Later Lectures
Wednesday 1 April 2026
Carole Petipher
Notre Dame de Paris – Its iconic status in France’s history
In December 2024, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, often referred to as the Soul of the City, reopened to the public after a devastating fire had threatened to destroy it 5 years earlier. A seemingly impossible target had been set by the French President to rebuild; yet huge sums of donated money and teams of expert restorers ensured the timescale was met. Such is the symbolic power of this cultural icon in the psyche of the French people and indeed people beyond. In this lecture Carole considers what makes Notre Dame so special. Rather than looking into the fine details of its restoration; she will look instead at its key location, some of its most precious artefacts, and through images consider some of the most significant events to have been staged inside the iconic silhouette. Along the way, she will introduce a much loved fictional character Quasimodo, Hunchback of Notre Dame , who was responsible for the cathedral’s salvation the first time it faced destruction.
Wednesday 6 May 2026
David Winpenny
Going with the Flow
the Flow’ looks at all things watery, from ancient oases to Egyptian and Roman gardens, pools in Persian Paradises, cascades in Italian jardini and their progeny in later centuries, fountains from simple spurt to fantastic frolic, formal and informal lakes and ornamental canals, from Dutch influence to modern usage.
The world’s longest cascade is near Naples, while the most lavish is at Peterhof near St Petersburg. the world’s tallest gravity-fed fountain is in a Cotswold garden) while artificial waterfalls also have their place as gardens became more natural in the 18th century.
The formality of canals, influenced both by Louis XIV’s Versailles and by the Dutch, gives way to the irregular shapes of lakes, while in the 21st century we see a return to greater formality, especially in the use of water to offset iconic buildings.
And the talk will have a few surprises. How do crayfish figure in the story of water in gardens? Did suddenly surprising your guests by squirting water at them really make them laugh? Why did Louis XIV need fourteen 38-foot water wheels and 60 staff at Versailles? How does Catherine the Great’s dinner service feature here? And, what do we know about Prior Wilbert’s Waterworks?
The world’s longest cascade is near Naples, while the most lavish is at Peterhof near St Petersburg. the world’s tallest gravity-fed fountain is in a Cotswold garden) while artificial waterfalls also have their place as gardens became more natural in the 18th century.
The formality of canals, influenced both by Louis XIV’s Versailles and by the Dutch, gives way to the irregular shapes of lakes, while in the 21st century we see a return to greater formality, especially in the use of water to offset iconic buildings.
And the talk will have a few surprises. How do crayfish figure in the story of water in gardens? Did suddenly surprising your guests by squirting water at them really make them laugh? Why did Louis XIV need fourteen 38-foot water wheels and 60 staff at Versailles? How does Catherine the Great’s dinner service feature here? And, what do we know about Prior Wilbert’s Waterworks?
Wednesday 3 June 2026
Isabelle Kent
Diego Velazquez: Painter and Courtier for Philip IV
When Diego Velázquez arrived at the court in Madrid from Seville, he stepped into a world that was the polar opposite to the bustle and chaos of his hometown. The court of Philip IV was governed by strict codes, hierarchies and prejudices. Yet, in his portraits of the king, courtiers, jesters, and dwarfs Velázquez manages to peel away mask of formality to reveal the individual beneath. This lecture explores these paintings and the relationships behind them. I will end with a discussion of Velázquez’s greatest and most enigmatic masterpiece, Las Meninas.
Wednesday 1 July2026
Alison Bevan
An Introduction to The Newlyn School
In the 1880s, the fishing village of Newlyn in the far West of Cornwall became a mecca for rural realist painters, who documented the lives of the local community in their beautiful and moving paintings. This talk will outline the key characteristics of this famous art movement, introducing the ‘father of the Newlyn School’ Stanhope Forbes and his talented wife Elizabeth (nee Armstrong), along with a host of their fellow artists, including Frank Bramley, Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier Tayler and Henry Scott Tuke tales, as well as some of the real-life characters they depicted.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Gavin Plumley
Brueghel, The Seasons and the World
In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was commissioned to create a series of paintings for a dining room in Antwerp. The images, charting the course of a year, changed the way we view the world through art. Landscape had previously been a decorative backdrop to dramas both sacred and profane. But in Bruegel’s hands the landscape and our interaction with it became the focus. Looking at paintings such as The Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow and The Gloomy Day, this lecture explores how Bruegel pioneered a whole new way of thinking about the environment and our individual places within a shifting cosmos.
Wednesday 7 October 2026
Douglas Skeggs
David Hockney – The Old Master of the Modern World
From the early sixties, when he left the Royal College of Art more famous than his teachers, Hockney’s paintings have shown a charm and humour that sets them apart from others of his generation. A naturally gifted draftsman, his love of ingenious visual devices has led him to experiment with a whole range of techniques, from stage design to coloured paper making. From the early abstract expressionist images, through his famous Californian scenes of swimming pools to the photo-montages of the mid eighties, this lecture follows the career of an artist whose wit and imagination has never faltered.
Wednesday 4 November 2026
Howard Smith
The Golden Age of the Transatlantic Liner
At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the domination of shipping routes to and from America that was the golden prize. Here is the fascinating story of how each company positioned itself in the size of liners, the luxurious environments with posters, art, ephemera and the offerings across the Atlantic Ocean either side of the Great War. We look at the breathtaking interiors as portrayed in the Shipbuilder special supplements of the day and the Sales Brochures. What were the reasons for the tragedy of both the Lusitania and Titanic? What art was lost on Titanic? Was it just plain sailing on the Atlantic? Howard Smith’s lectures have a reputation for stunning graphics – this lecture is no exception and also has vintage film of RMS Olympic with the building and launch as well as a glimpse of the First Class dining experience – up to 1933 these were floating luxury hotels for the seriously rich and below decks a cramped one-way ticket for the 12 million immigrants to the States. …the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh… It then all changed to cruising.
Wednesday 2 December 2026
Imogen Corrigan
Crowds and Clouds of Angels
There are so many angels there could seem to be an avalanche of them. It’s unusual for there not to be an image of at least one angel, if not many in our churches and cathedrals and yet passers-by know very little about them. We hear of tens of thousands in the Bible and other early texts but a surprise is how many of their names are known to us. Where do they come from and what are they for? We can see a hierarchy in the Nine Orders of Angels but that’s rather general and was devised in the 6th Century. What about the rest of them? Are they male or female? And what do they look like? Angelic beings wearing white nighties and gold wings are more of a Victorian concept and it seems that the biblical ones were originally flightless – so when did they get their wings?
Frick: The Man and his Museum
Digby Hall, Sherborne
Wednesday 4 March 2026
3 pm and 7 pm
Shot twice in the neck and stabbed five times in the leg, Mr Frick was back behind his desk within the week. Today, his name is synonymous with beauty and culture through the house on which he spared nothing, built with the sole intent of leaving it, and everything in it, as a gift to the nation. But just who was Henry Clay Frick, and how did this man who swapped a beehive oven for the classroom become the most prominent art collector of his generation in America, and the benefactor of its finest collection of European paintings? Join me on another astonishing ride from rural Pennsylvania to Gilded Age New York as we pull back the curtain on Frick: the man, and his museum.
Lecturer: Mark Meredith
Mark is the founder of AmericanAristocracy.com and lectures regularly in Europe and the United States, notably at the New-York Historical Society. After leaving Stowe School, Mark worked for twenty years as a plumber in London. However, his real passion has always been history, and he delights in ‘telling a story,’ not ‘giving a lecture’. Packed with facts and laced throughout with humour, he takes a particular joy in bringing to life the stories behind the people that shape houses; and, his area of special interest lies in the great American houses and American social history, from pre-revolution to the end of the Gilded Age
Earlier Lectures
Wednesday 4 February 2026
Tom Flynn
Art Crime in the Cinema
Whenever a major museum is robbed of its treasures, the BBC website reports the event under the heading ‘Entertainment’. The implications of this are more interesting than they at first seem. Art thefts have been a constant presence in the news media since the early decades of the twentieth century and Hollywood and international cinema were not slow to catch on to the general public’s fascination with these dark developments. This talk seeks to draw connections between three strands — the rise of the international art market from 1900, the theft of major works of art from museums and private houses in the twentieth century, and the emergence of cinema as an art form in the early twentieth century. All three can be seen to feed off one another. Criminals noticed the extraordinary prices being paid for masterpieces and responded accordingly, while cinema latched on to these real-life thriller crime narratives, turning art thieves into glamorous anti-heroes such as Thomas Crown. More recently, art collectors have sought ever more secure locations in which to store their art, with freeport warehouses now holding billions of dollars of the world’s masterpieces. This talk traces the connections between some of the most popular art heist movies and the reality of the art market and reveals one or two little-known examples of early ‘art crime cinema.’