Georgians of all classes dined out in pubs, coaching inns, French ordinaries and confectioners. They also ate all kinds of street food and had an almost insatiable appetite for buns. On a journey through London we will discover the early morning drinks consumed on the street before dawn, ‘nunchions’ served at coaching inns, Billingsgate dinners, confectioners’ cakes, syllabubs and ices, the proverbially thin ham dished up to diners at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, as well as the Jewish takeaway foods of the East End and even London’s first ‘Indian’ restaurant. Our journey will be illustrated from prints, paintings and broadsides of the period, some long neglected as a source for a forgotten but fascinating part of our Georgian ancestors’ way of life.

Whether drawing duchesses or portraying princes, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was high society’s leading portraitist. Flaunting a consummate technique, his luxurious canvases mirrored his subjects’ wealth. Yet beneath the dazzling veneer of works such as Madame X, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and Lady Agnew of Lochnaw lurks a much rawer world by far. Sargent certainly scandalised Parisian society and the city’s Salon with his frank depictions of human sexuality, yet he was even more modern than they might have feared. This talk charts the artist’s life and his prolific output, showing that, like the era he came to represent, Sargent was always on the cusp of seismic change.

British painting has used maps in so many different ways that painting sometimes looks like an imaginative branch of geography. 

While John Constable was painting the Stour valley, troops from the Ordnance Survey were mapping exactly the same territory. In this light, Constable’s work is visual geography. It was more than coincidence:  founding members of the Royal Academy were surveyors and map makers, and amateur tourists of the picturesque used maps with designated spots for painting a view. Poets spread the idea. Wordsworth described the Lake District in a way that made poetry a kind of imaginative map making. Coleridge drew a map of the lakes not unlike those that appear in children's  books: think of Treasure Island, Swallows and Amazons and Lord of The Rings.

The talk tracks connections between maps and painting up to the present day. Examples include Millais on The River Tay, Norman Ackroyd in the Hebrides and the work of Michael Andrews, Paul Nash, Richard Long and the speaker's own landscape paintings of Essex. In doing so we discover that the land makes the art almost as much as the artist.

This lecture and the Christmas Lunch will be held at Bramhall Park Golf Club, 20 Manor Road, Bramhall, SK7 3LY. Full details and cost to follow.

The legendary quality of light, dramatic landscape and sparking turquoise seas have drawn artists to West Cornwall for over 200 years. This talk explores the 'Newlyn School' artists, from their first flowering to the later Lamorna colony, together with their contemporaries in nearby St Ives. Featured artists include 'Newlyners' Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes, Walter Langley and Frank Bramley; the later generation, including Laura Knight, Harold Harvey, Dod Procter and ‘Lamorna’ Birch, and St Ives-based contemporaries Helene Schjerfbeck, Marianne Stokes and Julius Olsson.

Emerging from the ensembles that played for dancing in the nineteenth century under the influence of new styles of popular music imported from the United States of America, dance bands defined and sustained the musical mainstream in twentieth century British popular culture. British dance bands provided music for social dancing after the First World War, but also became key components of variety theatre, radio and television. During what has become known as a “golden age” (roughly 1920s-1940s), the top bands were resident in London’s hotels and clubs, broadcasted on the BBC and recorded prolifically, their leaders becoming household names. Dance bands also provided entertainment in cities, towns (especially seaside resorts) and even villages across the country, often involving non-professional musicians. This lecture, based on substantial original research and illustrated with numerous recorded examples, explores the music of dance bands in the “golden age”.

L.S. Lowry’s works are perhaps the most immediately familiar of any ‘provincial’ British painter, but his enduring popularity has perhaps cast a shadow over those contemporaries active in Northern Britain during the first half of the 20th Century. 

This lecture, considers those other artists and painters who sought to embrace the new visual language of modernism, but whose approach recognised and embraced the urban and natural landscapes of Northern Britain.

Who were these, often forgotten, individuals who sought to challenge the conventional wisdom of their training and metropolitan art market? In offering us an alternative vision they invite us to perhaps consider that it might not be so grim up North. 

Western European painting is not lacking in celebrated women artists; from Marcia in antiquity to Eva Gonzalès in the nineteenth century, from Sofonisba Anguissola in the Renaissance to Michaelina Wautier in the seventeenth century, artists who managed to break the norm of western European society by making a name and a living for themselves in a world of men. Yet, despite achieving fame and recognition in their own time and being celebrated for their talent and skill, they were subsequently erased from the mainstream narrative of art history. This lecture will reintroduce these artists, asking why and how their own paintings and self-portraits were already - in their own time - engaged with this fundamental problem of recognition. 

“There is nothing to equal it since the building of Venice,” said the Builder magazine about Manchester. Okay, that was in the 1850s, but many of the Italianate cotton palaces and Gothic glories remain, particularly Manchester Town Hall and the John Rylands Library.  

The international art market is today dominated by four British auction houses, all founded in the 18th century, their record prices sensationally reported by the world's media. But what is it like behind the canvas? How do auction houses function? What goes on behind the scenes and what is required for a successful sale to take place? With an historical overview and the inside stories behind the rise of the four leading international salerooms, based particularly in London, New York, Paris and Hong Kong, this partly interactive lecture, given by an auctioneer and specialist with almost forty years' experience in Sotheby's and Bonhams, reveals all.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS LECTURE FOLLOWS THE AGM, OPEN TO MEMBERS ONLY. 

If you think of St Pancras International or New York Grand Central Terminus you imagine long romantic journeys. You know they are special places promising excitement and adventure. But there are dozens of other glorious stations in the UK and overseas. We will take a journey around some of the most evocative and splendid stations in the world. We will look not only at the magnificence of the architecture and brilliant engineering but will also discover numerous artworks within the stations and examine many depictions of stations in art – like Claude Monet’s Gare St Lazare or William Powell Frith’s Paddington. It may sound a bit anoraky, but it’s definitely not. It’s lavish, colourful and fun.