Tapestries were the most expensive wall decorations in the Middle Ages and beyond. Often commissioned in sets, taking years to produce, they graced some of the most significant courts of Europe from the 15th century to the 21st. This lecture will explore the making of tapestries and some landmark sets including those of the House of Burgundy, Pope Leo X and Henry VIII all made by the weavers of Flanders and those of Louis XIV and the current Queen of Denmark made by the weavers of the Gobelins factory in Paris. It will explore the changing approaches and some of the stories translated into tapestry.

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.

What caused American painting to take off as it did in the mid-20th century? The painter Willem de Kooning attributed its initial success to the work of his friend Jackson Pollock whom he credited with ‘breaking the ice’. My talk looks at the career of the famous action painter and assesses how his contribution to painting (including his infamous drip technique) contributed to Abstract Expressionism becoming an artistic phenomenon worldwide. Pollock’s path left a particularly significant legacy in terms of future developments.

When the very first Chinese porcelains found their way to Europe, the beauty and fragility of the material led to their being mounted with precious metal and treasured alongside other rare and exotic objects such as ostrich eggs and rock crystal vessels. They were housed in cabinets of curiosities and exchanged as diplomatic gifts between great European rulers. This early and exclusive ownership of Chinese porcelain spread enormously in the 17th century with the opening up of trading routes between Europe and the Far East and led to a widespread fashion for housing and displaying collections of Chinese ‘blue-and-white’; and spawned a whole range of European imitations. This lecture will examine the enormous and long-lasting influence that these Chinese porcelains had on European taste and culture and the whole history of interior design.

This lecture covers almost 2000 years of London's history illustrated through its stained glass windows - these cover 19th century, 20th century and contemporary glass makers.

Lecturer: Anna Warrillow

Anna is a Blue Badge Guide offering bespoke private tours of the City of London. She graduated in Art and Italian at the University of Sussex and completed a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art in Renaissance Decorative Art and Design. She has worked as a curator in sculpture at the V&A and lectures widely to very varied groups.

At some stage in their life most of us have received or sent a valentine card. While enthusiasm for such a romantic gesture has fluctuated over the years, the symbolism has remained enduring. This talk explores the expressions of roses, hearts and cupids as depicted by generations of engravers and concludes with the satirical and elaborate confections of the late Victorian era.

From the 13^th to the 20^th centuries, the Nativity must be one of the most popular subjects of all with artists, north and south of the Alps, from Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rembrandt to Rubens. Sometimes the scene takes place at night, sometimes during the day.  The lecture will explore the many variations of the scene and their possible meanings, depending upon whether midwives, Joseph or shepherds are present, and will analyse the various postures and gestures of the Virgin as she adores the Christ Child.

Coade is an artificial stone that was invented in the 18th century. It was widely used for freestanding statuary and monuments, architectural detailing and even garden furniture. Hundreds of examples can still be seen across Britain. The stone was named after Eleanor Coade, who ran a successful manufactory in south London for many years. This lecture tells the story of Mrs Coade and the artificial stone that made her one of the most successful businesswomen in the late 1700s.

Suggested Book Titles

Due to the late swapping of the January and December lectures we were unable to source a book on Eleanor Coade and her Stone. If you are interested, here are 2 Titles.

1. Coade Stone by Hans van Lemmen published by Shire publishing
2. Mrs Coade`s Stone by Alison Kelly.

This is a narrative approach to the revival of 15th century carpets in Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan. Illuminations on vellum – containing the only surviving representations of textiles from this era – flourished, despite the Islamic prohibition on representative art – and are all we had left of Timurid Carpets until Chris Alexander’s workshop began to weave them to life again. The lecture will examine the traditional role of carpet weaving and embroidery in the social lives of Central Asian women and how social and political influences led to the decline of textile production. How do the constraints of gender-inequality, corruption and the sourcing of natural dyes from neighbouring Afghanistan continue to challenge attempts at reviving the rich textile heritage of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand?

The lecture explores the passion for the exotic and beautiful tulip flower which reached its height in Amsterdam in the 1630s. Collectors, besotted by the exceptional beauty of this new and exotic flower, speculated in and paid ever higher prices for the rarest varieties, in expectation of the metamorphosis of bulb to a flower with petals of an unparalleled richness and intensity of colour. The variety ‘Semper Augustus’ was the most desirable, with its mysterious and spectacular ‘flamed’ petals. The coveted tulip featured as a motif on still-life flower paintings by Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert and on many different works of art from furniture to embroideries, furniture, ceramics and silver. During the seventeenth century, this rare and precious flower, beloved in art and a feature of botanical gardens, inspired the production of Delftware flower pyramids for the English court of William and Mary and examples can still be seen in the collections at Hampton Court Palace and Dyrham Park near Bath.