The Nutcracker ballet has delighted audiences at Christmas for many decades yet it was deemed a failure at its initial performances. Based upon the current Royal Ballet production by Sir Peter Wright, this lecture takes a close look at how this well-loved ballet now takes its rightful place on stage and how the music of...

Hans Holbein the Younger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons   Hans Holbein brought with him from mainland Europe to England both sophistication and skill, with far reaching consequences for this island's artistic development. His Ambassadors is one of the National Gallery of London’s greatest treasures, dating from a tradition in the arts when no object...

  In Greek legend, Pandora was created with the express purpose of causing trouble to men which, by opening her box, she achieved. This lecture looks at the original sources for the story, draws parallels with both Eve in Genesis and Galatea in Ovid before showing how ballets, operas and plays from Coppelia to My...

Avant-garde painter, designer, decorator, inspired colourist, mother and muse, Vanessa Bell was the warm heart of the Bloomsbury Group, once described by Dorothy Parker as “living in squares and loving in triangles”. This has perhaps lessened the fame of her work: this lecture asks the question - was Vanessa Bell the painter as radical as...

The 'poor little rich girl' who changed the face of twentieth century art. Not only was Peggy Guggenheim ahead of her time but she was also the woman who helped define it. She discovered and nurtured a new generation of artists producing a new kind of art. Through collecting not only art but also the...

This colourful lecture explores the relationship between an extraordinary American painter and an equally remarkable place: the picturesque state of New Mexico. Having visited the mountain art colony of Taos for the first time in 1929, she moved permanently to New Mexico after World War II. Fascinated by the mountains and desert, adobe churches and...