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.