Since the C19 English high society had 'wintered over' on the Côte d'Azur, but always left by April. In the early 1920s, however, an intoxicating mix of artists, writers, musicians and international visitors, inspired by a mythological seascape of luminous colours, created a new summer season. Sun tans and sportswear soon became 'de rigueur' in the chic new coastal resorts, villas and hotels. This liberating playground of ideas across the visual design arts was stimulated by impresarios Serge Diaghilev and Paul Poiret. Traditional boundaries were torn down. Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Cocteau, and Chanel merged the worlds of fashion, theatre and interiors. Cole Porter, Scott Fitzgerald, and the intriguing Gerald and Sara Murphy, introduced an American perspective and attracted an influential new set of discerning patrons and collectors. We will 'time travel' to meet them.

Mary Alexander trained as an art historian and graduated with a B.A. Hons. in History & History of Art (University College London) and later an M.A. (with Distinction) in History of Art (University College London).

She moved to Manchester to take up the post of Assistant Curator at Platt Hall, the Gallery of English Costume, a renowned collection of historic dress. Subsequently she lectured in art history at the University of Leeds, the Open University and Manchester University Extra Mural Department. From 1995 - 2008, she was a Visiting Lecturer at Christie’s Education in London.

Mary has also combined academic work with the world of design consultancy. In 1985 she joined Pentagram Design in London, a leading international design consultancy, and coordinated client presentations, publications, conferences and international special events, including the 1986 British Design event in Aspen Colorado. In 1988 she transferred to Pentagram’s New York office with the task of organising an international design conference  held at Stanford University involving business, design and education leaders.

As an experienced international speaker, Mary lectures regularly for The Arts Society throughout the UK, Europe and Australia and New Zealand. She also contributes articles to magazines, newspapers and professional journals.  She was President of The Arts Society Glaven Valley, Norfolk from 2016- 2021.

The lecture title borrows William Shakespeare's stirring words from King Richard II and Horace Walpole's vivid description of a pearl-laden Queen Elizabeth I. Medieval and Tudor monarchs understood that the visual beauty and rarity of precious gem-stones, including luminous sapphires, rubies and spinels alongside lustrous pearls and clear rock crystal, expressed and enhanced their regal power and status. Resplendence and awe-inspiring magnificence transcend the passage of time in portraits of monarchs from King Richard II in the Wilton Diptych to Queen Elizabeth I in Nicholas Hilliard's painted miniatures. Hilliard himself trained as a goldsmith and the technical brilliance of other anonymous masters of this craft is still evidenced in surviving jewels such as Princess Blanche's dazzling crown, the Royal Gold Cup in the British Museum and Henry V's rock crystal sceptre linked to the City of London and the Battle of Agincourt. Tracing the sources of the stones in distant lands, the lecture follows a journey from the gem-stone mines of Asia, the pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf, mountains with crystal mines and freshwater pearls from the rivers of Scotland, to the merchants of Venice and Bruges, Medieval markets in Avignon and Champagne and on to the goldsmiths of Paris and London.

Anne 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.

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL LECTURE

The last splendid flowering of the formal Italianate garden in this country.

The Royalist landowners returning from exile on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 brought with them, from Holland or France, new tastes in garden design, and a longing to put down roots. John Evelyn was one of many employed to create little Edens for them. 

We see paintings and plans of the new gardens created during the late Stuart period.  The pictures, many of them by Dutch and Flemish artists who had travelled over with the restored King, are as lovely now as these magnificent gardens once were.   

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's  book on the 17th century Duke of  Buckingham, The Scapegoat, will be published by Fourth Estate in October 2024. Her last non-fiction book,  The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio was described in The Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won all three of the UK’s most prestigious prizes for non-fiction - the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include Cleopatra and Heroes.  

She also writes fiction. Her novel, Peculiar Ground, is largely set in the 17th century, and narrated by a landscape designer loosely based on the diarist John Evelyn. It was described as 'almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance' (The Guardian) and 'full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’. (New York Times).  In her short story collection, Fabulous, she retells fables from classical mythology, relocating them to modern Britain. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she has written on books, theatre and the visual arts for publications including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman and the TLS. She was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize. 

This Lecture will be preceded at 10am by the Annual General Meeting

In this talk we look at one of the most beautiful cities of the ancient world, the fabled city of Palmyra, in the Syrian desert. Palmyra arose on a trade route that brought silk, spices and other luxuries across the desert from the east. Her wealth and power are displayed in gorgeous monuments, while her people, wealthy, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, are preserved in their hauntingly beautiful funeral portraits.

Palmyra became so powerful during the Roman empire that its warrior queen Zenobia challenged Rome itself. We’ll see Palmyra’s meteoric rise and its dramatic fall, its rediscovery by English lords, its influence on art and architecture, and then its desecration by Isis. But we finish with the hope that beautiful Palmyra will rise again…

Dr Paul Roberts is Head of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. 

Paul has been a lecturer with the Arts Society/NADFAS for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean. Like all of us, he enjoys the immediate contact of face to face meetings, but is happy to provide online lectures if desired. 

He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford.  He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching.  He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines. His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. He is now writing a guide to the monuments and Emperors of ancient Rome.  

From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2015, he co-curated Storms, War and Shipwrecks: Sicily and the Sea (2016) telling the history of Sicily through shipwreck finds. Most recently (2019/20) at the Ashmolean he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine.

This lecture will be followed by the New Members Lunch.

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’s ‘golden mile’, we’ll set off on a cultural tour of the capital’s big stores – from snooty Marshall & Snelgrove, to Pontings, ‘House of Value’; from Kennards’ wart-removal service, to the live flamingos atop Derry & Toms; from Bodgers of Ilford, to Bon Marché of Brixton.

How did it feel to enter a great store in 1850 – and in 1950? What was it like to serve? From shoppers to shop girls, publicity stunts to wow factor window dressing, a fascinating slice of social history, with wonderful period images. 

Tessa Boase is a freelance journalist, author, lecturer and campaigner with an interest in uncovering the stories of invisible women from the 19th and early 20th-centuries – revealing how they drove industry, propped up society and influenced politics.

She’s the author of three books of social history: The Housekeeper’s Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House (2014); Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds (first published as Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather in 2018), and London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams (2022).

Since uncovering the feminist origins of the RSPB, Tessa has been campaigning for public recognition of its female founders with plaques, portraits and a statue. 

The crowning of the sovereign is an ancient ceremony rich in religious significance, historical associations and pageantry. This lecture looks at the evolution of the coronation ceremony from Saxon times to the present day, examines the stages of the coronation from the Proclamation to the Homage and explains the significance of the various items of Coronation Regalia. Finally, the lecture gives an account of fascinating incidents, ill omens and memorable mishaps that have occurred at coronations and ends with a discussion of how the coronation of King Charles III differed from that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

Barbara Askew has been a Historian and London Blue Badge Guide since 1988. She is a Lecturer, Examiner and Course Director on Blue Badge Guide Training Courses and an acknowledged expert on Royalty and Windsor Castle. The only Blue Badge Guide accredited to guide the Albert Memorial.

This lecture focuses on Andalucia’s most famous and popular painter, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, whose home town was Seville. Born in 1617, Murillo decided to remain here for almost all of his working life, and his paintings are not only a valuable testament to the religious climate of the city following the CounterReformation, but also important documents which tell us a great deal about society and everyday life at the time. The lecture describes some of the charming images of street orphans and flower girls which one so often associates with the artist, explaining the reasons behind their creation. It also examines some of the beautiful large-scale religious works and analyses their iconography. The lecture compares Murillo’s work to that of his two great contemporaries, Zurbaran and Velázquez, and demonstrates how his work took a radically different turn. It concludes with an examination of a lesser known work whose theme is a mystery, and attempts to piece the clues together in order to find a solution to its meaning. 

Siân Walters is an art historian and the director of Art History in Focus. She has been a lecturer at the National Gallery for over 20 years and taught their first online course, Stories of Art, in September 2020. She also lectures for The Wallace Collection, The Art Fund and many art societies and colleges throughout Europe, and taught at Surrey University for many years.

Her specialist areas include 15th and 16th century Italian Art, Spanish Art and Architecture, Dutch and Flemish painting and the relationship between Dance and Art (she is an honorary advisor to the Nonsuch Historical Dance Society). Siân studied at Cambridge University where she was awarded a choral exhibition and a 1st for her dissertation on the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg. She has lived in France and Italy where she worked for the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon and for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. She spends much of the year organising and leading specialist art tours abroad, including bespoke trips for The Arts Society.

In recent years Siân has been asked to represent the National Gallery at the international Hay Festival and was named a Highly Commended finalist in the World’s Best Guide Awards. In 2018 she was invited to be the guest lecturer on the inaugural BRAVO Cruise of Performing Arts alongside Katherine Jenkins, Julian Lloyd Webber and Ruthie Henshall. In 2020 Siân presented the first online courses for both The Wallace Collection and The National Gallery, and was one of the first accredited lecturers to provide online Zoom lectures.In November she launched a series of live, online tours and visits abroad entitled Cultural Travels from Home. These include visits by special arrangement to a number of major European art galleries allowing virtual access to their collections. These are being offered to Arts Society groups as part of their online tours/events programme, please get in touch for more details.

In 2020 she launched a series of live, online tours and visits abroad entitled Cultural Travels from Home. These include visits by special arrangement to a number of major European art galleries, allowing virtual access to their collections. Siân organised the world’s first livestream tours of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, the Medici Palace in Florence, the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi and the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and many more. These are being offered to Arts Society groups as part of their online tours/events programme, please get in touch for more details.

Gavin Plumley

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was commissioned to create a series of paintings for a dining room in Antwerp. The images, charting the course of a year, changed the way we view the world through art. Landscape had previously been a decorative backdrop to dramas both sacred and profane. But in Bruegel's hands the landscape and our interaction with it became the focus. Looking at paintings such as The Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow and The Gloomy Day, this lecture explores how Bruegel pioneered a whole new way of thinking about the environment and our individual places within a shifting cosmos.

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. He lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. His 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, as well as for history of art societies and The Art Fund.