Upcoming Lectures

Joaquin Sorolla: Painter of Light by Jacqueline Cockburn One of the most extraordinary Spanish artists from Valencia; Joaquin Sorolla has become better known more recently. He lived from 1863 to 1923 and created a world full of light and colour which delights the senses. Sometimes a social painter he was ...
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Dickens of a Christmas and “God Bless us Everyone” by Bertie Pearce Charles Dickens has often been proclaimed as “The Man Who Invented Christmas” and indeed on hearing that Dickens had died, a cockney barrow-girl said: “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”  Dickens revived the Christmas traditions with ...
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The Art of the Steal: Nazi Looting During WW II by Shauna Isaac The Nazis looted over 20% of Western Art during World War II, confiscating art from Jewish families and emptying museums throughout Europe. This lecture will provide an overview of Nazi looting by setting the scene in Nazi ...
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William Hogarth - 1697-1764 by Linda Smith Hogarth is nowadays mostly remembered as a talented satirist, but there is much more to him than that. He was extremely ambitious in other artistic fields, including portraiture, history painting, and art theory. He was also a tireless self-promoter and entrepreneur, with a ...
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The Market For Antiques in the UK Today - or- Why No-One Wants to Buy Your Wardrobe Anymore!  by Matthew Denney Today we are in a world of 'downsizing, decluttering and minimalism. Long gone are the days of high demand and eager buyers furnishing with antiques and dealers filling container ...
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Titian - The First Modern Artist by Douglas Skeggs During a long, successful and immensely lucrative career, Titian established himself as the foremost painter of northern Italy. Training in the Bellini workshop, he developed the Venetian love of light and colour, but adding a sense of drama and immediacy that ...
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Inspired By Stonehenge by Julian Richards Stonehenge is the most celebrated and sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the British Isles. This lecture explains why Stonehenge must be regarded as architectural in its layout and construction, embodying techniques that for centuries convinced antiquarians that it could not have been built by ...
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Baroque on a Roll: Classical Music in the Modern Era by Tony Rawlins When Tony first appeared at Grayshott in October 2019,  he gave a highly entertaining and well-received lecture on 'Mad Men & Artists' which looked  at how the advertising industry exploited Fine Art. In this lecture, Tony will ...
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New Advances in Ice Age Art by Paul Bahn Dating from c.40.000 to 12,000 years ago, Ice Age Art 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 ...
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The Forensic Eye: Find your Inner Connoisseur by Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe How do dealers, auctioneers and museum staff determine whether a piece is by one painter or another? What role does the signature play, and what are the key clues to look for when deciding who painted the picture? Artists before ...
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Art and Feminism by Colin Pink In this talk we'll explore the ways in which women have been excluded from the art world and how they have struggled to be taken seriously. We'll look at a diverse range of feminist art, from 1940 to the present, and trace how different ...
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The Kingdom of Sweets by Nigel Bates The Nutcracker has delighted audiences at Christmas for many decades yet it was deemed a failure at its first performances. We take a close look at how this well-loved ballet now takes its rightful place on stage and how the music of Tchaikovsky ...
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Three Exceptional Female Artists: Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Dame Laura Knight by Bernard Allan Nearly 300 years separates our three artists yet they faced the same struggle for recognition in what was a man’s world. Throughout these three centuries women had to fight for basic art training, for ...
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