THE VENUE FOR THIS EVENT IS THE PINEWOOD HOTEL

This Study Day will consist of 3 lectures:

‘How the Tapestry came to be‘

Explores the inspiration and the people behind the development of the Tapestry

‘Reading Scotland’s Story through the Tapestry’

An in depth look at the panels and the progress of Scottish history

'From Artwork to Journey’

A ride along the Tapestry Trail, a journey inspired by the Tapestry, highlighting the most important features along the way.

Tea and coffee will be available from 9:30 a.m. and the first lecture will start at 10:30 a.m. The cost is £35 and includes a buffet lunch. Please click here for a booking form.

THE VENUE FOR THIS EVENT IS THE PINEWOOD HOTEL

London’s sumptuous Victorian and Edwardian department stores changed the capital – and changed its women. Shoppers of every rank were lavishly wooed, seduced and often undone by the temptations laid out before them in these new ‘cathedrals of desire’.

Starting on Oxford Street, we’ll set off on a cultural and architectural tour of the capital’s big stores at three pivotal points in retail history: the Victorian birth of the Big Store; the Edwardian age of excessive consumption; and the thrill-seeking, slump-busting Thirties.

From snooty Marshall & Snelgrove to crowd-pleasing Arding & Hobbs, you’ll remember how to tell your Barkers from your Bodgers, your Gorringes from your Gamages… while learning about Edwardian shopaholics, Art Deco fabulousness, and the awful menace of The Elephant Gang, professional lady shoplifters.

A fascinating slice of social history, with wonderful period images.

Price: £38 (inc lunch). Tea/coffee will be available from 9:30 and the 1st lecture will begin at 10:30. Bookings can be made at our meetings or a PDF version of the booking form can be downloaded here: booking form

The Pinewood Hotel Handforth, 09:30-15:30, £36

9:30-1030, Tea / coffee and biscuits

1030 - 1130, The Red House

Comfort Break

1150-1250, Kelmscott House

1300-1400, 2 course buffet lunch with a glass of wine.

1400-1500, Kelmscott Manor

1500-1530, Questions and thanks

The Home Beautiful: Pre Raphaelite Interiors

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood not only challenged conventional definitions of beauty within the fine arts, they also rejected many of the fashions associated with the mid and late Victorian home. Inspired by their admiration for the middle ages and the medieval guild, they believed that artists should also be craftsmen, as capable of decorating furniture as painting on canvas. And for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, a beautiful home was “the most important production of art” and they expended considerable time and energy on beautifying their own homes. Morris’s work, first at Red House, then at Kelmscott House Hammersmith and Kelmscott Manor , exemplifies his ideas about the synthesis of art and design. This lecture explores the decoration and lifestyles associated with these and other famous Pre-Raphaelite homes.

We are delighted to welcome Joanna Banham who is an independent lecturer and curator. She was Head of the Adult, Students and Creative Industries programmes in the Learning Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum from 2006-16, and before that, Head of Learning at the National Portrait Gallery, Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain, and Head of Adult Learning at the Royal Academy. Her curatorial and research posts have included Curator at Leighton House, Archivist at Arthur Sanderson & Sons, and Curator of historic wallpapers at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. She has edited and written several books on art and design – including William Morris; the Middle Ages (1986), Victorian Interior Design (2000), Encyclopaedia of Interior Design – 2 vols (2002), Dictionary of Artists Models (2006) and William Morris and the Arts and Crafts 1837-1914 (2017). She lectures regularly on V&A courses and study days and contributes to conferences and research seminars on 19th-century design. She is Director of the Victorian Society Summer School and has taught at BA and MA level for Birkbeck College and University College, both University of London, the Open University, and Manchester Metropolitan University.

The Pinewood Hotel Handforth, £36, 0930-1530

Includes 2 course lunch with a glass of wine.

The Medici were in many ways an unattractive family. Ruthless in pursuit of profit for their Florentine bank, which had branches in every city of the known world, they were greedy for success, merciless to those who opposed their ambition and vicious in their own internal squabbles. And yet without them we wouldn’t have Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, the Fra Angelico frescoes in San Marco, Donatello’s “David” or the majestic Michelangelo sculptures in the Medici chapel. The Platonic Academy wouldn’t have been founded and the doors for the Baptistry would never have been cast. This Study Day looks into the turbulent history of this extraordinary family.

This Study Day, composed of three talks, looks into the turbulent history of this extraordinary family.

Lecture 1: Bankrolling the Renaissance.

Under the guidance of Cosimo Medici, the family became the unofficial rulers of Florence and leading patrons of the arts. This inevitably aroused fierce jealousies, which boiled over in the attempted assassination of Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo.

Lecture 2: Popes and Patrons.

With Florence gripped by the apocalyptic preaching of Savonarola, the Medici were exiled from Florence. But they re-emerged triumphantly as Popes in Rome. Here their decadent and eccentric rule led to the Sack of Rome and ultimately opened the door to Luther’s Reformation of the Church.

Lecture 3: From Riches to Royalty.

Although the Medici were a spent force in Italy, an ingenious marriage had put Catherine de Medici on the throne of France, to be followed, shortly afterwards, by Marie de Medici. This last talk looks at the impact these two formidable queens had on the shape of French history.

Douglas Skeggs
For this day we are delighted to welcome the ever-popular Douglas Skeggs. Douglas read
Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In
that time he has given over 8000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was
the director of The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular
lecturer at The Study Center, Christie’s course ‘The History of Art Studies’ and other London
courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5
headquarters, the Captain’s Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hanger in a German NATO base.
Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous
tours around Europe.

He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on
Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his
paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which
have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has
sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.

Jo Walton has combined teaching and lecturing with a career in art
bookselling and has been a volunteer guide at both Tate Britain and Tate
Modern; she is also a freelance lecturer.
Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are three of the most
important British artists of the last century. Friends, neighbours and
artistic rivals, their lives were intertwined through their personal
relationships as well as through their shared determination to make new
and radical forms of art in mid-twentieth century Britain.
In this study day we will look at the background to their emergence as
dynamic artists fascinated by the cutting-edge ideas of European artists
such as Picasso, Brancusi and Mondrian. We’ll see how, in the staid British
art world of the 1930s, their use of new materials and techniques injected
a truly modern dimension into both painting and sculpture, complimenting
that of modernist architects and designers. We’ll see how they coped with
the challenges of making art during times of war and in the rebuilding and
regeneration that followed.
The complex relationships between them – with Barbara Hepworth being
both friend and rival to Moore, as well as lover, wife and rival to Nicholson
– make this a personal and compelling story. As each of the trio achieved
international stardom in the 1950s, drawing younger artists into their
orbits as helpers, students and assistants, we’ll explore the different
paths they took in dealing with wealth, influence and success in the
international art world of the later twentieth century.