This November, the National Gallery in London will attempt something that has never been done before and, by the institution’s own assessment, will never be done again: it will gather in a single building all nine surviving independent portraits by Jan van Eyck. The paintings are scattered across five museums in four countries — London, Vienna, Berlin, Bruges, Sibiu — and several have not travelled in decades. The Arnolfini Portrait has left the National Gallery only once in over a century. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has agreed to lend both its Van Eycks simultaneously for the first time in its history. That such an assembly requires the word “only” to describe nine objects tells us something about the scale of loss that six centuries have inflicted on the work of a single painter — and something about the preciousness of what remains.

The modern visitor, arriving at Trafalgar Square in late November, will likely bring with them a set of assumptions about what a portrait is. A portrait, we tend to think, captures a likeness. It records how someone looked. It is a picture of a face. These assumptions are not wrong, exactly, but they are radically incomplete when applied to the nine panels that will occupy the National Gallery’s rooms. To understand what Van Eyck achieved, one must recover a world in which a painted face was not a picture but a device — a legal document, a diplomatic instrument, a store of status, a surrogate for the living body. The question this talk pursues is not “what do these portraits look like?” but rather: what were they for?

Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff has her own company - Art Historical London -  offering art historical lectures, museum visits, courses, tours, travel and events from Amsterdam, London and New York, and since 2020 online. 

She also teaches on the public program of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, for Roundtable, the Timken Museum and the New York Adventure Club in the States, for Academy Travel and the Art Academy in Sydney, and for a number of institutions in the Netherlands. 

Murder, poison, corruption and incest: all perfect ingredients for sensational popular culture. But in an age known for its brutality and church corruption were the Borgias really so bad? This lecture reveals the real family that dominated the Papacy and Italian politics during the last decade of the 15th century: the charismatic figure of Pope Alexander VI, living inside his sumptuously decorated apartments, the career of his son, Cesare, cardinal, general, employer of Da Vinci and the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince, and the journey of Lucrezia Borgia from “the greatest whore in Rome” to a devout and treasured duchess of the city Ferrara. Sometimes truth is more intoxicating than myth.

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster and critic. Sarah worked for many years as a cultural journalist in radio and television on such programmes as Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4), The Late Show (BBC 2), and Night Waves/Free thinking (BBC Radio 3). She has published thirteen novels, taught renaissance studies at Washington University, St Louis and lectured around the world at festivals and conferences.  She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View and these talks, alongside her series on history for Radio 4, When Greeks Flew Kites are available on podcast or BBC sounds.  Her last six novels have been set within the Italian Renaissance, including the lives of women and the - true - story of the Borgias. Isabella d'Este, an illustrated novel about the life of the first ever female patron and collector is published in June 2025. Sarah delivered a series of  15 talks to BBC Radio 4 "Unearthing the Past" as book of the week to coincide with publication.

This lecture explores some truly amazing pieces of embroidery from 10th century metal thread work in St Cuthbert’s stole  to the Bayeux Tapestry and on to the high point of English embroidery Opus Anglicanum, meaning English work, which was sought after by Popes and monarchs. The lecture puts these pieces in to a wider social context while unpacking the materials and techniques and in some cases the people involved. 

Susan Kay-Williams.  For 17 years Susan was Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace.  Since then she has worked on editing a History of Embroidery Course for the RSN. Susan has a longstanding interest in textiles, especially colour, and published her first book,The Story of Colour in Textiles, in 1913,. In 2022 she published An Unbroken Thread: the 150 year History of the royal School of Needlework. She is currently the Immediate Past President of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, and is now getting back to research into the history of colour in textiles.

The 200th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's death in March 1827 makes it a great time to reassess the legacy of this great composer. Born into a family of court musicians in Bonn, Beethoven became one of the greatest and most disruptive figures in the history of classical music; by the time he died in Vienna he had completely transformed music's cultural landscape. This lecture reflects on this brilliant, cantankerous, visionary and astonishingly original composer, and traces how he grew from Classical beginnings to become a true Romantic artist, or as he preferred to describe himself, a “poet in sound.”

Constantinople and Istanbul, two names for one city, which straddles two continents, Europe and Asia, Byzantine imperial capital for 1000 years then capital city of the Ottoman Turks. Minarets and domes of Turkish mosques dominate the skyline, the waters of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus lap its shores, and a stroll through the streets reveals the city's diverse and magnificent heritage. Byzantine churches with colourful mosaics, Ottoman mosques with beautiful tilework, the luxurious palaces of the sultans, elegant fountains, bathhouses and bustling covered markets make Istanbul one of the most fascinating cities in the world. 

Antarctica is the only continent on earth without an indigenous population, nevertheless, for almost as long as people have been exploring it, they have been making art. Discover carved whale teeth, scientific watercolours and Christmas decorations in this lecture about the many artistic responses to the icy continent.

Agatha Christie (who had a number of Ealing connections)  is often dismissed as a writer of intriguing but lightweight novels which are no more literary than the average cryptic crossword. If her work is credited with any political meaning at all, it is seen as self-evidently reactionary and outmoded. This talk suggests that, looked at another way, the work can be read as exposing a disorder at the heart of polite society. Christie emerges as one of the twentieth century’s great chroniclers of political instability.

For those interested in architectural and garden design of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the names of Sir Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll are inseparably linked. Lutyens’ buildings are the most individual of their time, blending respect for materials, a natural sympathy for the site and an inventive set of practical and aesthetically pleasing solutions.

Equally inspired are the gardens designed by Miss Jekyll. Her work remains a constant source of inspiration to gardeners, with her inventive planting schemes where colour, pattern and texture shape the gardens she designed. Bothe were in turn inspired by the great changes stimulated by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Among the themes to be discussed are Munstead Wood, Deanery Garden and Hestercombe.

After a generation in University life, Tom Duncan has now retired from teaching to concentrate on lecturing to a wider public. He began to lead cultural tours over thirty years ago and founded Ciceroni Travel in 1998. He has a particular interest in the evolution of country house architecture, decoration and furnishings, and their surrounding gardens and landscapes.

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 we consider what makes Notre Dame so special. Rather than looking into the fine details of its restoration, we 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, the lecturer 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.

Carole Petipher 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.

This lecture covers the life, art and times of one of Britain's greatest artists from the last hundred years: David Hockney. He truly made a bigger splash. He was essentially a figurative artist who painted or made artworks of subjects he loved. And those subjects ranged from people (his mother, Celia Birtwell and Peter Schlesinger) to places (California, Yorkshire and Normandy). Despite brief dalliances with Pop Art and Abstraction, the art movement that most captured his imagination was Cubism, with its ability to depict people and places from different perspectives at the same time.

Ray Warburton has had a life-long love of art. However, in his twenties, Ray studied social sciences at the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. These studies led to a career in health and social care, with art being an evening and weekend passion. But all that changed in 2011, when Ray became a guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Then from 2014 to 2017, he studied art history at the Open University, and then at the University of Buckingham, from where he gained an MA in the History of Art. And to cap it all, Ray became an Arts Society lecturer in 2017. Ray also knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of lectures as he is a member of his local Arts Society in Blackheath.

Despite the fame of Holbein's portraits, art might not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the Tudors. Yet from Henry VII onwards, the Tudor dynasty made unprecedented use of images and objects to promote their rule. We'll uncover the rich variety of painting, architecture, tapestry and other decorative objects that surrounded English viewers in the 16th century, putting these artworks into their religious, political, social and artistic contexts.

We’ll consider issues such as the extent of Renaissance influences at the court of Henry VIII, the revival of medieval and neo-chivalric themes under Elizabeth I, and the lesser-known artistic atmosphere during the reigns of Henry VII, Edward VI and Mary I. 

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.

She teaches at 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, and her latest book, The Story of Tudor Art, was published in September 2025 and was named a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year.