The ability that paintings, like music, have to leave you speechless is surely the whole point: art needs no words to fire the mind, quicken the body and touch the heart. And then we say of a painting that it really speaks to us. No wonder poets want to speak back, make art’s hidden voice

Certain subjects exert a sustained fascination for the artist, others rise from nothing in response to a particular mood, a particular time – landscape, still-life, war…... Each week this course will examine a different theme and the changing way it has been perceived and presented through the ages, moving in to focus on a specific

London is a collection of villages - to a degree greater than any other world city. Medieval villages expanded, particularly in the Georgian and Victorian periods. And, as the fields between those villages were built on, the capital coalesced into one huge conurbation. But, still, within those villages, you can see their distinctive old heart,

This course will explore the design and decoration of some of the most influential and fascinating domestic interiors in Western culture, highlighting both mainstream movements as well as interesting idiosyncratic styles of note. We will focus on the architecture as well as the fine and decorative arts, with painting, furniture, ceramics, glass and other works

Late nineteenth-century Spain was in a state of flux, characterised by competing aesthetic ideas between tradition and the modern, religion and the secular, passionately-felt regional and national identities. Nowhere was this more strongly articulated than through Catalan modernisme (modernism), a cultural movement centred on Barcelona.  We will examine these various seminal influences focussing on the

This course will explore an artist who is still seen as the epitome of the ideals that aligned themselves with the term Renaissance. We will chart the rise of Raphael beginning before his birth with the work of his father Giovanni Santi to the introduction of Raphael into the Santi studio. We will discuss his

From JMW Turner and John Constable, to Chinese Masterpieces, Japanese Prints,  Hokusai’s Mount Fuji, and Cézanne’s Mont Saint Victoire,  artists have strived to capture landscape in all its beauty and nature for centuries.  Landscape vistas can be recreated in private gardens and parkland estates, as with Chinese gardens of the 8thC, Capability Brown in the

This series of study days will examine the relationship between music and painting during three contrasting eras: Dutch Baroque 1600-1700, English Classicism 1750-1810, and Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism 1800-1920.  The first day discusses symbolism in the musical paintings of the Dutch masters who painted the mercantile classes making music.  Day 2 examines the wide range of composers

Light illuminates, it moulds, it defines our mood – and, in art, its effects are determined by the artist’s tools. From gold leaf to photography, oil paint to the Louvre pyramids, each week we range across centuries and styles to understand both how light can be captured and the changing messages it carries, whether of

Europe is at a turning point in its history. Questions about its unity and diversity are more relevant today than ever. This series of talks will address the concept of Europe through a number of its most characteristic and idiosyncratic cities. It will discuss the evolution of their ground plans as well as the stories

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,