Go to any ancient building and there will be interesting, exciting, and romantic stories presented to the visitor. They are commonly believed and widely repeated – but are they really true?
These stories include those of secret passages linking ancient buildings, spiral staircases in castles giving advantage to right-handed defenders, ship timbers used in the construction of buildings on land, blocked doors in churches which are thought to keep the Devil out and claims to be the oldest pub in the country. The three talks for this study day will be peppered with case studies from our own area, including the George Inn in Norton St Philip.

Matisse in Moscow: A Revolutionary Collection in Pre-Revolutionary Russia. In 1909, Henri Matisse received a commission from his Moscow patron Sergei Shchukin for two enormous canvases. After creating a scandal by showing Dance and Music at the Salon d’Automne, Matisse travelled to Russia to help install them in the stairway of Shchukin’s mansion. This lecture tells the story of how a Russian industrialist fell in love with Matisse after infatuations with Monet and Gauguin, how Matisse fell in love with Russian icons and how his riotous paintings electrified the artistic rebels of Moscow’s young avant-garde.
From Van Gogh to Cézanne: The Morozov Brothers and the Parisian Avant-Garde discusses the remarkable collection built up by the Morozov brothers and their interest in contemporary art.
Picasso in St. Petersburg: The Hermitage and its Masters of Modern Art. The pioneering Moscow collectors Shchukin and Morozov emigrated after the Revolution – their collections were united to create the pioneering State Museum of New Western Art. In 1948, however, Stalin ordered its closure. This final lecture recounts the museum’s history. It tells how a brave female curator helped rescue the museum’s most radical paintings for the Hermitage amid fears they would be destroyed, and what happened next to Matisse’s The Dance and 27 Cubist masterpieces by Picasso.