Tuesday 10 November 2026
Paula Nuttall
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Presenter: Paula Nuttall
Paula gained her BA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute. She is a specialist in Renaissance art, both Italian and Northern European, on which she has published widely, notably “From Flanders to Florence: the Impact of Netherlandish Painting 1400-1500 (Yale 2004)”. She has collaborated on major exhibitions including “Jan van Eyck: an Optical Revolution (Ghent, 2020)”. She was formerly a Director of the V&A Medieval and Renaissance Year course, and lecturer at – among others – the Courtaul and the British Institute of Florence. Now largely retired, she continues to lecture for the Arts Society, to research and to write.
Tuesday 18 November 2025
Julian Halsby
In 1879 following his disastrous court case against Ruskin, James McNeil Whistler arrived in Venice bankrupt and depressed. The Fine Art Society had paid for him to work there for three months, but he remained for over a year producing some of his best etchings, pastels and oils. His Venetian exhibitions in Bond Street were an enormous success and his position as the leading modern artist in Britain was re-established.
John Singer Sargent had been to Venice as a child, but returned in 1880 to start a long love affair with the city. His relations bought the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal which became his spiritual home from where he set off each summer to paint sparkling watercolours, some of his finest works.
Other artists working there before the First World War include Walter Sickert and Arthur Melville. The day ends with a brief look at contemporary artists Ken Howard, Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan who have all made Venice their own.
Arts and Crafts Movement in Cotswold Churches
Tuesday 10 March 2026
Kirsty hartsiotis
The Cotswolds was one of the first rural centres of the Arts and Crafts Movement, with architects and designers of the Movement moving to the area to work and craft from the 1890s onwards. The designers and makers who settled in the area became a key part of the artistic and cultural life of the area, their influence still felt today by the many crafters who life and work there. From the first, churches in the region of all denominations commissioned work from Arts and Crafts designers, from whole churches, including one of the so-called ‘cathedrals of the Arts and Crafts’ to some of the most important Arts and Crafts stained-glass schemes. Their work and its legacy is very much alive in Cotswold churches today.
This loose association of artists who met in the inn in Barbizon – a small village near Fontainebleau – included such names as Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet to name but three. They in their turn inspired the French Impressionists some of whom studied in Barbizon.