STUDY DAYS PAST – ARCHIVE
2024 and 2025
Tuesday 25 March 2025
Kathy McLauchlan
The Barbizon School and the Lure of Nature
At the end of the 18th century nobody imagined that landscape painting would one day lead innovation in French art.
The first lecture sets the traditional ideals of landscape painting against developments in the methods and materials employed by landscape painters in their search for truth to nature.
The second describes how, in the 1820s, French painters including Camille Corot and
Georges Michel started to explore greater naturalism and immediacy in their landscapes which formed the basis of the Barbizon school from the 1830s onwards. Its leading figures Théodore Rousseau, Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Jean-François Millet transformed the course of French landscape painting.
The final lecture highlights the impact of Barbizon. By the 1860s its artists had achieved fame at home and abroad. Painting from the motif to capture the transient effects of nature was a starting point for the Impressionist landscape influencing Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet.
Thursday 21 November 2024
ashley gray
Textile Renaissance and Revolution in Britain
Alexandra Epps
The Art of John Piper
and
Coventry Cathedral: Icon and Inspiration
The Study Day began with a Lecture on one of the most versatile British artists of the twentieth century – John Piper, painter, designer, stained glass artist, photographer and writer on the arts – a man of many parts. After coffee Alexandra’s second lecture explored the extraordinary story of the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its inspiring commitment to the modern, featuring C20th British artists Jacob Epstein, Elisabeth Frink, and Graham Sutherland as well as John Piper.
After lunch Jenny Newman showed a 1970s film, “Crown of Glass” about the making of the Lantern glass for Liverpool Cathedral. She followed this with a talk highlighting Piper’s versatility as an artist and included book designs, ceramics, prints, textiles, photography and stage design. Jenny had brought along her actual framed screenprint Piper made for a series based on the sets he designed for the Britten opera ‘Death in Venice’.
2022 and 2023
Thursday 16 November 2023
David Boyd Haycock
A Crisis of Brilliance
The Slade School and the Revolution in British Art 1910-1945
The students who studied at the Slade School of Art in London between 1908 and 1914 would go on to become some of the most significant names in twentieth-century British art. They included Dora Carrington, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. They lived through one of the most exciting and disturbing periods in European art and culture, when the traditional canons that had been established during the Renaissance were blown apart by waves of Modernism: Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and the First World War.
The three lectures in this study explored how, in the space of just a few years, the art world changed forever, and they look at some of the leading young British artists who were swept up in that revolution. Each one leads on to the next in a chronological order, looking at the chief themes and personalities involved, and focussing in on a range of particular works, from both national and private collections.
Thursday 9 March 2023
Carol wilhide justin
An introduction to Japanese Woodcut
This study day comprises three lectures. Beginning with a lecture on the history of Japanese Woodcut looking at its rich cultural importance to Japan and later the huge impact the prints had on the course of Modern Western Art, particularly to the Impressionists in France. Carol Justin also brought the technique into the present with a look at contemporary practitioners including Rebecca Salter, President of the Royal Academy and her own work.
In the afternoon Carol introduced the tools and materials and give a demonstration of Japanese woodcut printing.
There was an opportunity at the end of the day for
participants to try printing from prepared blocks.
Carol Wilhide Justin graduated from the RCA in 2017 and is now an artist-printmaker who teaches and specialises in Japanese woodcut.
Thursday 17 November 2022
Gavin Plumley
Vienna 1900
Culture and Crisis
This study day comprises three lectures, looking at the cultural and social context of the artistic explosion in Vienna at the turn of the last century, with concentrated case studies into two of its primary movers and shakers.
Wednesday 23 March 2022
Evelyn Silber
Breaking the Mould
Modern Sculpture in Early 20th Century Britain
It is a forbidding challenge to overturn 400 years of accepted definitions and standards in art and create a new language. Sculptors faced the same, if not even greater challenges than painters in re-inventing their conservative, expensive practice geared to the needs of public commissions and private patronage during the early twentieth century. Artists across Europe including Picasso and Matisse, Brancusi and Modigliani, Duchamp-Villon and Boccioni were jettisoning classical baggage and literary lumber in favour of radical experiments in form, material and content. This study day looks at how in Britain carvings by Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the young Henry Moore engaged with mainland Europe and challenged critical and public taste.
2021
Julian Halsby
Painting in Britain 1850 – 1914
The study day of 3 lectures aims to give an account of the achievements and developments of painting in Britain from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. It was a dynamic period with the Pre-Raphaelites, the square brush painters of Newlyn and Glasgow, the London Impressionists, the Camden Town School and Roger Fry’s explosive Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London in 1910-12. Some art historians see this period of British painting as backward looking and conventional. Hopefully this study day will change your views on this!
Thursday 9 March 2023
Sally Dormer
Pomp and Piety
This will include Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Dowager Queen Jeanne d’Evreux and Jean, Duc de Berry, and will cover a variety of manuscript painting, ivory, stone and alabaster carving, goldsmiths’ work and enamelling – from the 12th, to the late 14th century
Monica Bohm Duchen
The Lure of the Midi:
Modern Artists and the South of France
Ever since the late C19th, seduced by its intense light and sensual colours, visual artists (most of them from the north) have been irresistibly drawn to the Mediterranean coast of France. Claude Monet painted in Antibes in 1888; while in the same year, van Gogh, dreaming of setting up a “Studio of the South”, persuaded Gauguin – with disastrous results – to join him in Arles. Cézanne’s roots, of course, lay in his beloved Midi, to which he returned for good in 1899. Meanwhile, in 1892, Paul Signac sailed into the unspoilt port of St.Tropez, settling there and attracting large numbers of younger artists to the area – among them, his Neo-Impressionist disciples and members of the future Fauve group. In the early 20th century, Renoir would make the Midi his home, as would Bonnard and Matisse. And after the Second World War, so too would Picasso and Chagall.
Nigel Bates
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
The Inside View
In-depth look at the history and architecture of the building – and how performances and rehearsals fit into this elegant Victorian theatre. Performance video clips are included and focus on costume and set design. Also discussed is the digital age and how it has been embraced by the opera and ballet worlds