This Day of Special Interest is organised by The Arts Society Ross-on-Wye

Venue and time: Upton Bishop Village Hall, HR9 7TU, 10,30am - 3.00pm

For Booking form please visit http://theartssociety-rossonwye.org

Leptis Magna and Cyrene, Cities of the Sands, marks the beginning of our odyssey, in now troubled Libya, as we gaze on two great cities once lost to the sands but now rediscovered. Spiritual Cyrene, founded by Greek colonists, clinging to its beautiful mountain-top site with its theatre, temples and tombs, and mighty Leptis Magna, first built by Phoenicians - ancestors of Hannibal - and now a mini Rome with its imperial forum, basilica, stadium and arena.

Ancient Faces transports us to Egypt, where we gaze on the beautiful realistic portraits on linen, wood or gilded plaster, which appeared on Egyptian mummies when the Romans took control after the death of Cleopatra. In the 1880s the British archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie discovered hundreds of portrait mummies at Hawara, about 100 miles south-west of Cairo, and recorded them carefully in his diaries. We examine their hair, and dress and even their racial origins and characters (or at least Petrie’s opinions on them!).

Palmyra, Bride of the Desert ends our journey. Once-glorious Palmyra situated in the Syrian desert, was on a trade route bringing silk, spices and other luxuries from the east. We marvel at Palmyra at the peak of her prosperity, with her beautiful monuments, wealthy, cosmopolitan people, and their haunting funeral portraits, then watch her dramatic fall, under Queen Zenobia who dared to defy Rome. We see her rediscovery by English adventurer lords, her influence on art and architecture, and the recent desecration by Isis. But we finish with the hope that beautiful Palmyra will rise again.

Lecturer

Dr Paul Roberts OBE is Research Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. Paul has been a lecturer with the Arts Society/NADFAS for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean.

He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching. He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines.

His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. In 2024 his book "Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments", looking at the history of Rome through its monuments and the Emperors who built them, was published by Thames and Hudson.

From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2015, in 2019/20 he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine.

He was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List 2025 for services to Archaeology and Heritage.

Bookings open in December 2026

A new Parisian leisure society developed in the second half of the 19th century, providing ample material for artists who portrayed not only the excitement and energy of this vibrant period but also its darker side. This study day looks at the way ‘scenes of modernity’ were depicted through paintings of the new absinthe-fuelled cafe society, the nascent emancipation of women and the rise of the bourgeoisie. It will make particular reference to the works of Manet, the Impressionists and one of the most underappreciated female artists, Berthe Morisot.

Biography:

Stella Grace Lyons is a freelance Art History lecturer, speaker and writer accredited with The Arts Society. She has lectured across the UK, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Malaysia. Stella gained her BA in the History of Art with a 1st class in her dissertation from the University of Bristol and her MA in History of Art from the University of Warwick. She spent a year studying Renaissance art in Italy at the British Institute of Florence and three months studying Venetian art in Venice. In addition, she attended drawing classes at the prestigious Charles H. Cecil studios in Florence, a private atelier that follows a curriculum based on the leading ateliers of nineteenth-century Paris.

Image: Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre - Eremitage, Public Domain