and the theatre. She was the only woman to be given War Commissions in both the First and Second World Wars and the only British artist to cover the Nuremberg Trials of 1946. This lecture provides an overview of her fascinating career and some of the remarkable achievements of her long life. 

AGM for members only at 7pm followed by Supper and short talk

Sally is a lecturer and tutor for the Early Medieval Year Course at V&A. Dean of 'European Studies' for 2 US Universities. Freelance lecturer for The Art Fund. Study tours, cruises and tour groups. BA (History) University of Durham; PhD (Medieval Manuscript illumination) and MA (Medieval History of Art) Courtauld Institute.

In the language of medieval colour symbolism blue was deemed the most precious of all. It conjured the colour of the sky, and by extension, the colour of heaven, God’s dwelling place. As a result, lapis lazuli, the precious purple-blue stone, only available from north-eastern Afghanistan was much sought after during the Middle Ages. This lecture explores how the stone was mined and traded vast distances; and then carved into cameos, sometimes inlaid with gold; cut into minute tesserae for micro-mosaics; or ground and refined to make the costly pigment ultramarine, which has been identified in a surprising number of medieval panel paintings, wall paintings, manuscript illuminations and sculpture. 

Brian's chief interests lie in photography, architecture and history and he combines all three in his lecturing career. He has taught at University College London, since 1997 and became an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society in 2003. He is a member of the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography and an exhibition of his own photographs has been staged at UCL. In an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the skills of some great photographers of the past, he has begun to work with a pre-War Leica camera, as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others.

British photography enjoyed a golden age in the 1960s. Young, talented newcomers broke out of the conventional studio to revolutionise perceptions of fashion, portraiture and popular culture.

This lecture looks at a range of superb images from photographers such as David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Lewis Morley,Tony Ray­Jones and Jane Bown.

Shawn is an architect working mainly on medieval churches. A Lethaby-Plunket Scholar of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and a Brother of the Art Workers Guild. He lectures on architectural matters at academic institutions and to interest groups here and abroad. He has organised and led many study days and tours and has contributed articles to magazines and journals. He is a researcher of Mamluk Jerusalem (1987) and co-researcher and co-author of A View of the Cotswolds (2004). He wrote the updating comments and notes for the new edition of A.R. Powys's seminal 1929 work Repair of Ancient Buildings (2015). 

Although valuable as the raw material for knives and other blades for far longer than it has been used as a building material, East Anglia has a heritage of flint buildings that goes back at least to the Roman occupation. In many ways its flint buildings have come to characterise the region. In many ways an absurd material with which to build; if we did not have so many flint buildings that have stood for hundreds of years we would be told that they cannot be built using flint. The use of flint in building led to innovation excluded from other masonry in Britain. Its construction and repair needs careful handling. This talk shows examples of how flint has been used in buildings in East Anglia (although the examples are relevant to other flint areas too), how they were built and how we repair them. 

Peter appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Vivaldi is the one Baroque composer whose music is a direct reflection of the city in which it was composed. Listen to a Vivaldi concerto and hey presto you are transported directly to the heart of 18th century Venice. The reasons for this are many – Vivaldi’s passion for colour, display and spectacle in his music; the unusual way in which Venice solved its problems with the poor and the homeless; Vivaldi’s health problems and his eccentricities as a man and a priest. Against the luxurious backdrop of 18th century Venice, and with live musical performances, this lecture (or study day) explores the amazing world of Vivaldi’s music - music that is as intrinsically Venetian as the canvasses of Canaletto. 

Writer and historian Simon Inglis specialises in the architecture and heritage of sport and recreation. Since 2004 he has edited the Played in Britain series for English Heritage. Although sport and recreation might seem an unlikely subject for The Arts Society, non-sporty types need have no fear. Simon’s themes are architecture, design, heritage and popular culture. After a history degree at University College London, he freelanced for various publications, including the Guardian, Observerand Radio Times. He has curated exhibitions for the Building Centre and the British Council, been a regular contributor to radio and television, has travelled and lectured extensively, and written a number of books. Two were shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, while another, on British football grounds, was chosen by journalist Frank Keating as the best sports book of the 20th century. A recent highpoint in his work for English Heritage was the listing of a 1970s skatepark in Essex, a world first that made the 10 o'clock news.

London’s great drivers have always been finance and culture. But while the arts are celebrated in the capital, physical culture is often overlooked. In this lecture, Simon traces London’s sporting culture back to the 12th century, taking in manuscripts in the British Library, records of jousting at the College of Arms, and the obscure game of Pall Mall, from which the current thoroughfare takes its name. Much of this story concerns the battle for open space, an issue for the Finsbury Archers of the 17th century no less than campaigners for playing fields in the 20th century East End slums. Other themes include the story of the German Gymnasium, boathouses on the Thames and the mania for lidos in the 1930s. Although focusing on London, several elements of this lecture (such as the Olympics, Lord’s, Wimbledon and the University Boat Race) will be of interest to audiences elsewhere. 

After nearly 20 years in the British Army, Imogen went to the University of Kent to study Anglo-Saxon and Medieval History and Art, graduating with First Class Honours. She works as a freelance lecturer across Britain and Europe as well as lecturing on small cruise ships and running study tours on land.

There is far more to be discovered about the Bayeux Tapestry than could ever be covered in one lecture. Who made it, where and why are the most frequently asked questions – although they might also be seen as less important beside the information the tapestry itself offers us. It is not just a narrative of the most famous battle in English history, but also of the build-up to it. It is a moral story showing that good cannot come to those who break their word. It is a story of kings, chivalry and ambition. Intriguingly, many crucial events are omitted and we can only speculate as to why. The tapestry itself is woven from only 10 different colours on linen, but remains as vibrant today as it must have been 900 years ago. The lecture looks at many of the scenes in detail and explores what might be learned from this depiction of a turning point in our history. 

During this lecture we will look at the work of André le Nôtre, royal gardener to Louis XIV and the magnificent gardens he created for the ‘Sun King ’ at Versailles. We will examine the laying out of the formal terraces, the great tree-lined walks and the vast expanses of water. We will discuss the glorification of the King through the iconography of the statues and great fountain groups; and the importance of playing water to make the gardens come alive. We will also look at the extravagant entertainments that took place within the grounds; and the summer houses and pleasure pavilions where the King was able to escape from the thronging crowds.

Jane has an MA History of Art, University of London. She trained at the V&A and continues to lecture there. She was Senior Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art for 17 years, becoming a Deputy Director of Sotheby's, UK. She has also lectured for the National Trust, the Art Fund, London University, Buckingham University, l'Institut d'Etudes Superieures des Arts in Paris, a private women's college in Saudi Arabia, on cruise ships and at antiques fairs and interior design conferences in America.

The wealth from his father’s business gave Tiffany the chance to travel to Europe and the Middle East before he settled down in New York to work in design. He developed some extraordinary techniques in coloured glass, which he first used in windows for the many churches being constructed in the 1880’s in the United States, but his work in domestic interiors led him to develop his lamp shades and objects by the late 19th century. The range of items produced in glass until his retirement in 1918 was quite remarkable and of a quality rarely achieved.

Diana is a freelance lecturer in ceramic, glass and the history of interior decoration in Europe, North and South America. She lectures at the Inchbald School of Design, the Interior Design School and for American University Groups, National Trust and Antiques Societies and Christie's Education. She guides groups through museum collections and country houses. She collects ceramics and glass and has a Diploma with Distinction in the Fine and Decorative Arts, Inchbald School of Design.

Van Dyck was born in Antwerp in 1599 and would die in London only forty-two years later, having transformed painting in England with his outstanding portraits, of great influence upon British painters from the 17th to the 19th centuries, such as Lely and Sargent. The lecture will explore Van Dyck’s early career in Antwerp as a pupil, then assistant to Rubens, his travels in Italy and his later outstanding career in England.

Clare has an honours degree in History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her regular commitments include Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust. She also organises study tours abroad.

Sue was originally in art and design publishing (Phaidon and Yale University Press), and now lectures for the National Trust, U3A and City Literary Institute. She is a qualified Blue Badge Guide, gives guided walks on various themes and has published work on the lost world of the River Fleet.

Over the last 25 years, the Docklands area of London has been transformed. Here are not only some of the great Georgian industrial warehouses and dock buildings, but state-of-the-art office buildings by the great architects of today. Canary Wharf is also a dramatic and witty sculpture park. Even the lamp posts, benches, pavements, planters and ventilation shafts are specially commissioned and designed to the highest standards. 

Caroline is a Design and Decorative Arts journalist and author and a  London Blue Badge Guide, specialising in themed tours for American Museums and Art Galleries. Her specialist subjects include the history of glass and London's history, galleries, museums and architecture. She is a freelance lecturer for Adult Education Groups. She enjoys devising tours, lecturing and study days based in and around London.

Caroline will be talking about the Christmas Story through the ages from before the Reformation where there was rich imagery and fabulous stories of saints. The Counter Reformation in the mid 16th century saw Catholic art stripped of its colour which was regarded as superstitious fabrication. Through these paintings we can see how Western European art developed in Italy and the Netherlands.

Karin is known for her entertaining lectures on writers and diarists connected with the arts from the mid-18th to 19th century, and moving forward in time with Virginia Woolf. Extensive research into diaries and letters bring her lectures to vivid life. Karin illustrates them with slides of contemporary pictures and portraits from varied sources.

1752-1840 Diarist, novelist, playwright, lady-in-waiting to King George lll and Queen Charlotte, Fanny Burney, best known today for her diaries, was Jane Austen’s favourite novelist. Full of shrewd and illuminating comment, and of hilarious reported conversations, the diaries offer an entertaining and highly personal view of London life. Her first novel Evelina made its young authoress the toast of London, leading to her employment at the court of King George lll as an unwilling and somewhat inefficient lady-in-waiting. Later she married an émigré from revolutionary France, and lived with him happily in Surrey and then, more perilously, in Napoleon’s France. Her account of Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo was drawn upon by Thackeray for Vanity Fair. With paintings, portraits and caricatures by artists of the day, including Hogarth, Gainsborough, Zoffany, Reynolds and cousin Edward Burney.

Hilary was formerly Print Room Superintendent at the British Museum and is now the Art History Education Officer. She lectures for the British Museum, London Borough of Bexley and the Wallace Collection. She is also Liaison officer at the British Museum with The Arts Society. As well as being Founding Artistic Director of The Arts Society of North Kent Evening she guides Special Interest Private Tours of State Apartments at Buckingham Palace.

Hilary's lecture will be about Hogarth, born in London, the son of an unsuccessful schoolmaster and writer from Westmoreland. After apprenticeship to a goldsmith, he began to produce his own engraved designs in about 1710. He later took up oil painting, starting with small portrait groups called conversation pieces. He went on to create a series of paintings satirising contemporary customs, but based on earlier Italian prints, of which the first was 'The Harlot's Progress' (1731), and perhaps the most famous 'The Rake's Progress'. In 1743 he painted the series famously entitled 'Marriage A-la-Mode'  His engravings were so plagiarised that he lobbied for the Copyright Act of 1735 as protection for writers and artists.

Andrew Davies is an Extra-Mural Tutor for London, Essex and The Open University; Author of 9 books, including The East End Nobody Knows; frequent contributor to radio and television; has lectured all over the world and organises walks to complement his lectures.

This lecture is about one of our finest architects Nicholas Hawksmoor who is barely known to the general public - and a man largely responsible for the magnificent Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard and the West towers of Westminster Abbey.  His London churches such as Christ Church, Spitalfields stand proud and true.

Starting as Sir Christopher Wren's favourite pupil, Hawksmoor developed his own unique architectural voice and, together with Sir John Vanbrugh and others, created the short- lived but glorious English baroque movement in the early eighteenth-century.

Val is a lecturer and guide at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as well as many other London Galleries and for various art organisations.

She was a former member of the teaching team at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

She lectures to The Arts Society (formerly NADFAS) throughout Britain, and to related organisations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. She lectures and runs courses at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

This lecture covers portraiture in England. For about 200 years after the Reformation, portraiture was virtually the only subject in art. During this time most major painters working here were foreigners; the most important of these were Holbein and Van Dyck. From the 18th century on, outstanding British portrait painters such as Reynolds and Gainsborough came to prominence, and the portrait has continued to intrigue and fascinate right up to the present day, as artists such as Lucian Freud continue to explore and expand the subject.

Linda Collins is a lecturer in Historic Royal Palaces & the National Trust. She is a freelance lecturer at the Tate Modern & National Gallery, London. She is also an independent lecture organiser and member of the Association of Art Historians.  She holds a BA (Hons) in Early Italian art, an MA in the works of Georges de la Tour, and a Diploma in French language and Culture.

 This lecture looks at the lively, fin de siecle Paris – the Moulin Rouge and the Can Can girls, the Cabarets, the Expositions and, of course, the artists. Baudelaire urged Manet to become a flaneur - to go out and paint the ‘real heroes of Modern life’- the absinthe drinkers, the rag pickers and the prostitutes. From the academic art recognised as the benchmark of good taste at the beginning of our period, through the Impressionist artists, the post-impressionists and finally, to Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.

Bertie has a BA (Hons) in Drama from Manchester University, and a Diploma Internationale from the École Internationale du Théatre, Jacques Lecoq. He is a member of the Inner Magic Circle, with Gold Star. His past experience includes lecturing to cruise ship audiences, the Women’s Institute, theatre clubs and the Sussex Magic Circle, as well as The Arts Society. In addition, he has toured the world with a magic cabaret show and a one man show entitled All Aboard. He has written an article on entertainment for the Guardian newspaper.

Charles John Huffam Dickens brought into the world a staggering array of wonderful characters with orphans. Starving children, misers, murderers and abusive school teachers among them. People such as Mr Micawber, Fagin and Abel Magwitch remain in one’s literary psyche long after the books are put down. Largely self-educated, Dickens possessed the genius to become the greatest writer of his age with 15 major novels and countless short stories and articles. In his lecture Bertie Pearce looks at the life and places of Dickens through his characters. The talk is interspersed with readings of this works. A truly Dickensian experience. 

Rosalind has a Masters in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a Masters in Gender, Society and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a guide and lecturer at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as well as guiding at the Royal Academy. She is an accredited (Arts Society) lecturer and leads Art Appreciation holidays to various locations.

Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor are amongst the most well known sculptors working in Britain today and have both had major commissions for public works of art.  With a wide range of inspirations and motifs, the work of these two artists provides an interesting insight into contemporary views and preoccupations in Britain.  This lecture will look at examples of both artists’ work, exploring the common ground between them, and the differences in style, technique and themes.

A postgraduate of the Sorbonne, Thirza Vallois has lived in Paris for over fifty years. She has written widely about Paris and also rural France. She lectures throughout the world and contributes to the international press, television and radio, including the BBC, CNN and the Discovery Channel.

No company had so profound an influence on 20th-century ballet as Diaghilev's Ballets russes. Descending on the Châtelet Theatre in 1909, like "a great flaming comet", their impact on Paris was overwhelming. At a time when modernity was fighting its way to the limelight, Diaghilev's troupe dazzled, astonished, occasionally scandalised, an essentially conservative society. Focusing on the sets and costumes created for the company's productions, the lecture will look into their sources of inspiration and into how, in turn, they became a source of inspiration to the artists and craftsmen working in Paris at the time, in particular in the world of fashion and design. Finally, it will examine their contribution to the revolution in the art of ballet brought about by Diaghilev and his troupe.

Dr Annie Gray is one of Britain’s leading food historians. She has degrees from Oxford, York and Liverpool, and remains a research associate at the University of York. She is also a lecturer, writer, consultant and broadcaster. She works as a consultant on historic food for organisations such as The National Trust and Historic Royal Palaces, as well as training staff in live interpretation. She also writes both popular and academic content and is currently working on her first book. You may well have heard Annie as the resident food historian on BBC Radio 4’s culinary panel show, The Kitchen Cabinet, or you may have seen her on The Great British Bake Off, or in one of her regular slots on James Martin: Home Comforts. She recently advised on, and co-presented, Victorian Bakers, a living history-based documentary for BBC2.

To many people, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a turkey and trimmings, pudding and brandy butter and a feeling by the end of the day that movement is impossible. But where do our notions of ‘traditional fare’ come from? And when modern writers ‘reinvent’ the Christmas meal, are they really doing anything so very different? This lecture charts the traditions of dinner, along with the specific foods consumed, from the high medieval to the Edwardian period. From the celebration of the twelve days under Edward I, to the masques and merriment of Elizabeth’s court, Christmas has been a celebration. But it dwindled and nearly died under the Georgians, before being reborn under Victoria. Concentrating on dinner, this talk covers the way the English have celebrated Christmas through the medium of the table.

Formerly a lecturer at the University of Bath where he was Director of Studies in the School of Education with responsibility for the professional development of teachers, John Ericson has worked extensively overseas as an educational consultant. This has given him the opportunity to give lectures and presentations at conferences all over the world. In 2008 and again in 2011 he undertook extensive lecture tours of Australia and he has been a popular speaker on The Arts Society's circuit for a number of years. In his professional life he has developed a particular interest in presentation skills including the role of pictures in learning and the appropriate use of PowerPoint. This coupled with his ability to relate well to people of all ages and backgrounds makes him an impressive and confident public speaker.As well as the talks he has developed from his professional background, he offers presentations on an eclectic range of topics that are derived from his diverse interests and enthusiasms such as, pub signs, children’s book illustrations and the Shakers of north America.

Pubs and their signs are a fundamental part of our history and cultural heritage. In this colourful and entertaining lecture John shows some of the most interesting and distinctive signs before exploring the fascinating stories behind the origin of some of their peculiar names. Who could fail to be intrigued by ‘The Bucket of Blood’, the ‘Cow and Snuffers’ or even the ‘Eager Poet’ – and who on earth was ‘Blind Jack’? 

Jane Watt specialises in interpreting paintings from 14th to 19th centuries, in particular how artists used symbols and other means to add extra meanings to their paintings. Has a degree in history of painting and architecture and spent a year in Holland studying Dutch paintings and furniture. Has also studied Elizabethan architecture and paintings and all aspects of Elizabethan domestic life. Worked for the National Trust in East Anglia and London, and for the Royal Collection. Trained as a Blue Badge Guide for London and Southern England. She has lectured for many years and she much enjoys lecturing.

Animals have played many different roles in European painting. This talk traces the different ways in which artists used animals to express extra meanings in their pictures. We will look at 15 paintings from the 1470s to the 1870s by Italian, Flemish, Dutch and British artists such as Holbein, van Dyck, ter Borch, Hogarth and Gainsborough.Then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries artists used animals in their paintings to tell us dramatic stories and to evoke in us emotional responses. We will look at works by Stubbs, Landseer and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt. These pictures will help us to uncover what has almost become a hidden language in paintings. 

David Phillips studied History at Oxford, and from 1968-82 worked for Nottingham Castle Museum. From 1982-98, he was a Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art History at University of Manchester. David published a book about museum practice with Manchester University Press, 'Exhibiting Authenticity', in 1997. 

Fake scientific and documentary evidence can play as big a role in forgery scandals as clever fabrication of the artwork itself, as we discover in a “ripping yarns” survey featuring the familiar Tom Keating and Van Meegeren amongst a supporting cast of exotic rogues. We come right up to date with the Greenhalghs of Bolton. 

Next month's talk is on Wednesday 21 June, when John Iddon will talk to us about “Hockney at 80 – Tate Britain 2017”. John is a Lecturer and Guide at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. He ran an MA course in Heritage Interpretation at St Mary's University College. He has lectured freelance to numerous art societies, to the National Trust and the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in Venice. In 2012, he wrote the new guidebook to the newly opened Strawberry Hill. This lecture, aimed to coincide with the 2017 Tate Britain Retrospective celebrating Hockney’s 80th birthday, will look at the artist’s journey from Bradford to Swinging 1960’s London and then to hedonistic California and back to Bridlington and his ambitious and extraordinary paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds in the 2012 Royal Academy Exhibition. The talk will also look at his art since 2012 and consider generally how, like his hero Picasso, his career has been marked by a restless seeking of challenge and experimentation.

 .

Studied History/History of Art at York University, followed by an MA in Fine and Decorative Art at Sotheby's Institute, London. A lecturer, writer and curator, working in the visual arts field for the last 25 years; teaches at several institutions in London. Faculty staff member at the City & Guilds of London Art School, teaching History of Decorative Style c. 1400-1950 and the Classical Tradition in Western Sculpture; also lectures on 17th and 18th century East-West trade, and modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art at Sotheby's Institute and the Institut d'Etudes Supérieures des Arts (IESA), London. Senior UK Consultant for One East Asia, a Singapore-based art gallery, art advisory and education centre, and has co-curated regular exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art in London since 2011. Writes as an arts journalist for publications including The Art Newspaper, Art + Auction, Country Life, the Guardian and the Antiques Trade Gazette. Author of a forthcoming book, Horse: a History of Equine Bronze Sculpture, to be published by the Sladmore Gallery, London. Currently working part-time towards a PhD at the University of East Anglia on the teaching practices and institutional developments in post-war British art school education.

The Fascinating World of Playing Cards

Yasha Beresiner qualified as a lawyer from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has lived in England since 1963. He has lectured extensively to antiques collectors’ clubs, the Rotary Club, Women's Institutes, Masonic Societies and Red & Blue Badge Guide audiences. He is a qualified City of London guide and a past Master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards. As well as various magazine articles, other publications include The City of London Masonic Guide (2006), A Collector's Guide to Paper Money, and British County Maps.  

Surprisingly today’s playing cards date back to 1377. Decks from 1475 still survive. The English deck is of French origin and the Company of Makers of Playing Cards was founded in 1628 to protect English makers from French importations. Cards were used as a medium of communication, propaganda or education: the 1678 Titus Oates plot is illustrated on a 52 card deck published at the time and known as The Horrid Popish Plot. Francis Barlow illustrated the cards depicting Marlborough's Victories in 1707. Modern cards follow in these old traditions with some wonderful collectors’ decks of today.

The Punch & Judy Show

Bertie Pearce has a BA (Hons) in Drama from Manchester University, and a Diploma Internationale from the École Internationale du Théatre, Jacques Lecoq. He is a member of the Inner Magic Circle, with Gold Star. His past experience includes lecturing to cruise ship audiences, the Women’s Institute, theatre clubs and the Sussex Magic Circle, as well as NADFAS. In addition, he has toured the world with a magic cabaret show and a one man show entitled All Aboard.  

Bertie’s talk goes back to origins of the Punch & Judy show and traces its changing character over the years. As a “Professor” – or practitioner – of the art, he brings Punch & Judy very much to life. We’re told by those who have heard it, that it’s a fascinating talk.

Photo by Zed 69

Children in Art

Children are everywhere in painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. The lecture will explore how children are represented, how perceptions change and the sheer variety of examples from a host of artists and sculptors like Giotto, Donatello, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Millais.

Clare Ford-Wille has an honours degree in History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her regular commitments include the Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust.

Andrew Davies, well known to us and very welcome, is an Extra-Mural Tutor for London, Essex and the Open University. Author, frequent contributor to radio and television, world wide lecturer, he also organises walks to complement his lectures.

The title of Andrew’s talk tells you what it will be all about - celebrating the Victorian Christmas.

It will be good to welcome Professor Marie Conte-Helm. Marie is an established NADFAS lecturer with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art. She is currently Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, a Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, a Member of the Board of Governors for the University for the Creative Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Marie was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and previously held senior academic positions at various UK universities. She is widely published and has lectured throughout the UK and abroad. She is also an experienced cruise lecturer. Marie was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations.

Marie’s lecture invites you to explore Chinese landscape painting through the ages in an attempt to convey the development and evolution of this important tradition. While the title, ‘Travellers Among Mountains and Streams’, is based on that of an 11th century work by the great Northern Song master, Fan Kuan, its key elements, mountains and water, or ‘shan sui’, represent the essence of all Chinese landscape painting. Using ink and brush and a variety of techniques and formats, the artist’s response to the natural landscape and to man’s place within it, has been said to evoke ‘landscapes of the mind’. By introducing a range of examples from different periods, this lecture will reveal ways of ‘reading’ Chinese landscape painting and understanding the differences in content, style and philosophical inspiration that have contributed to the uniqueness of this artistic genre.

Twigs Way is a professional garden historian, freelance speaker, lecturer, researcher and author. She has lectured at Birkbeck College and the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge University. She has also done a lot of media work, including presentingTV programmes.

 Twigs’ talk will consider Capability Brown’s life and work and examine his aims and methods as well as the accolades and charges laid at the feet of “England’s Greatest Gardener”.

Linda Smith has an MA and is a well-qualified art historian with a broad range of knowledge and a special interest in British Art and the art of the twentieth century.

This lecture will look at English painting during the so-called “Long Sixteenth Century” - the tumultuous reigns of the five Tudor monarchs. Significant artistic developments were made, largely by talented immigrants like Hans Holbein and Marcus Gheeraerts. Important works by these and other artists will be examined, particularly for their symbolism and portraiture. Other genres like religious paintings and early landscape will also feature. 

Mary Rivett-Carnac studied art and has written articles on art. She is a volunteer guide at Doric House Museum and Turner’s house, Twickenham. Since 2007, she has worked for the Public Catalogue Foundation.

In 2003, a project was set up to catalogue the UK’s collection of oil paintings. It involved visiting 3,000 locations and photographing 212,000 paintings. The lecture offers an insider’s view of this ambitious and unique project.

This talk explores the way Leonardo acquired his knowledge of anatomy from experience. It is illustrated with examples of his anatomical drawings and reflects the extraordinary accuracy of his findings.

Ian Swankie is a Londoner with a passion for art and architecture. He is an official guide at various places including Tate Modern, Tate Britain and St Paul’s Cathedral as well as being a qualified London guide. He has also established an independent art lecture group in Richmond.

Brian Stater’s chief interests lie in photography, architecture and history and he combines all three in his lecturing career. He has taught at University College London since 1997. He is a member of the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography and an exhibition of his own photographs has been staged at UCL. In an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the skills of some great photographers of the past, he has begun to work with a pre-War Leica camera, as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson and many others.

Viv Laws is an arts journalist, lecturer and curator with over twenty years’ experience in the art market. She teaches at the City & Guilds of London Art School and Sotheby’s Institute in London. She has written for many national and international arts publications including The Art Newspaper, the Guardian and Country Life. As UK consultant to Singapore Gallery, One East Asia, she has curated many many exhibitions of South East Asian art in London and Singapore.

Stephen Duffy read History and the History of Art at New College, Oxford. After working in marketing, he joined the Wallace Collection, where he is now Senior Curator with particular responsibility for exhibitions and nineteenth-century paintings. His latest publication is a book on the Wallace Collection’s miniatures. So he is very well placed to speak on his chosen topic.

Jane Watt specialises in interpreting paintings from the 14th to 19th centuries, particularly how artists used symbols and other means to add extra meanings to their paintings. She has a degree in the history of paintings and architecture and spent a year in the Netherlands studying Dutch paintings and furniture. She has worked for the National Trust and the Royal Collection.

Clare Ford-Wille has studied and lectured for over 30 years on almost every period of the fine arts, from Charlemagne to the late nineteenth century, and has led many study tours and lectured throughout the UK, Europe and worldwide. Projects have included the writing of a portion of the CD-Rom sound-guide of the National Gallery’s permanent collection, as well as contributing articles on Dutch and Flemish art to Encarta, the Microsoft Encyclopaedia.

Mr Shawn Kholucy is an architect working mainly on medieval churches. A Lethaby-Plunket Scholar of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and a Brother of the Art Workers Guild, he lectures on architectural matters at academic institutions and to interest groups here and abroad. He has organized and led many study days and tours and contributed articles to magazine and journals. Currently he is rewriting the notes for new edition of A R Powys’s seminal 1929 work Repair of Ancient Buildings for SPAB and working on a book of gardens in Rome.

Jasleen Kandhari is a lecturer and tutor of Indian art and Asian textiles for Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, the Ashmolean Museum of Art at Oxford University and Morley College. She was formerly Curator of Asian Collections at the University of British Columbia, Museum of Anthropology in Canada, the British Museum and the British Library, specializing in the artistic heritage of Asia and Canada. She is Editor of Asian Textiles with several publications in this field. Image: Temi tea garden, Sikkim, India (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Susie Harries is a writer, editor and lecturer, specialising in 20th century culture and the arts. She has published eight books on subjects including official war art, opera and the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. The most recent is the biography of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, published in August 2011. She has lectured to a range of audiences, from the Imperial War Museum and British Museum to the Twentieth Century Society and the RSA, most recently at the Cheltenham and Bridport Literary Festivals and the Victorian Society. Image by Andrew Loutit

Jane Gardiner has an MA in History of Art, University of London. She trained at the V&A and continues to lecture there. She was Senior Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art for 17 years, becoming a Deputy Director of Sotheby's, UK. She has also lectured for the National Trust, the Art Fund, London University, Buckingham University, l'Institut d'Etudes Superieures des Arts in Paris, a private women's college in Saudi Arabia, on cruise ships and at antiques fairs and interior design conferences in America.

Hilary Hope Guise lectures in the main museums in London, for American universities, and has toured widely in the USA and lectured for the Smithsonian Institution. She has also worked for the Art Fund, taught courses for Cambridge University, and has been a guest speaker on cruises. Trained as a painter at Central St Martin’s, she exhibits abroad, most recently in Berlin and France. She lives in London and in Provence.

Caroline Rayman has lectured for many years to universities and art organisations in America and on cruise boats. She was an official guide at the British Museum and has published articles on samplers. Her lecture topics range from the role of royal mistress in history to more scholarly subjects such as Frederick the Great of Prussia. Image: The canal at Sissinghurst Castle garden Source: Anne Oxley

Sian Walters studied at Cambridge University. She lectures at the National Gallery and Surrey University, specialising in 15th and 16th century Italian painting, Spanish art & architecture, and the relationship between dance and art. She also teaches private courses, and organises lectures, study days and art holidays abroad. She has lived in France and in Italy, where she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. Image: Supper at Emmaus, Caravaggio Location: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (there is another version in the National Gallery, London) Source: in the public domain

Nicola Moorby is a freelance historian specializing in British art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She studied at the University of York and Birkbeck College London. Formerly a curator at Tate Britain she has curated a number of exhibitions. She has published on Walter Richard Sickert and is co-author of Tate’s catalogue of works by the Camden Town group. She has also published widely on JMW Turner, including contributions to the forthcoming online catalogue of the Turner bequest, and she is co-editor and author of 'How to Paint LikeTurner' (Tate Publishing, 2010) Image: Walter Sickert's "Ennui" Source: Wikimedia Commons

Tim Bruce-Dick received an MA in Art History at Edinburgh University, and a Diploma in Architecture from the Architectural Association, London; he has established his own private practice specializing in dometic architecture. He has taught Design and History at Oxford Brookes University, and evening classes in the Appreciation of Contemporary Architecture. Tim organizes three or four trips each year to see the latest architecture, as well as leading regular walks in London. Image: BIG housing in Copenhagen Source: speaker's own

Pauline Chakmakjian is an independent lecturer on both eighteenth-century British Freemasonry and Freemasonry in contemporary Japan, including masonic symbolism, as well as certain aspects of Japanese culture such as historical periods, the City of Kyoto, and Machiya, traditional Japanese townhouses. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature (Whittier), a DipLaw (London) and an MA in Modern French Studies (London). She has given public lectures since 2004 and also offers lectures on more unusual subjects; she gave a lecture tour for AFAS/Australia in 2013. Image: Kyoto's geishas are called geiko Source: Pauline Chakmakjian MA

Linda Smith is a well-qualified art historian with a broad range of knowledge, and a special interest in British art, and the art of the twentieth century. She offers illustrated talks and study days on a variety of art-historical topics at a wide range of venues, including public galleries, schools, universities and cruise liners. She is also an experienced gallery guide, especially at Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, where she works as a guide and lecturer. Linda last visited us in September 2012 when she talked about Augustus John and Gwen John. Image: Paul Nash, Totes Meer, 1940-41, Tate Britain

James Taylor MA FRSA studied at the Universities of St Andrews and Manchester. He is a former curator of paintings, drawings and prints and co-ordinator of various exhibits and galleries at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is also a lecturer and ship historian on board cruise ships. James last visited us in March 2013 when he talked about Ocean Liner Art. Image: From the speaker's private collection of World War I postcards. It is by an unknown designer published by Regent Street Publishing Company in November 1914 and depicts Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, with pointing finger, borrowed from Alfred Leete's famous design first published on the cover of London Opinion magazine on 5 September 1914.

Mary Alexander has over thirty years' experience as a lecturer, with a BA in History of Art and an MA with Distinction in History of Art from University College, London. Experience includes public lectures in museums, tutoring for the Open University, visiting lecturer at Christie’s Education in London, and museum curator at Platt Hall, the Gallery of Costume, Manchester. Now a freelance lecturer to various arts, heritage and antiquarian societies, her background combines an unusual blend of academic and visual communications skills. Image: Hockney's 'Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy'

Oliver Everett, formerly in the Foreign Office, was Assistant Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales (1978-80) and then Private Secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales (1981-83). He was Librarian in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (1984-2002) and is now Librarian Emeritus following his retirement in 2002. He wrote the official guidebook and audio tour on Windsor Castle, articles on the Royal Library and helped with two books on aspects of the Royal Collection. He was educated at Cambridge University and did postgraduate work at Tufts University USA and at the London School of Economics. Image: King George III, aged 23, at the time of his coronation in 1761, by Sir Allan Ramsay

Kevin Karney JP, MA (Cantab), son of an Anglican clergyman, was brought up in Northumberland and educated at Rugby School and Trinity College Cambridge. He holds a Masters degree in Natural Sciences. After two years as a VSO teacher in North Borneo, he worked for 33 years in oil business in Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Netherlands and the UK. He retired as a senior technical executive with Shell International. Since retirement, he has involved himself in charity work and as a Magistrate in Gwent - sitting on both the Adult and Family Benches. He is a long-term NADFAS member and Treasurer of the Monmouthshire branch. With a great-grandfather and uncle who were both notable gnomonists (those interested in Sundials), he has had a lifelong interest in the subject - from both a technical and historical perspective. His specific technical expertise relates to the Equation-of-Time, which - discovered by the Greeks - is the variation between Mean Time and Solar Time. His other great interest is the history of cosmology. He is a member of both the British Sundial Society (an affiliate of the Royal Astronomical Society) and the North American Sundial Society. He has made a number of contributions to the Journals of these bodies. He has lectured extensively on the subject to both specialist and general audiences in the UK and overseas. A reading list for the lecture is available on this website; click on 'About Us' then 'Documents'. Image: University of Western Sydney Sculpture Awards 2006.

Nicola Smith spent the years between 1979 and 1993 at the sharp end of conservation and heritage management as a Historic Buildings Inspector in the Department of the Environment's Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, which became English Heritage in 1984. From 1993 to 2003 she was Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Heritage Management at the University of Buckingham. She is now co-director of Art Pursuits UK, a company organising study days, visits and tours. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Image: Pugin’s contrasted mediaeval and modern towns, from the second edition of his book 'Contrasts', published in 1841.

Sarah Lenton read Theology at King's College, University of London, and has spent most of her working life in the theatre. She regularly writes articles for Royal Opera House (ROH) programmes, lectures at study days, and gives pre-performance talks for both the ROH and English National Opera. She has written and directed more that 20 shows for the ROH LinburyTheatre, and gives tours at the London Coliseum. She does live commentary for BBC Radio 3 opera broadcasts and writes scripts for BBC Radio 4. She is also a cartoonist. Image: The Royal Opera House (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Formerly Assistant Director and Director of Grants at the Art Fund (1992-2006), Mary Yule studied art history at Birkbeck College and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she obtained an MA in 20thCentury British Art. She has lectured for the Art Fund, at Kingston University, the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and at Museums Association conferences and study days. Her publications include A Place for Living Art: The Whitechapel Art Gallery 1952-68 in Artists and Patrons in Post-War Britain (2001) and articles in Art Fund and museum publications. A two-page list of the sculptures and places included in the lecture is available on this website; click on 'About Us' then 'Documents' (when it appears, click anywhere on it to enlarge). Image: 'Angel of the North', Gateshead © Antony Gormley

Susie Harries is a writer, editor and lecturer, specialising in 20th century culture and the arts. The most recent of her eight published books is a biography of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, published in August 2011. Image: St Mary's Church, Great Warley ©John Winfield

Our speaker, Clive Barham Carter, is a retired history teacher from Charterhouse School, having studied history and Egyptology at Cambridge. His interest in cars and coachwork dates back to when he bought his first pre-war Rolls Royce while still a student. He has since owned and enjoyed several Rolls Royces and Bentleys and indeed his range of lectures includes the history of the motor car. Image: (source: Clive Barham Carter)

Mark Bills was until recently the Curator of the Watts Gallery. He has extensive experience of the world of art, being formerly Senior Curator of Paintings, Print and Drawings in the Museum of London, and Visual Arts Officer at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. His written work includes G.F.Watts, Victorian Visionary: Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection, The Art of Satire - London in Caricature as well as Art in the age of QueenVictoria. He has also contributed numerous articles in various books and publications. Image: Watts Gallery Exterior, Photograph by Julian Nieman, ©Watts Gallery

Chloe Sayer is a fellow the Royal Anthropological Institute and has made ethnographic collections and carried out fieldwork in Mexico for the British Museum. She has curated several exhibitions of Mexican folk art and has worked on a number of television documentaries about Mexico and Peru for Channel 4 and the BBC. These include Full Circle with Michael Palin. Image: Zapotec women wearing richly embroidered fiesta attire in the state of Oaxaca (Photograph by Chloë Sayer)

Toby Faber read Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and his career has been through investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber & Faber, where he still remains on the board. He has written two works of narrative history, Stradivarius and Fabergé's Eggs, and has given lectures associated with these two subjects at various venues, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bath Theatre, the Library of Congress and the Huntingdon Library, as well as at a number of literary festivals. Image: Coronation Egg by Fabergé (Image courtesy of The Forbes Collection, New York. Photographed by Joseph Cosica, Jr. Copyright (c) All rights reserved.)

Tom Errington has been a practising artist, gilder and painter of trompe l'oeil murals for over 20 years. Previously a lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, he worked in the theatre on the technical side as production manager at Nottingham Playhouse and was a producer and director of independent films. He is adviser on art, art history and stained glass to the Diocese of Southwell and adviser on stained glass to Coventry Cathedral. Image: Painted Trompe l’oeil fireplace and invitations (Painting and photograph by Tom Errington)

James Taylor MA FRSA studied at the Universities of St Andrews and Manchester. He is a former curator of paintings, drawings and prints and co-ordinator of various exhibits and galleries at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is also a lecturer and ship historian on board cruise ships. Image: Poster of the liner Nieuw Amsterdam, design inspired by A M Cassandre’s work (image by Ten Broek; with the permission of Holland America)

George Hart was Staff Lecturer at the British Museum 1973-2004, particularly on the Ancient Egyptian and Greek collections. He has a wide experience of talks and study-days to a variety of audiences and is author of books on Egyptian monuments and religion. Chairman of the Friends of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology from its foundation for twelve years, he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Board of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Peter Medhurst appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Image: San Marco horses (source: Wikimedia Commons, which is a freely licensed media file repository)

Anton Gabszewicz has been an international specialist in English ceramics for over 40 years. He joined Christie’s in 1975 where he catalogued sales of British ceramics and prepared inventories for insurance and probate of both European and oriental porcelain from British country houses. He was a principal auctioneer for the firm, becoming a Director in 1989 and took over as head of the European Ceramics Department. Since 1992 he has acted independently as a consultant in this field, arranging evening courses on 18th century English porcelain for Christie’s Education. He has recently hosted a series of tours for the National Trust of the important porcelain collections at Fenton House, Hampstead and has published several books on Bow Porcelain - and jointly compiled a pioneer Exhibition Catalogue on Isleworth Porcelain. Anton lectures extensively to ceramic societies and other institutions in the UK, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Image: Goat and Bee jug, Chelsea porcelain (source: Wikimedia Commons, which is a freely licensed media file repository)

Linda Smith is a well-qualified art historian with a broad range of knowledge, and a special interest in British art, and the art of the twentieth century. She offers illustrated talks and study days on a variety of art-historical topics at a wide range of venues, including public galleries, schools, universities and cruise liners. She is also an experienced gallery guide, especially at Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, where she works as a guide and lecturer. Image: Augustus John on board a ship (source: Wikimedia Commons, which is a freely licensed media file repository)

Dr Libby Horner is a freelance art historian, curator, film producer, lecturer and writer. She has been commissioned to write many film scripts, whose subjects include Patrick Reyntiens, among others. Dr Horner has had unprecedented access to previously unseen sketchbooks and autonomous panels and her film about the artist Paul Reyntiens was released in 2011. Image: Baptistry window, Coventry Cathedral (photo by Steve Cadman, on wikipedia)

Janusz Karczewski-Slowikowski is a freelance lecturer and researcher in English furniture history and also an antique dealer. His lectures seek to explain furniture in terms of the skills and materials employed in its design and construction as well as its socio-economic significance. He has lectured to over half the British NADFAS societies as well as those in Australia and many others in European countries. Image: Klismos chair on the stele of Xanthippos, Athens, circa 430-20 BC (source: Wikimedia Commons, which is a freely licensed media file repository)

Dr Twigs Way is a garden historian, author, researcher and lecturer. After a period of lecturing for the University of Cambridge she now carries out freelance research in the history of specific gardens and parks for bodies such as English Heritage and the National Trust. With a specific interest in social and political aspects of the garden, as well as the portrayal of parks and gardens in art and literature, Dr Way likes to explore the quirkier and less trammelled aspects of gardens in the past. Publications include Allotments, History of Garden Gnomes, History of Women in the Garden and the highly illustrated A Nation of Gardeners. Image: Nepenthes northiana by Marianne North (source: Wikimedia Commons, which is a freely licensed media file repository)

Mark Corby is a freelance lecturer in history and architecture and a occasional lecturer at University College, London. He is lecturer and tour leader on numerous “adventures” to Mediterranean countries and to Ireland. He has been a television historical documentary presenter. Image: The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey (this image is in the public domain, source wikipedia)