Lectures

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Friday 24 January 2025 – Vauxhall Revisited: London’s Pleasure Gardens, 1660-1877

Lecturer: Jonathan Conlin

Seasonal suburban resorts like Vauxhall provided generations of Londoners with a space to perambulate, flirt, eat and listen to music. This talk begins with the story of Restoration-era Spring Gardens before moving on to Ranelagh and Vauxhall in their Georgian heyday, finishing in the 1870s Cremorne Gardens. It explains and illustrates their multi-sensory appeal, shows how they inspired artists such as Hogarth and Whistler and shaped today’s Proms.

Friday 28 February 2025 – Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst

Lecturer: James Bolton

The Arts and Crafts gardens created, in particular by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, set a standard against which English gardens would be measured for the next 60 years. Sissinghurst, created and gardened by Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet and garden writer, and her husband, Harold Nicholson, from 1930 to her death in 1962, is the perfect example of this style; wonderful plantsmanship set within a framework of hedges and vistas.
Sissinghurst is the child of Knole, the sprawling Elizabethan house that Vita did not inherit, described by her as having “an inward gaiety of an aging woman who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go.”
The Nicholsons acquired a ruin and, to their intense surprised, created, along with Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote, the quintessential twentieth century English garden.
This lecture looks at the life of Vita Sackville-West and the extraordinary garden that she created which nearly 60 years after her death continues to charm and delight.

Friday 28 March 2025 – The Art of the Steal: Nazi looting during World War II

Lecturer: Shauna Isaac

The Nazis looted over 20% of Western Art during World War II, confiscating art from Jewish families and emptying museums throughout Europe. This lecture will provide an overview of Nazi looting by setting the scene in Nazi Germany, discussing Hitler’s obsession with art and how the Monuments Men recovered art after the war. Several landmark cases will be discussed in detail, including Gustav Klimt’s celebrated Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer and the stash of over 1200 artworks found in possession of the son of a notorious Nazi dealer.

Friday 25 April 2025 – ‘The Dancing Faun’: A personal story of a masterpiece

Lecturer: Bertie Pearce

In this lecture Bertie recounts the extraordinary tale of how a small bronze statue, which had sat in his Grandfather’s garden for 40 years, was discovered as a master piece and ended up in the Getty Museum, California. Adriaen De Vries (c.1556-1626) was a Northern Mannerist sculptor born in the Netherlands. A technical virtuoso, he created spectacular bronzes for the most discerning patrons of his time, including the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Prague.He excelled in refined modelling and bronze casting and in the manipulation of patina and became the most famous European sculptor of his generation.

Friday 23 May 2025 – William De Morgan, Victorian Art Potter

Lecturer: Matthew Williams

William De Morgan was an intimate friend of William Morris and ‘Ned’ BurneJones. He began his career as a painter; he became a stained-glass maker, best-selling author and one of the most imaginative and amusing potters and tile-makers of the nineteenth century. His work now commands extremely high prices in the saleroom, as does that by his wife Evelyn, herself an accomplished artist. The lecture examines their fascinating and delightful artistic partnership.

Friday 27 June 2025 – The Art of Dining. A look at dining style from Pompeii to the present day

Lecturer: Clive Stewart-Lockhart

Humans have been very good at recording how and what we eat through the ages and this talk looks at these themes starting with the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum up to the modern day. The talk looks at the objects involved with the eating and presenting of food and wine beginning with a banquet in Pompeii where the guests seem to be wearing very little to the present day, where, in many houses, the tables are dressed with little other than a knife, fork and ketchup bottle. Even these, however, can be given a classy upgrade.

Friday 25 July 2025 – The Field of Cloth of Gold: 6,000 Englishmen in France for 18 days – how did they do it?

Lecturer: Joanna Mabbutt

In June 1520 Henry VIII and Francis I meet to ratify an Anglo-French alliance and celebrate the betrothal of Henry’s daughter Mary to the Dauphin. The two handsome ‘Renaissance Princes’ have imperial ambitions and are eager to display themselves as magnificent nobleman and warrior kings. Each brings an entourage of 6,000 to a field south of Calais for 18 days of various events and entertainments staged to display the skill and splendour of each King and country.