If you have any questions about this study morning, please contact Val Williams at auntie.val@icloud.com; Mobile 07983 682368 or Tel 020 8546 4050.

The link to buy a ticket will be announced later.

Meeting place - ​​​The study morning will be held upstairs in Duke Street Church, Richmond TW9 1DH so enter via the main door in Duke Street.

Meeting date - Wednesday 27th May 2026.

Meeting time - Please be there from 9.30am in time for a 10am start.

09.30 Registration

10.00 - 11.00 Our lectures begin

11.00 - 11.30 Break. Coffee and biscuits will be served.

11.30 - 12.45 Second lecture

Eventbrite link for tickets: https://studymorning27May2006.eventbrite.co.uk

The "long" link is https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/john-constable-study-morning-on-wednesday-27th-may-2026-tickets-1984549192056?aff=oddtdtcreator

The cost is £23. You will be emailed a ticket but you do not need to show it on arrival as we will have a list of names. You are most welcome to bring family and friends.

Our lecturer - Alan has a masters and first-class honours degree in History of Art from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a gallery guide at Tate Britain and regularly lectures at both London Tates. For twenty years he was a gallery guide and lecturer at the National Portrait Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He also works as a London Blue Badge Guide.

John Constable

John Constable (1776-1837) was a leading figure in English Romantic painting, renowned for his revolutionary landscapes that celebrated the Suffolk countryside of his childhood. His profound connection to his native environment, coupled with his innovative techniques, established him as a pivotal artist in the history of landscape painting.

Born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, Constable's father was a prosperous corn merchant. This upbringing afforded him an intimate knowledge and deep affection for the rural life and landscapes of the Stour Valley, an area that would become the primary subject of his art and is now famously known as "Constable Country." He resisted his father's initial wish for him to enter the family business, instead pursuing a career in art, enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1799.

Constable's artistic style was groundbreaking for its time. He rejected the idealized and classical landscapes that were then in vogue, opting instead for a more naturalistic and personal approach. He was a master of capturing the transient effects of light and atmosphere, famously stating, "No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world." To achieve this, he developed the practice of creating large-scale oil sketches directly from nature, a radical departure from the studio-based compositions of his contemporaries. These sketches, characterized by their free and vigorous brushwork, allowed him to record his immediate impressions of the changing English weather and its impact on the landscape.

Among his most celebrated works are the "six-footers," a series of large-scale canvases that depicted scenes from his beloved Stour Valley with an unprecedented level of detail and emotional depth. "The Hay Wain" (1821) is arguably his most famous painting and a quintessential example of his style. Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, it caused a sensation and won him a gold medal, significantly influencing French artists like Eugène Delacroix and the painters of the Barbizon School. Other notable works include "The Cornfield" (1826) and "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" (1831), the latter reflecting a period of personal turmoil and dramatic intensity.

Despite his eventual recognition, Constable's work was not always met with critical acclaim in his own country during his lifetime. His dedication to the "humble" English countryside was seen by some as lacking the grandeur of historical or mythological subjects. Nevertheless, his persistent and deeply felt vision ultimately transformed the status of landscape painting. His emphasis on direct observation from nature and his expressive brushwork are now seen as important precursors to Impressionism.

John Constable's legacy is that of an artist who fundamentally altered the way landscape was perceived and painted. His dedication to capturing the beauty of the everyday world and his innovative techniques have secured his place as one of Britain's greatest artists. His paintings continue to be cherished for their evocative power and their timeless celebration of the English countryside.

If you have any questions about this study morning, please contact Val Williams at auntie.val@icloud.com; Mobile 07983 682368 or Tel 020 8546 4050.

The link to buy a ticket is https://studymorning18feb2026.eventbrite.co.uk/

John Singer Sargent was THE international art star of the Gilded Age. He was most famous for his dramatic and stylish portraits of the elegant and wealthy. He brought his subjects to life, but also used fashion as a powerful tool to depict identity and personality. Cindy Polemis explores how John Singer Sargent 'fashioned' his world.

Meeting place - ​​​The study morning will be held upstairs in Duke Street Church, Richmond TW9 1DH so enter via the main door in Duke Street.

Meeting date - Tuesday 18th February 2026.

Meeting time - Please be there from 9.30am in time for a 10am start.

09.30 Registration

10.00 - 11.00 Our lectures begin

11.00 - 11.30 Break. Coffee and biscuits will be served.

11.30 - 12.45 Second lecture

The cost is £23. You will be emailed a ticket but you do not need to show it on arrival as we will have a list of names. You are most welcome to bring family and friends.

Our lecturer - Cindy Polemis is an art historian, independent lecturer and art guide. She has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University and as a mature student she went back to university to study first for a BA and then for a Masters in History of Art at Birkbeck College, London University. Before that she spent many years as a radio producer and presenter for the BBC World Service working in news and current affairs. Since 2016 Cindy has worked as an official art guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has also been a trustee at the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye Museum. Cindy has accumulated a wide range of art historical knowledge ranging from 18th European and British art to the contemporary international art scene. She has been an official guide for both Frieze Masters and Frieze Art Fairs in London. She is particularly keen to draw parallels with art and social history and her lectures are accessible and engaging, drawing out the stories of art and artists which are steeped in human emotions and experiences which we all share.

If you have any questions about this study morning, please contact Val Williams at auntie.val@icloud.com; Mobile 07983 682368 or Tel 020 8546 4050.

Many of you will remember Peter Medhurst’s lovely Christmas musical lecture. Peter is a scholar, musician, and singer with a particular interest and expertise in early keyboard instruments of which he has a great collection. These will feature in his lectures on Nocturnes in Music and Art. He will start with John Field, the composer of the earliest nocturnes, and from there we will be taken on a musical journey with evocative art works as an accompaniment. Peter is a top notch lecturer and accomplished pianist. He will play the piano live and he will also play recordings. This study morning will be one of the highlights of the year. We do hope you will join us!

Peter 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 cost is £23. You will be emailed a ticket but you do not need to show it on arrival as we will have a list of names. You are most welcome to invite friends and family to buy a ticket. Please buy your tickets at https://StudyMorning301025.eventbrite.co.uk

Meeting place - ​​​We will meet downstairs in Duke Street Church, Duke Street, Richmond TW9 1DH. Use the door at the side of the church in Quadrant Road. If that door is closed, walk 5 yards further on and go through the archway on the left into the church's private car park.

Meeting date - Thursday 30th October 2025

Meeting time - Please be there from 9.30am in time for a 10am start.

09.30 Registration

10.00 - 11.00 Our lectures begin

11.00 - 11.30 Break. Coffee and biscuits will be served.

11.30 - 12.45 Second lecture

This is a late change because our original speaker, Cindy Polemis, has to go into hospital that day. She will return at later date to speak to us on John Singer Sargent and Fashion.

We are delighted that the replacement speaker is Stephen Duffy who formerly was a Senior curator at the Wallace Collection.

Profile

Stephen had particular responsibility for exhibitions and nineteenth-century paintings at the Wallace Collection. He has given countless tours of the Collection for visiting groups as well as many lectures on its art and other art historical subjects at home and abroad. His most recent publication, The Discovery of Paris, is a book on early nineteenth-century watercolour views of Paris by major British artists such as Girtin, Turner and Bonington. He has written many articles and reviews for art magazines.

Jacqueline Cockburn will give two lectures on Gaudi in Barcelona and Sorolla in Valencia.

Each artist will take his place in his home town and we will discover how Sorolla adored the light of Valencia and could hardly bear to leave the city and how Gaudi shaped the city of Barcelona with his quirky architectural style which drew heavily on nature itself and the sea.

Leslie Primo will give two lectures on The Art of Land, Wealth and Tulip Fever in the Low Countries

This study day will bring together Dutch Golden Age art, Flemish art and early to late Netherlandish art, looking at the history and growth of these particular strands of European art. 

Leslie Primo will examine the changing face of these multifarious forms of art from the late 14th century through to 16th century Renaissance art.  Along the way we will look at how and why the meaning and function of these various art forms have changed throughout the centuries and why artists were drawn to the particular subject matters. 

Furthermore, this course will explore some of the key work in the history of Dutch, Flemish and Netherlandish art, bringing a more rounded and inclusive history of painting originating in the Low Countries.  Artists will include

Jan Both (about 1615 – 1652)
Cornelis van Poelenburgh (1594 – 1667)
Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9? – 1682)
Aelbert Cuyp (1620 – 1691)
Meindert Hobbema (1638 – 1709), and
Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640).

The first lecture will look at the obsession the Dutch had in their love of nature, which in many ways emulated the Italian Renaissance artists similar fascination. However, this session will not only look at this aspect, but also look at how this merged into a dominance in landscape painting mirroring the Low Countries unique terrain, which in turn would produce two distinctive types of landscape – Dutch and Flemish.

The second lecture will explore the very particular brand of Dutch naturalism with fantastical depictions of animals in improbable landscapes, and the ubiquitous phenomena of Tulip Fever and in turn Dutch flower paintings taking us through to modern flower painting from Van Gogh to Fantin-Latour.

but other regions from Florida to the Nile Valley have also entered the picture in recent years.

Profile

Art historian Leslie Primo is an author, broadcaster, and graduate of Birkbeck, University College, with an MA in Renaissance studies. He lectured at the National Gallery, London for 18 years, and has appeared on the BBC speaking on Michelangelo and presenting on JMW Turner. He contributed to the Oxford Companion Guide to Black British History, and has a forthcoming Thames & Hudson book called, The Foreigners that Invented British Art. He currently teaches art history at Imperial College, The City Literary, London, and lectures for the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The lecturer is Dr Susan Kay-Williams who is Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework. She will talk on the making of tapestry and its early development from the 14th century to the 16th century. The second lecture will be about the Gobelin and Mortlake tapestries.

Profile

Susan Kay-Williams is Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Chartered Institute of Marketing and in 2015 was made a Fellow of the Society of Dyers and Colourists in recognition of her work on the history of dyes. Susan has a longstanding interest in textiles, especially colour, and published her first book, The Story of Colour in Textiles (Bloomsbury) in 2013. She has extensive lecturing experience and has been invited to lecture in the USA, Canada, China, Japan and Taiwan as well as for the V&A and across the UK. 

An introduction to the earliest art known in the world, primarily the artworks from western Europe and dating to c. 40,000 to 12,000 years ago - it takes the form of portable art objects, and also engravings, drawings and paintings on cave walls and in the open air. The story of the art’s discovery and authentication will be followed by a presentation of the main techniques employed (including experimental reconstructions), the pigments, the lighting methods, and some of the many reasons why this art corpus comprises some of the greatest imagery ever produced. A brief survey of the main theories about its meaning and purpose will also be given. 

Ice Age art - dating from c.40,000 to 12,000 years ago - continues to be found every year, in the form of both portable objects and images on cave walls and on rocks in the open air. This talk will present a selection of the most recent discoveries, many of them still unknown to the general public, and a few still unpublished. Most are in western Europe, but other regions from Florida to the Nile Valley have also entered the picture in recent years.

Profile

Paul Bahn studied archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and completed PhD thesis (1979) on the prehistory of the French Pyrenees. Has held post-doctoral fellowships, at Liverpool and London, plus a J. Paul Getty postdoctoral fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Devotes time to writing, editing and translating books on archaeology, plus occasional journalism and as much travel as possible. Main research interest is prehistoric art, especially rock art of the world, and most notably Palaeolithic art, as well as Easter Island. Led the team which, at his instigation, searched for and discovered the first Ice Age cave art in Britain (at Creswell Crags) in 2003.

Goldsmiths and artisans working in glass, rock crystal, enamels, porcelain or precious jewels have produced small and exquisite perfume vessels to delight the senses. Many of these are now exceptionally rare. Such virtuoso examples of fine craftsmanship attract the eye with their sparkling beauty and brilliant colour; they tempt the sense of taste when shaped as ripened fruit and appeal to the touch with their cool sculptured hardness. The scent and sound of a swinging censer can permeate a room. These small, delicate yet vibrant and alluring vessels also appeal to a sixth sense: the imagination, as they evoke the fragility of a flower or conjure the exoticism, glamour and mystery of a far-away land. The morning begins with glass-making in the Ancient World and continues through time to focus on the golden age of the 18th century when porcelain and silver makers made perfume containers for an aristocratic clientele. We then look at exotic glass bottles made by Tiffany and Lalique. Anne will aslo examine the world of the merchant, the art of the perfumer and the emergence of the great perfume houses of Paris including Guerlain and Houbigant

Profile

Anne Howarth is a lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Queen’s Gallery. She is a visiting lecturer for Regent's University, Sotheby's Institute and SOAS. Since 2008, she has been a member of the London faculty of Eckerd College, Florida, teaching Art History and is also an accredited Arts Society lecturer. For ten years she guided private evening tours of the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace. She lectures extensively for private groups, guides museum tours in London and has lectured on William Morris for the British Council and British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow.  

After studying Modern History at Durham University, she trained and became a senior specialist in ceramics at the head offices in London of Bonhams (1981-1986) and Christie's (1987-1995). From 1995 to 2002, she was resident in Shanghai, China and gave lectures on the history of the China trade and European Chinoiserie to the international community of diplomats and expatriates in Shanghai and Beijing. On returning to London in 2002, she worked on a short project cataloguing Chinese ceramics at Kensington Palace and became Hon Membership Secretary and Treasurer of the French Porcelain Society.

In our first lecture we’ll meet Gianlorenzo Bernini (c.1598-1680), not only a sculptor but also an architect and urban planner who left his mark on the city of Rome, creating churches, palaces and fountains as well as an array of remarkable statues, tombs and portrait busts.

After a coffee break we’ll look at the sculptures of Antonio Canova (1757-1822) working a century later. He was a master of the Neo-Classical style. Elegant and restrained, his work was inspired by the ebullience of the Baroque and by the classicism of the antique.

Louise will take us to a mysterious and atmospheric ancient city on the coast of southern Albania, to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates and the wild and wonderful mountains of northern Ethiopia. [Please note that this is a change to our advertised programme due to illness.]

The study morning reveals the diverse richness of Byzantine decorative arts.  The first lecture explores the fascinating story of Byzantine Empire through a myriad of amazing objects – sculpture, architecture, wall paintings, mosaics, enamels, crown jewels, stolen treasures, silverware and ivory carvings.  The second lecture will focus on Ravenna and its magnificent mosaics.

The Modern Art Market began in 17th century Holland where travellers to the Low Countries observed that there were more artists than butchers in Amsterdam! Lucrezia explains what drove this new market in this new republic of the Dutch Golden Age.

We raised the wonderful sum of £8,050 which we donated to the British Red Cross Ukraione Crisis Appeal We are indebted to Tixoom whom have waived their ticketing fees. 

10.30-11.30am.  Lecture 1: Ilya Repin (1844-1930 born Chuhiv, Kharkiv province in modern day Ukraine). An introduction to this prolific and astounding realist painter, famous for his portraits and his genre and historical paintings.
11.30-12 Break
12-1pm.  Lecture 2: An introduction to the stunning, thought provoking and awe-inspiring landscapes of Arkhip Kuindzhi (1841-1910 born in Mariopol in modern day Ukraine), Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898 born in Yelabuga, Russia), and Isaac Levitan (1860-1900 born in Kibarty in modern day Lithuania)

We will explore the Silk Road through the lens of textiles and how wool, silk and cotton changed the fortunes, cultures and landscape of Central Asia and we will we examine how Central Asia came under Russian and Soviet influence and how art was used in propaganda, moulding and influencing the Muslim peoples now under Russian atheist rule. We will hear how independence of ‘the -stans’ has led to a resurgence in art and textiles, particularly the silk carpet workshop founded by Chris, reviving 15th century carpet design based on Persian illuminated manuscripts.

This Study Morning will take you on a Spanish journey from Toledo to Seville and on to Madrid. We will explore El Greco and his art and relationship with the city of Toledo then move on to Velázquez who left Seville as a young boy to make his name in Madrid.  Our speaker, Jacqueline Cockburn, lectures at The Arts Society, the V&A, Christies Education and several other prestigious institutions. Her specialist field is Western European art from 1790 to 1950 and she has particular knowledge of both the art and literature of France and Spain.