From the 19th century the city became a symbol of modern life - a place of social and sexual drama and a force of energy both emotional and physical. Join me on a visual urban journey to explore how artists have engaged with the idea of the city as a rich, sometimes surprising, source of inspiration. The lecture is divided into certain themes and artists include Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Bomburg, Edward Hopper, Hogarth, as well as some contemporary artists.

Image: Le Pont de l'Europe. Gustav Caillebote.

Cindy is an art historian, independent lecturer and art guide. She has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University and as a mature student she went back to university to study first for a BA and then for a Masters in History of Art at Birkbeck College, London University. Before that she spent many years as a radio producer and presenter for the BBC World Service working in news and current affairs. Since 2016 Cindy has worked as  a lecturer and an official art guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has also been a trustee at the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye Museum. Cindy has accumulated a wide range of art historical knowledge ranging from 18th European and British art to the contemporary international art scene. She has been an official guide for  Frieze Masters art fair in London. She is particularly keen to draw parallels with art and social history and her lectures are accessible and engaging, drawing out the stories of art and artists which are steeped in human emotions and experiences which we all share.

This is the story of how the socialite and muse Peggy Guggenheim became one of the greatest collectors in the history of modern art. Friends with the leading cultural figures of her day – including Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Barbara Hepworth, Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Djuna Barnes and Igor Stravinsky – she was photographed by Man Ray and André Kertesz, took advice from Marcel Duchamp and married – among others – the artist Max Ernst. She moved with ease between the social elites of New York and the bohemia of Paris. This talk asks why it was that – seemingly out of the blue – Guggenheim started collecting contemporary art in the 1930s? What impact did her subsequent galleries in London and New York have on artists and the wider art world? How and why did her name become inextricably linked with the city of Venice? And how did a New York heiress play such a pivotal role in the making of mid-century Modernism?
Image: Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice.

Jacky is an art historian, publisher, writer and broadcaster, specialising in modern and contemporary art. After studying at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she worked as a curator at a number of leading galleries: Tate, the Barbican, the Courtauld and the Hayward. In 2008, she moved sideways into the world of art publishing, She is the author herself of a bestselling book on British artist Grayson Perry (Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition 2020) and co-author of a number of other titles. Jacky has presented and contributed to a range of television programmes for the BBC, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's arts review programme, 'Front Row'. She has written and presented a number of online films and livestreams for Tate, Christie's and the Art Fund.  An experienced lecturer in museums, galleries and at literary festivals, she has taught at a number of arts institutions including University College London, Christie’s Education, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts. She is currently based between London and Tel Aviv.

The last splendid flowering of the formal Italianate garden in this country.
The Royalist landowners returning from exile on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 brought with them, from Holland or France, new tastes in garden design, and a longing to put down roots. John Evelyn was one of many employed to create little Edens for them. 
I show paintings and plans of the new gardens created during the late Stuart period.  The pictures, many of them by Dutch and Flemish artists who had travelled over with the restored King, are as lovely now as these magnificent gardens once were.
Alongside the pictures I show 17th century embroidery. Gardens, as Samuel Pepys noticed, tended to be grandly formal and ‘plain’, with few flowers, but the bed-covers and hangings and cushions produced by the women of the period are wonderfully skilled, and  exuberantly colourful. I will show them for their beauty, and decode their messages.  All those quaint animals and fabulous blooms carry lessons about politics, about domestic harmony and about humanity's place in the natural world. 
Image: Capriccio. Robert Robinson, British artist, d. 1706. An Imaginary Formal Garden and House. 

Lucy's most recent book on the 17th century Duke of  Buckingham, The Scapegoat,  has won the Plutarch Award for Biography of the Year and the Randy Shilts Award for Non-Fiction.   Her previous biography, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio was described in The Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include Cleopatra and Heroes. She also writes fiction. Her novel, Peculiar Ground, is largely set in the 17th century, and narrated by a landscape designer loosely based on the diarist John Evelyn. It was described as 'almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance' (The Guardian) and 'full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’. (New York Times). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she is a widely respected critic.  She was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize. She lives in London and Suffolk.   

The foods we eat at Christmas have a long, curious and visually spectacular history. This lecture narrates and illustrates that history from Medieval boar’s head and brawn, by way of highly decorated seventeenth century mince pies to the almost forgotten Twelfth Night Cake. Medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings and prints from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and illustrations from cookery books provide us with images of some of the lost glories of the British Christmas feast.
Image: Christmas pudding. Colour lithograph from Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1907 edition.

Peter has a BA in the History of Art, an MA in London History, and a PhD in the cultural history of the early eighteenth-century criminal, Jack Sheppard. Until 2023, he was the Principal Librarian at the City of London’s Guildhall Library. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Peter has appeared on television and radio as a consultant on crime in eighteenth-century London, the history of English food, and Shakespeare’s First Folio. Peter’s The Curious Cookbook, Viper Soup, Badger Ham, Stewed Sparrows, and a Hundred more Historic Recipes was published in 2012 by the British Library and subsequently published in the US, China and Taiwan. Peter is currently engaged in writing a book - Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London to be published by Bodleian Library  in May 2026.
 

In December 2024, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, often referred to as the Soul of the City, reopened to the public after a devastating fire had threatened to destroy it 5 years earlier. A seemingly impossible target had been set by the French President to rebuild; yet huge sums of donated money and teams of expert restorers ensured the timescale was met. Such is the symbolic power of this cultural icon in the psyche of the French people and indeed people beyond.
In this lecture Carole considers what makes Notre Dame so special. Rather than looking into the fine details of its restoration; she will look instead at its key location, some of its most precious artefacts, and through images consider some of the most significant events to have been staged inside the iconic silhouette.
Along the way, she will introduce a much loved fictional character Quasimodo, Hunchback of Notre Dame, who was responsible for the cathedral’s salvation the first time it faced destruction.
Image: Notre Dame west portal

Carole is an experienced guide and lecturer on combined history and art tours in France with 20 years experience. Having lived and worked on a number of bespoke river vessels and converted barges there she has used them as a platform from which to research her lectures. She uses art in all its guises to explore the characters who shaped France and likes to delve behind the scenes to discover hidden truths. She also acts as a guide for a privately owned ancestral home in her native Chilterns.

Napoleon’s Empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, was a passionate gardener, patron and art collector. Her reputation for generosity, charm and gentleness of manner was of enormous value to Napoleon as a counterweight to the otherwise military and legalistic tenor of his regime. This talk will explain the range of her cultural activities, including her acquisition of a large and distinguished collection of paintings – among them by far the most important group of works by an entirely new school of painting, the troubadours (who painted beautifully crafted historical scenes). We'll also look closely at Malmaison, her chateau near Paris, which she created as a home for her splendid art collection and which was famous throughout Europe for its magnificent gardens containing plants and animals gathered from all over the known world.