This study day focusses on the transformation of Istanbul from its conquest by Sultan Mehmed II through to its Golden Age under Suleyman the Magnificent and beyond.
Lecture 1 The Conquest of Constantinople and the Making of Istanbul
Lecture 2 Treasures of Ottoman Istanbul: Suleyman the Magnificat’s Era and beyond
Lecture 3 Carnations, Tulips and Hyacinths: The Story of Turkey’s Iznik Ceramics

Antonia Gatward Cevizli is an independent art historian specialising in both Italian Renaissance art and Ottoman art. Her publications focus on cultural and diplomatic exchanges between the Italian city-states and the Ottomans. She also worked across the collections of both Tate Modern and Tate Britain as a professional guide. She has lived in Siena, Venice and Istanbul.

As the word ‘impressionism’ was first used in painting as a term of abuse, so the first recorded use of the word in connection with music – in 1887 regarding Debussy’s Printemps – was derogatory as well.  However, by 1905, the term was applied frequently to musical compositions and it was Debussy himself who maintained that music was able to put impressionist’s theories into practice more fully than painting was able to do, since music could represent the play of light fluidly, where as painting could only present it statically, and therefore unnaturally.
This new lecture & study day examines some of the great works of Debussy (Preludes, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune) as well as key works by Fauré and Ravel, side by side with the world of late 19th century French art (Monet, Degas, Renoir, Manet) to determine whether or not there is a link between impressionism in music and impressionism in art. 

Peter Medhurst appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

The price for members & guests is £36 per person, lunch included. Contact Lesley Jennings at jenningsdc@yahoo.com for further information or to reserve a place.

During the 19th century, when many Central European countries were still under the control of the Habsburgs, art and culture were often the only ways in which the Empire’s constituent crownlands could express national identity. One hundred years after the end of Habsburg dominance in Central Europe, this study day looks at the arts and culture in both the imperial capital of Vienna and the principal metropolitan centres of the Czechs and the Hungarians.

Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, appearing on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and contributing to newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes worldwide. Lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Recent talks include the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Trust, the National Theatre, the British Museum, the V&A, the Southbank Centre, the Tate and the Neue Galerie, New York. His first book, A Home for All Seasons, was published in June 2022. 

The study day will explore the lure of travel and its impact upon the work of artists from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Rogier van der Weyden travelled to Italy and was impressed by the work of Fra Angelico. Italian artists were equally influenced by the work of Weyden.  Just before Van Eyck completed the Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, he was sent by Philip the Good of Burgundy to collect the duke’s bride, the Infanta of Portugal. Upon his return Van Eyck added to his altarpiece the exotic plants, the shrubs and the trees, which he had seen on his travels.

In 1551 Bruegel went on a study tour to Italy but what impressed him was not so much Italy as the alpine ranges of mountains and these stayed with him and were included in so many of his great paintings and prints on his return. In the 17th century Rubens travelled to Spain and Italy and what he produced during his future career was shaped by those journeys. Van Dyck’s stay in Italy and his experience of seeing the work of Titian and Rubens there enabled him to transform British painting for the next three hundred years.

In the 19th century Delacroix at the beginning and Gauguin towards the end of the century travelled further outside Europe to North Africa and the South Seas respectively. How did their travels transform their work and introduce new ideas to European painting?  The study day will explore the travels of these and a host of other artists.

Clare Forde-Wille Honours degree in History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London. Regular commitments include Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust. Study tours abroad.

If you would like to join us, please email Lesley Jennings at jenningsdc@yahoo.com .

We are holding our traditional Special Interest Day in the hall, with our convivial lunch included in the price. We will also be transmitting the lectures via Zoom, if you would prefer to watch from home.
Julian Halsby is a practising artist and prolific author. He studied History of Art at Cambridge, was formerly Senior Lecturer and Head of Department at Croydon College of Art. Has interviewed artists for the Artist Magazine and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and The Critics Circle. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1994 and appointed Keeper in 2010.

Lecture 1: 10.30am
The Years of Achievement 1848-1860
Lecture 2: 11.45am
The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites and Pre-Raphaelite Landscape
Lunch 12.45pm
Lecture 3: 2.00pm
The Later Pre-Raphaelites 1860-1917

The price for members & guests in the hall is £36 per person, lunch included.
The price for members & guests watching from home via Zoom Webinar is £20 per person.

If you would like to join us, please email Lesley Jennings at jenningsdc@yahoo.com indicating whether you wish to come to the hall or watch from home.

In July we are planning our Traditional Special Interest Day, in the hall with our usual delicious lunch included.  The bar will also be open at lunch time for those who want to indulge.  

This will not be available on ZOOM, so do come to the hall and join us.

Programme for the day
10:00 am Coffee
10:30 lecture 1
11:30 Comfort break
11:45 am  Lecture 2
12:45 pm Lunch
2:00 pm  Lecture 3 plus questions
Finish 3:15pm

The 1860s and 1870s were two of the most dynamic decades in the history of French art. A new generation of artists, impatient with traditional methods and ideals, were looking for new ways to depict the modern world. In particular, they were fascinated by the spectacle of Paris, which, under the Emperor Napoleon III, was being transformed into the elegant city of parks, squares and boulevards that we still know today. This study day considers the ways in which Degas, Manet and the Impressionists sought out new ways to depict a new city.  

Kathy McLauchlan specialises in 19th-century art history. She is currently a course director at the Victoria & Albert Museum, organising courses and study days on the history of art and design. She teaches at several institutions, including Art Pursuits. She is a graduate of Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute, with a PhD on French 19th-century painters in Rome.

Purchasing tickets

If you would like to join us, please email Lesley Jennings at  jenningsdc@yahoo.com and put 'SID' in the subject heading. 

The price for members and guests is £36 per person. This includes lunch.

At this Special Interest Day, we first see the Carthaginians, the first major invaders of Sicily and their atmospheric culture, still visible on the small island of Motya. Then come the Greeks, with beautiful cities such as Agrigento, and Syracuse and Segesta, filled with culture and art. Today these cities preserve some of the Mediterranean’s most stunning ruins. 

We then look at Roman Sicily, peaceful and prosperous, reflected in the cities of Syracuse and Taormina, and in the sumptuous ‘mosaic villa’ of Piazza Armerina. 

After Rome, we see the Arab conquest of the island - an architectural (and agricultural) revolution - and then Norman Sicily - an extraordinary artistic flourishing, culminating in the mosaics of the mighty Norman basilicas.
 
Dr Paul Roberts is Head of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds. He is now writing a walking guide to ancient Rome. 

Purchasing tickets
The price for members and guests is £15 perperson
If you would like to join us, please email Lesley Jennings at jenningsdc@yahoo.com and put 'SID' in the subject line

Virtual Special Interest Day
at 10:00am

This Special Interest Day will be three lectures in the morning with two 'get your own coffee' breaks in the middle. There will be questions at the end of each lecture. The timings will be as follows:

10:00 am -11:00 am     Lecture 1
11:00 am - 11:15 am    Break 
11:15 am - 12:15 pm    Lecture 2 
12:15 pm - 12:30 pm    Break
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm     Lecture 3

Description
This interest day is intended to explore keys works by the best painters of a generation and demonstrate how seventeenth century painting is stylistically and thematically interlinked across the continent of Europe. 

Caravaggio: The Bad Boy of the Baroque. This scandalous and sometimes vicious painter produced work with cinematic compositions and intensely visceral details. His downfall is the stuff of a film not yet made and despite dying prematurely his canvases influenced a generation that followed.

Rubens: Poses, Position and Property. Writhing sea nymphs with dimpled bottoms were only a small part of this prolific painter’s offerings. Charm personified, Rubens worked for every major court in Europe, and his career caused envy and created inspiration in equal parts.

Velazquez: in Search of Status. From the humble origins of painting eggs, this sensational Spaniard will produce a portrait that raised the eyebrow of a Pope and astonished the Italians and a painting that was described by a contemporary as the ‘theology of painting’.

Dan Evans is an educationalist with a passion for all things Italian. He is a Housemaster and Teacher at Cheltenham College, and was formerly Head of History of Art at Wycombe Abbey School. He has been lecturing since 2001, and spent 9 years working as a senior lecturer, tutor, and tour guide for Art History Abroad. He was voted the British winner of the World Guide of the Year Awards in 2008 and alongside his lectures and special interest days he also leads educational study trips for groups of friends to a range of destinations in Italy.

Purchasing tickets

The price for non members watching from a different device will be £20.

If you would like to join us, please email Lesley Jennings at jenningsdc@yahoo.com and put 'SID' in the subject heading. 

 

Virtual Special Interest Day
Thursday 25th February 2021
The Art and Scandalous Lives of the Bloomsbury Group
Lecturer: Frank Woodgate

We will not be back in the hall by February, so we have arranged with Frank Woodgate that instead of our usual three lectures with lunch in the middle, this will now be two lectures in the morning via Zoom with a 'get your own coffee'  break in the middle. However it will be a delightful and fascinating morning.

Description
The art of the three main ‘Bloomsbury’ artists (Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry) cannot be separated from their extraordinary lives. They, along with their literary and other intellectual companions (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, amongst others) were part of a movement, the popular name for which became widely used only after the death of around half its members.

Frank Woodgate
Lecturer at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, lecturer for the Art Fund, the National Trust, U3A and other organisations. Lectures and runs courses at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Purchasing tickets
The price will be £20

If you would like to join us, please email us at harrow@theartssociety.org and put 'SID' in the subject heading. 



 

This Special Interest Day provides an introduction to the rich repertoire of Russian opera, including Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, Borodin’s Prince Igor, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. We will look both at how opera evolved in Russia as an art form initially imported from Italy by the imperial Court, and the role played by Russian rulers such as Catherine the Great and Nicholas I. We also explore  the symphonic music of Russia and the wonderful  Russian ballet.  The day includes plenty of video clips so sit back and enjoy!

Rosamund Bartlett

Rosamund Bartlett was born in London. She holds a doctorate from Oxford, and spent fifteen years pursuing an academic career, latterly as Reader in Russian at the University of Durham, before becoming a full-time writer, translator and lecturer.  She continues to maintain an active scholarly profile in Russian literature, music and cultural history, and has held fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the European University Institute in Florence.  She is currently Honorary Research Associate at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney.  In 2015 she was awarded the Mary Zirin prize by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia, Shostakovich in Context, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, and Tolstoy: A Russian Life, which was longlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize.  She has also received recognition as a translator, having edited the first unexpurgated collection of Chekhov’s letters for Penguin Classics, and produced the first new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics in 96 years. Her Chekhov anthology About Love and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

She has written programme notes for opera and theatre productions, including for the Royal Opera House, La Monnaie, Opera Australia, English National Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Almeida Theatre, and has given talks at venues such as the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall and the British Library.  She has worked as a consultant to London orchestras, collaborated with the Salzburg Festival, and contributed to programmes on BBC Radio such as Opera on 3 and In Our Time. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and the international art magazine Apollo. 

She has been travelling regularly to Russia since 1978, and spent a year attached to Moscow State University as a British Council Postgraduate Scholar while doing her doctoral research.  In 2007 she began a campaign to restore Chekhov’s house in Yalta, and remains a Trustee of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a UK charity set up to preserve and honour the writer’s literary and humanitarian legacy. In 2010 she was awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Medal by the Russian Ministry of Culture in recognition of her educational and charitable work.

The Silk Road: A Journey of Wool, Cotton and Silk

Wool, cotton and silk have each played a crucial role in the fortunes of Central Asia. Wool created the clothing and housing needed by the great nomadic cultures to dominate Middle Asia. Silk was more valuable than gold and used as currency, creating a network of trading routes that led to the first outbreak of globalisation. Cotton was the cause of Russian and then Soviet  Colonisation and continues to cause controversy today. The felts, carpets, embroideries, robes and veils of the Silk Road stratified wealth, displayed religious and political entrenchments and changed the fortunes of this fascinating part of the world; a meeting place between Mohammed and Marx.

Chris Alexander 

Chris was born in Turkey (hence his middle name) and spent his childhood there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, Chris spent two years at sea before studying Media and journalism at Leicester University. He then moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, creating income for women. After a year in the UK writing A Carpet Ride to Khiva, he moved to the Pamirs in Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down, spending three years there. Next came two years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Chris has recently finished rowing and studying at Oxford and is now a curate at St. Barnabas, North Finchley, and author of Alabaster and Manacle. He returns to Central Asia whenever he can and conducts tours there.

The Taj Mahal was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The lecture traces the origins of its design, its site in Agra, how it was built, the craftsmen, the interiors and its surrounding buildings and gardens.

Lecturer:  Oliver Everett 
He was educated at Cambridge University and did post graduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA; and at the London School of Economics. Following service in the Foreign Office, including postings in India and Spain, he was Assistant Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales,1978 80; and then Private Secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, 1981-3. He was Librarian in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, 1984 2002. He is now Librarian Emeritus following his retirement in 2002. He wrote the official guidebook and audio tour on Windsor Castle, taught a course on its history and advised on a television programme about it. He wrote articles on the Royal Library and helped with two books on aspects of the Royal Collection. He is advising on a possible history series for television. He lectures widely in Britain and abroad and also on cruise ships.