Beyond the Pomp!
September 25 - November 27
10.45–12.45 Thursdays
£83.00 – £690.00
Description
Portraits, piety, the classical world – it is the great celebratory themes which dominate our perception of the history of art, but the artist’s familiar world, both personal and social, filters in around the edges, creating vivid images of contemporary experience. Certain themes, like feasting and friendship, are constant over the centuries, but we will also see medieval cock-fighting, the street scenes of Rembrandt and Velasquez, self-portraits, domestic gardens in the 19th century and hamburgers in the 20th!
“A fascinating series, wide-ranging and richly illustrated Nicole’s knowledge of the vast range of periods, styles and subject matter - is awe-inspiring yet never dry or challenging and her inclusion of personal details of the artists adds another dimension”
Course Outline
25 Sep 2025 – Hide and Seek
The artist is paid to capture the lives and values of others. It is the wealthy and powerful who commission idealised reflections of their world, but can we look at the arts and see anything of the artist’s own experience? Whether woven through great and sumptuous projects or, eventually, as independent works, the emergence of contemporary life as a subject reflects the changing role of patronage.
02 Oct 2025 – Crafts, Beasts and Merry-Making
Medieval art is often portrayed as being uniquely religious but manuscripts and tapestries give a rich sense of a world at work and play, of harvesting, brawling and hawking, and a growing curiosity about the natural world of plants and beasts.
09 Oct 2025 – Quiet Reverence
Through the work of C15th artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, we can enter the tiled rooms, finger the trappings and feel the warmth of cosy interiors, and, for the first time, look upon real and familiar, rather than imaginary, landscape, damp with mist.
16 Oct 2025 – Holland – The Love of Domesticity
For the successors of van Eyck and van der Weyden, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, the intimate domestic spaces of home are the focus of some of their most powerful works. Lacemaking and kitchen chores, the streetscapes of Delft, mothers and music-making, the exotic communities of a major trading nation – all are grist to the artist’s mill in this age of quiet prosperity.
23 Oct 2025 – The Calm Heart of a Storm
C17th Catholic Europe, dominated by the great courts, produces flamboyant works of religion and secular power. However, side by side with these, artists also find inspiration in their own lives, such as Rubens’ loving studies of his wife and children, Velasquez’s scenes of street sellers and de la Tour’s card-sharps and prostitutes.
30 Oct 2025 – 18thC – Curiosity and Democracy
The “Enlightenment” attached a moral value to respectable family life and Chardin in France and Hogarth in England are fascinated by children, servants, and as a counterpoint, even criminals. At the same time, the physical trappings of the bourgeois environment start to become more varied and affordable and we explore this development through the real and the painted evidence.
06 NOV 2025 – War and Peace
War and civil unrest dominate the early C19th and no one is untouched by propaganda, spread ever–wider by the popular print. Side by side with this, though, is a new understanding of the world of work – still predominantly rural but increasingly, and disturbingly, shifting to a threatening new industrial environment.
13 NOV 2025 – Harnessing Nature
Through the centuries, gardens and nature have been a constant theme. We look at the changing nature of man’s engagement with Nature, in knot gardens, Frost Fairs and the Garden City, and in paint from the ploughed fields of the Middle Ages to the lovingly tended plots of the C20th.
20 NOV 2025 – Railways and Respectability
Transport, cafes, the lives of women, the domestic interior, the nature of work, the urban environment – everything changes in the C19th. For so many of the key figures of the age, the dizzying modern world was to become the essential theme of their art, from the dance floor to the tram, from the laundry to the race course.
27 Nov 2025 – The Triumph of Everyday
From the early C20th, it is not just subjects which change, but the materials themselves. Andy Warhol may paint soup cans, but Marcel Duchamp designates “readymades”, mortality becomes active in the works of Damien Hirst and in 2001, Michael Landy made a cataclysmic artistic statement by publically destroying his every possession. What does all this tell us about our changing expectations of art and our relationship with the physical world?