In-person Course

The last 50 years have produced some of the most exciting and powerful music, painting and sculpture in history, but to many people it remains an undiscovered world. This course aims to introduce participants to some of this era’s major composers including Arvo Pärt, James MacMillan, Brett Dean, Sofia Gubaidulina, Jörg Widmann and John Adams,

Money may make the world go round, but it is also crucial to the development of the arts. The Renaissance across Europe was financed by Church, commerce and conquest, and fuelled not only by connoisseurship but by the need for calculated propaganda. This course examines the diversity of a formative age and asks how and

A look at some great strivers of the late 18th and l9th centuries and their relationship with fame. Mary Robinson enjoys it; Fanny Mendelssohn hankers after it; Benjamin Robert Haydon perishes for lack of it; Edwin Landseer basks in it and overdoes it; Florence Nightingale utterly rejects it.

Most of London’s housing stock now dates from no earlier than the beginning of the eighteenth century. The forms that its dwellings have taken since the time of the Great Fire of London have changed dramatically in response to changing needs, an expanding population, forces of development and legislation.

The concept of the solitary male genius has been a dominant theme of Western art histories. Wives, mistresses, partners and collaborators have often been chased into the shadows, even if they too were practicing artists in their own right.  We will explore the complexities of some of these notable artistic relationships, with an emphasis on

Ever since its inception two-hundred years ago, the National Gallery has been open to the public free of charge. Starting with a small collection, it has grown to just over 2,500 paintings including some of the greatest masterpieces in Western European art.  Each week, this gallery-based course will tell the story of the National Gallery

Over the centuries, composers and painters have often drawn inspiration from the same subject matter – a crow on a dead branch, a lonely traveller, a man contemplating the moon, are common themes, for example, in both the songs of Franz Schubert and the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich.  However, the worlds of music and paintings

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

This course will study the influences from East to West, and West to East, on the East Asian cultures of Cambodia and Vietnam, Japan and China, from Classical times to the Modern era.  China was the most influential culture in East Asia. Its influence is seen everywhere, from the complex writing system to its elegant

Performance of all kinds – from opera and dance to the spoken-word and many other manifestations in between – has been a site of fascination for artists. With the advent of the ‘stage reform movement’ in the late-nineteenth century and the emergence of significant European empresarios, the drive to make theatre anew became ever more

London of the Victorian and Edwardian period is all around us, so much so that we scarcely register the scale of building, and the ambition and inventiveness of the architecture of the period. The shops and pubs we use, great swathes of housing, as well as a number of new suburbs were developed during this

In 1863, a 31year old artist exhibited a masterpiece, Luncheon on the Grass (Déjeuner sur l’Herbe) at the notorious Salon des Refusés in Paris. From that moment on, Edouard Manet was as celebrated by younger artists, the future Impressionists, as he was deplored, mocked and excluded by the art establishment. Rejecting a comfortable life of