Crowds and Clouds of Angels
David Hockney – The Old Master of the Modern World
Digby Hall, Sherborne
Wednesday 7 October 2026
3 pm and 7 pm
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.
Lecturer: Douglas Skeggs
Douglas read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 8000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at The Study Center, Christie’s course ‘The History of Art Studies’ and other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain’s Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hanger in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Wednesday 1 July 2026
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 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?
Wednesday 1 April 2026
Caroline Petipher
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.’