The lecture is about the hidden treasures of the Cities of Castile. Each of these cities has its own individual personality, and art treasures. Toledo has its Visigothic and Moorish background. Avila, active in the campaign for Christian re-conquest, has its fortified walls and was the birthplace of the 16th century reformer St Teresa. Salamanca has its university and great ‘plaza’. 

Biography of Gail Turner

Gail is a historian, art historian, and painter. She is passionate about Spain and Spanish topics. She has been a long-time lecturer for The Arts Society, and before Covid she taught on courses at the V&A, and for Art Pursuits, the National Gallery and the Art Fund. She has lectured on Cambridge University Summer Schools, the Courtauld Institute Summer Courses, Inscape, and for many arts organisations in Europe. In the past she led tours to Spain for The Arts Society and Martin Randall Travel. Gail lectured in the Prado and Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in the 1980s, and was Deputy Curator of Keats Shelley Memorial House, Rome, before that. She was also once a Christie’s consultant in Illuminated Manuscripts. In 2015 Gail was awarded the Encomienda de Isabel la Católica (the equivalent of the CBE) by the King of Spain for promoting Spanish culture among British audiences. She is President of The Arts Society Colchester.

Photo of the Puente de San Martin, Toledo by Volodymyr Vlasenko, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Some of the finest work of modern British art was produced during the second world war. Many women were amongst the artists officially commissioned to record the Blitz and travel through Europe to record its devastation first-hand. One, Doris Zinkeisen, was the first civilian to arrive at Belsen after its liberation by the Allies. They also painted land girls back home, the women in factories, in the ATS + the Red Cross, all stepping into the breach to keep the country going. I will introduce you to some new names based on my interviews with several of the self-effacing but very talented people who found their paintings shown at the National Gallery, while all its other masterpieces were hidden away in the slate mines of Snowdonia. While Myra Hess’s morale boosting concerts took place there throughout the war, the Recording Britain and War Artists Advisory Committee schemes meant that artists were guaranteed employment, and our national collections would inherit work of great historical and propaganda interest, much of which is not often on display.

Biography of Magdalen Evans

Magdalen studied history of art at UEA and worked in London galleries for fifteen years; since then, she has been organising exhibitions, researching paintings and writing articles, particularly on C19th/20th women artists. A contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to BBC Woman's Hour, she also works with charities that help ex-offenders through art and education. Her book, 'Utmost Fidelity' is on Marianne Stokes and her English landscape painter husband Adrian Stokes RA. Magdalen has also lectured recently for the Art Fund, National Portrait Gallery, Pre-Raphaelite Society and Art Workers' Guild as well as to the Art Society of Budapest. She is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars and has lectured for them at the Old Bailey in 2024 on the subject of Elizabeth Fry and her contribution over the past 200 years to prison reform through creativity since the passing of the 1823 Gaol's Act.

Photo of Laura Knight’s ‘A Balloon Site, Coventry’, HMSO Public domain

Caspar David Friedrich was born two hundred and fifty years ago in Greifswald in Pomerania in 1774 (a year before the birth of Turner and two years before that of Constable). His unique contribution was to transform the subject of landscape by infusing it with deep spiritual meaning and by expressing the universal power of nature. Three major exhibitions took place throughout 2024 to celebrate his life and work, in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden, and last year, in 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York put on the first solo exhibition of his work in the USA.  Although he was little appreciated when he died in 1840, during his lifetime his work was collected by royal and noble patrons and is today enthusiastically admired in the museums of Berlin and Dresden, as well as, more recently at London’s National Gallery.

Biography of Clare Ford-Wille

Honours degree in History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London. Regular commitments include Centre for Lifelong Learning, London University, National Gallery, V&A Museum, WEA, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, the Art Fund and National Trust. Study tours abroad.

Photo of ‘Der Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer’, Public Domain

Bookings open October 2026

Price TBA, to includes a meal to be served during the course of the evening.

Start time: 6pm at Colwall Village Hall

Lecture

The Arts and Crafts Movement was one of Britain’s most radical and far-reaching art movements. It was not just about making art and craft, but how and where you lived and how you spent your time. Many Arts and Crafts makers moved to the countryside to go Back to the Land and live a Simple Life – buzzwords of the 1890s and 1900s! Part of the ethos of the movement was the revival of forgotten crafts, and for many makers, this also meant reviving forgotten customs and festivities to build a sense of community in the places they lived. Arts and Crafts designers sought out wassails, and mummers’ plays, and carolling customs amongst others and reinstated them in the communities.

Biography:

Kirsty Hartsiotis was the curator of the decorative and fine art at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham from 2008 to 2023. She is currently a curator at Swindon Museums, where she also worked prior to 2008.  At Cheltenham she looked after the Designated Arts and Crafts Movement collection, which includes the important private press archive, the Emery Walker Library. She’s curated many exhibitions on the Arts and Crafts and Private Press Movements, including Crafting Change and Ernest Gimson: Observation, Imagination & Making.  Her most recent exhibition is A Very British Art Revolution at Swindon, and she's currently working on a touring exhibition and publication about British studio pottery, Beneath the Surface, opening May 2026. Passionate about sharing her deep love for and knowledge of the arts, she’s also a freelance researcher, currently researching the work of Arts and Crafts designers in churches in the South West, and Arts and Crafts war memorials. She’s also been an oral storyteller for over 20 years, and has published a number of collections of stories. She is a regular columnist for Cotswold Life, writes for diverse other publications on art history and folklore, and was the newsletter editor for the Society of Decorative Art Collections. 

Image: Cray Floral Pattern William Morris Texture, FreeStockTextures are licensed under Creative Commons Zero

One of the finest collections of Impressionism anywhere in the world was assembled by the English industrialist and philanthropist Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947). During the 1920s, he acquired seminal works by all of the major Impressionists, at a time when Impressionism still struggled to gain acceptance among English public institutions. After a decade of collecting, Courtauld gave the majority of these remarkable works to establish The Courtauld Institute of Art and Gallery in London. This lecture will explore Courtauld’s collection and his role in promoting Impressionism in the United Kingdom.

Biography of Natalia Murray

Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she gained BA and MA in the History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts before taking the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. In 2015 she was awarded a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. At present she works as an independent curator and an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she teaches her MA course on the role of the exhibitions and private collections in Europe in 1863-1930.  In 2017 she curated a major exhibition Revolution. Russian Art. 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She is currently working on several exhibition projects in London, Paris and US. Her latest exhibition The World as Non-Objective. The Birth of a New Art which traces development of the new abstract art from Chagall to Malevich, was opened with high acclaim at the Jewish museum in Moscow in November 2022. Her most recent books include Two Women Patrons of the Russian Avant-Garde. Nadezhda Dobychina and Klavdia Mikhailova (Unicorn, 2021) and Art for the Workers. Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd. 1917-1920 (Brill, 2018). Her books and articles extend across the wide field of 19-20 century European art, and she has featured in films and art programmes on BBC 4, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Natalia is also trustee of the Avant-Garde Art Research Project - a UK-based charity which shares one of her aspirations to reduce the number of fakes on the art market.

Photo: Ham II, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Entertainments were one of the most important features of the Elizabethan court calendar, often taking place during royal progresses to courtiers' houses. In this lecture we'll explore the ways that such entertainments combined visual art, music and poetry to entertain, persuade and win the favour of the Virgin Queen.

Biography of Christina Faraday

Dr Christina Faraday FSA FRHistS is a historian of art and ideas, specialising in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider 16th and 17th-century world. She is an Affiliated Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, a Trustee of the Walpole Society for British art history, and a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3 and in other popular media. She is the host of British Art Matters podcast, and from 2020-2025 she was a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is an experienced lecturer, teaching for the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge, The Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, London, and for Professional and Continuing Education at Cambridge, where she is Co-Director of the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published in 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press. Her latest book, The Story of Tudor Art, was published by Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury in September 2025 and was named a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Photo: Painting of Elizabeth the First by Steven Van Der Meulen, Public Domain 

The American artist who has become synonymous with the isolation experienced by many in the covid era. We will look at Hopper's unique contribution to American art in the 20th century with his haunting images of loneliness in the midst of urban life.

Biography:

Born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, (19th-20th century art - Distinction for thesis on Matisse's Illustrations to Poetry). She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London's National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the latter as a guest speaker for travel companies. Since the pandemic began in March 2020 Lydia had devised and delivered a programme of upwards of 180 online lectures to her own group Art For The Uninitiated.

Photo: Universalist Church by Edward Hooper, Public Domain

Explore the central mystery embodied by the inimitability of Stradivari's violins by following some of his instruments from his workshop to the present day. Two hundred and fifty years after Antonio Stradivari’s death, his violins and cellos remain the most highly prized instruments in the world. Loved by great musicians and capable of fetching fabulous sums when sold, their tone and beauty are legendary. Every subsequent violin-maker has tried to match them. Not one has succeeded. How can that be?

Biography:

Toby is an experienced lecturer and public speaker who has been accredited by The Arts Society since 2012. His career began with Natural Sciences at Cambridge and has been through investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, where he remains on the board. He is also non-executive Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music and a director of Liverpool University Press. Toby has written three narrative histories: Stradivarius – Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius; Faberge’s Eggs; and Faber & Faber – The Untold Story, as well as a novel, Close to the Edge. Of these, only the obvious one is published by the family firm.

Image: Portrait possibly depicting Antonio Stradavari, Public Domain

If any decade could be called The Golden Age of Hollywood, it was the 1930s. Its start coincided with the last of the silent films, but its end saw the apogee of the studio film – Gone with the Wind. In between came the establishment of the great stars and the famous names of the Hollywood studios as American film colonised the world. There was little shooting outside the enclosed walls of the studio lot, but the list of classic films that decade produced is unending – Top Hat, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, Goodbye Mr Chips, Ninotchka, Robin Hood, Snow White, Grand Hotel, The Women…..

Biography:

Colin Shindler has been lecturing on American and British social and cultural history for over 30 years. He was awarded his PhD at Cambridge University and subsequently lectured on film for their History Faculty between 1998 and 2019 exploring its relationship to modern British and American social and cultural history. He also teaches a variety of adult education courses at Madingley and Higham Hall in Cumbria and has lectured on cruises. Between 1975 and 1999 he pursued a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and film. He won a BAFTA award for his production of A Little Princess. His production of Young Charlie Chaplin was nominated for a US Prime Time Emmy. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Buster and was the producer of various television dramas such as Lovejoy and Wish Me Luck. He has written three novels as well as numerous television scripts and radio plays but regards his greatest cultural contribution as choosing the title music for the police series Juliet Bravo. His most recent radio play to be broadcast on Radio 4 was Leni Goes to Hollywood, about the German film director Leni Riefenstahl. Other radio plays for R4 included How To Be An Internee (about P.G. Wodehouse) and one on Private Eye & The Profumo Affair (Rumours). He is the author of Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches: The Controversial South Africa Cricket Tour of 1970 which was short listed for the MCC/Wisden Cricket Book of the Year in 2021. He is best known for his childhood memoir Manchester United Ruined My Life which was short listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. His other publications include Hollywood Goes To War: Films & American Society 1939-1952 and Hollywood in Crisis: Films & American Society 1929-1939.  His next book is called Boom!: The Story of a Generation.

Image: What Price Hollywood window card, Public Domain