What’s Coming

 

TALK 2024: Save the Children: Children in Art
Held at: The Holy Name Church, 42 Arbrook Lane, Esher, KT10 9EE
Lecturer: Dr. Laurence Shafe
Dates: Wednesday 13th March 2024
Time: 12:00-14:00
Fee:
Description: This talk is to raise money for ‘Save the Children’ and it covers the representation of children in art from the ancient Egyptians to the present day. It skips through the many roles imposed on children over the centuries, from Tudor and Stuart succession, to eighteenth-century destitution to the Victorian’s invention of the modern idea of childhood. Artists covered include Van Dyck, William Hogarth, Gustave Doré, John Millais, Mary Cassat, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, Norman Rockwell, Grayson Perry and Martin Parr.

TALK 2024: Social Class in Victorian Painting
Held at: The Lightbox, Chobham Road, Woking, GU214AA
Lecturer: Dr. Laurence Shafe
Dates: Saturday 16th March 2024
Time: 10:30-12:30
Fee: £15 adults, £12 for members and students
Description: The nineteenth century was a time when there was a massive divide between the rich and the poor. It was a time of discontent with the Peterloo Massacre, the Swing Riots and Chartism leading to the closest we came to a nineteenth-century revolution. Laurence shows how artists dealt with these and a wide range of Victorian social changes—increasing industrialisation, the treatment of the poor, the role of women and on a more positive note summer holidays and the invention of childhood. The talk is illustrated by many of the leading Victorian artists such as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, George Frederic Watts and Gustav Doré.

TALK 2023: William Hogarth And The New Middling Sort
Held at: The Lightbox, Chobham Road, Woking, GU214AA
Lecturer: Dr. Laurence Shafe
Dates: Saturday 23rd March 2024
Time: 10:30-12:30
Fee: £15 adults, £12 for members and students
Description: Laurence covers the life and work of William Hogarth and uses three of his “modern moral subjects” to talk about life in eighteenth-century London. ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ shows how a naive country girl became a wealthy mistress and then quickly fell to the lowest ranks of society. ‘A Rake’s Progress’ takes us from an inheritance through a lavish lifestyle to downfall—prison and finally the ‘madhouse’. Hogarth’s most famous series ‘Marriage A-la-Mode’ illustrates the way an eighteenth-century arranged marriage leads to disaffection and death. All the series take common scenes of the day that would have been immediately recognised and Hogarth illustrates his moral lessons through careful selection and brilliant observation.