Charles Saatchi  

A MODERN MEDICI ?

Barry Venning

Barry Venning is a historian of British Art with a particular interest in the work of J M W Turner, on whom he has published widely, including the volume on Turner in Phaidon’s Art & Ideas series and several catalogue essays for exhibitions in the UK, Germany, Italy and Poland. He was the BBC’s script consultant and expert commentator for a 2005 documentary on Turner’s Fighting Temeraire and has recently taken part (2013) in a BBC documentary called The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution. He has also published a study of John Constable’s paintings. His interests and his teaching extend from medieval architecture to contemporary British art. He is currently Associate Lecturer in the History of Art with the Open University and lecturing on a freelance basis for Nadfas, Christie’s Education and other organisations.  

The Living and the Dead - Victorians & Their After-Life

Those Crazy Years - Life & Art in Paris during the Jazz Age

Dame Laura Knight

Dame Laura Knight, DBE RA RWS was an English artist who worked in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint. Knight was a painter in the figurative, realist tradition and who embraced English Impressionism. In her long career, Knight was among the most successful and popular painters in Britain.

Chatsworth and The Devonshires

A history of the Devonshire collection and its home, Chatsworth, told chronologically through the interests, characters and tastes of its collectors over 16 generations, from Elizabethan beginnings to the current Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and their family.

Each generation has left its mark on the collections, whether as connoisseurs, enthusiastic patrons and acquirers, through fortuitous marriage or the occasional benign indifference, and it is fascinating to see how these diverse personalities have contributed to what is now considered one of the finest surviving family collections in Europe. This story features outstanding work by artists such as Raphael, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Canova, Freud and Craig-Martin, and comes right up to date with the current Duke and Duchess’s passion for modern British sculpture and decorative arts. The lecture includes Old Master drawings, rare books, silver and jewels, ancient and modern portraits, sculpture spanning centuries of European culture and other unique treasures.

Simon Seligman works in cultural lecturing, assessing quality in tourist attractions, and communications in the field of the arts, heritage and tourism.

The Commedia dell 'Arte 

Bertie Pearce

Bertie Pearce is a Nadfas Accredited Lecturer who has toured the country extensively. On the 20th May, Bertie's lecture will be on the Commedia dell'Arte. A brief synopsis is below.

At the end of The 15th Century when the urge for religious drama had died out a new secular drama emerged in Italy. It was an improvised drama based on stock plots (scenarii) and stock characters such as Signor Pantalone or Il Dotore. Most of the characters were masked. The engine of the show was the antics of the comic servants, known as Zanni, who worked comic bits of business, lazzi, which were physical and hilarious. Many of the actors had special skills as musicians, jugglers and acrobats which they integrated into their characters. Conventional plot lines drew on themes of adultery, money, jealousy, old age and love.

The troupe of performers would travel from Town to Town, performing outdoors on trestles set up in the market square and would seek their fame and fortune either by patronage or else by passing the hat and receiving their money from an enthusiastic audience.

Burned, Bombed or Bulldozed - Britain's Lost Houses

Napoleon Bonaparte

Scandal, Spite & Shuttlecocks - Wentworth Woodhouse

The Souls - Art in Edwardian England

The Coterie, children of the Souls; an alternative aristocratic way of life in Edwardian England. The Souls, and their children, the Coterie, were a self conscious group of aristocrats who, in the late Victorian and Edwardian period protested against the philistinism of contemporary aristocratic society, preferring personal intimacy, friendship and love of the arts, to field sports and vulgar display.

NORMAN ROCKWELL'S         CHRISTMAS WISH

Focusing on the role of posters and poster artists in the history of advertising, this global-award winning Creative Director of international advertising agencies has lectured extensively on design, illustration and photographic styles as they have influenced the building of brands. He has himself created posters for major brands including British Airways, Nestlé, Sony, General Motors and Shell. His travel writing and photography has appeared in various airline magazines as well as Time. He has also written and produced several hundred TV and Radio commercials and corporate video programmes. A member of Winchester DFAS.

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK

THE MAN WHO DREW OLIVER TWIST

George Cruikshank is now best known for his brilliant drawings for Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist.  But this is to do his prodigious skills and work output a disservice. Cruikshank moved effortlessly from biting satirical prints in the Georgian era through to producing engravings for numerous books and journals in Victorian times. Adapting his talents both to new printing technology and the new demands of the reading public, he is considered by many to be the greatest illustrator of the 19th century. His personal reputation hasn't survived quite so well, partly through his obsession with temperance in later life and the fact that when he died, aged 85, it was discovered he had fathered eleven illegitimate children with his mistress.

From Paris to New York

American Impressionism

Bernard Allan

Only one American, Mary Cassatt, exhibited with the Impressionist group in Paris but, by the mid 1880s American Impressionism had become an important art form in the U.S., inspired by, but not imitating the French prototype.

Artists such as Childe Hassam successfully blended their academic training with the vitality of Impressionism, which they had encountered on their European travels, to produce paintings that conveyed the dynamism of the new country and its rapidly expanding cities; especially New York.

Simultaneously, painters like Theodore Robinson, who had been inspired by Monet at Giverny, based themselves in artists’ colonies on the east coast of America. Here they found subject matter for paintings with a sense of nostalgia for a way of life that was fast disappearing as the traditional industries of fishing and agriculture were supplanted by the influx of tourists. Meanwhile John Henry Twachtman drew on diverse influences to produce wonderfully evocative winter scenes.

Impressionism remained popular with American artists until the 1920s, although by the early 20th century the style had been supplanted in status by the new urban realists.  

American Impression embraces many superb artists who are barely known on this side of the Atlantic. This visually exciting lecture (or special interest day) seeks to redress that situation.