The Stirling Prize has celebrated the very best contemporary buildings since 1996. Some winners, such as Norman Foster’s Gherkin, of 2004, have become enormously successful and appreciated by the wider public. Others have proved harder to love. This entertaining lecture looks at some of the hits, some of the misses, and several buildings that arguably should have won, but didn’t.

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Brian Stater lectured at University College London for 25 years, retiring in 2021 as a Senior Teaching Fellow. His principal academic interest lay in the appreciation of architecture and he has a lifelong enthusiasm for photography. He therefore offers lectures to The Arts Society on each of these subjects.

He has written on architecture for a wide range of publications and an exhibition of his own photographs was held at UCL. He is a member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography and he works with a pre-War Leica camera, as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others.

Brian is an engaging and amusing speaker who seeks to entertain as well as inform his audience.

This lecture aims to give an overall impression of the nature of Royal patronage of silver and silver-gilt and give (in broad outline) an impression of what is contained within the Royal Collection. It explains how the modern Royal Collection has come about, evolved and changed in character from the holdings of previous monarchs and attempts to explain its significance within the wider context of Royal patronage. The lecture focuses on some of the pre-eminent pieces of silver in order to examine the particular significance of individual members of the Royal Family (not just the monarch) in the history of building one of the most important collections of plate in the world.

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Christopher is an independent Researcher. 2010–2019 Director of Palace House, Newmarket (National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art: www.palacehousenewmarket.co.uk). 2008–2010 Co-Director of the Attingham Summer School for the Study of Historic Houses and Collections. 1998–2003 Senior Curator & Assistant Keeper of Art (Decorative Art) at Norwich Castle Museum: co-curator of Flower Power – The Meaning of Flowers in Art and Eat, Drink and Be Merry, the British at Table 1600 to 2000. 1994–1997 Catalogued the silver in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and other royal residences.

Dogs are man’s most loyal friend. They are often used in art, as in life, to project our ambitions and anxieties. From the poignancy of Landseer, Queen Victoria’s favourite animal painter; to the dachshunds of Bonnard and Picasso; the xolos of Kahlo; the whippets of Freud and many more, explore how dogs have provided inspiration, solace and companionship throughout artistic lives.

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Official Guide and Lecturer at Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Guildhall Art Gallery. Qualified Guide to the City of London, offering lectures and walks about many aspects of the arts for societies, corporations and private individuals. Member of the City of London Guide Lecturers Association. Co-author of the book Lord Mayor's Portraits 1983-2014 (2015). Alexandra’s background is in design having practised as a graphic designer running her own design consultancy for many years. BA Saint Martins School of Art, MA London College of Printing.

Despite the enormous political challenges that Vienna faced between 1780 and 1830 - including major wars against Napoleon, - the city thrived, culturally.  In fact, it could be argued that Vienna never had a finer moment in terms of its artistic achievements.  It was a period of outstanding writers, poets, architects and painters, but above all, it was a period of great composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert who made Vienna the musical capital of the world.  The lecture explores the history and the arts of Vienna in the late Classical and early Romantic eras.

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Peter appears in the UK and abroad as a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts. He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

In 2024 the National Gallery celebrates its 200th birthday. In the run up to this special anniversary, join me as I explore some of the nation’s best-loved paintings in a new light, revealing details which cannot be seen with the naked eye and discussing what goes on behind the scenes in the conservation, framing and scientific departments. The lecture will result in a greater understanding of not only the art itself, but also of the work the National Gallery does to care for it, present it and interpret it.

Few of the gallery’s works retain their original frames but an expert team will often source and adapt examples which complement the paintings historically, or indeed hand-carve new ones from scratch. We will also look at the technical challenges involved in hanging, displaying, moving and framing the collection and the various solutions devised by the Art Handling Team. Many of the paintings in the gallery were designed for a very specific function, an altarpiece such as Piero’s Baptism of Christ for example, so how do the curators allow us to interpret and view these within a museum context? Finally, we’ll talk about restoration and conservation, exploring extraordinary details from works such as the Wilton Diptych, which have only been discovered recently thanks to scientific analysis.

Join me on a journey of discovery as we explore the hidden secrets of masterpieces by Bellini, Leonardo, van Eyck and many more. I have been a lecturer at the National Gallery for nearly 20 years.

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Siân Walters is an art historian and the director of Art History in Focus. She has been a lecturer at the National Gallery for 20 years and taught their first online course, Stories of Art, in September 2020. She also lectures for The Wallace Collection, The Art Fund and many art societies and colleges throughout Europe, and taught at Surrey University for many years.

Her specialist areas include 15th and 16th century Italian Art, Spanish Art and Architecture, Dutch and Flemish painting and the relationship between Dance and Art (she is an honorary advisor to the Nonsuch Historical Dance Society). Siân studied at Cambridge University where she was awarded a choral exhibition and a 1st for her dissertation on the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg. She has lived in France and Italy where she worked for the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon and for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. She spends much of the year organising and leading specialist art tours abroad, including bespoke trips for The Arts Society.

In recent years Siân has been asked to represent the National Gallery at the international Hay Festival and was named a Highly Commended finalist in the World’s Best Guide Awards. In 2018 she was invited to be the guest lecturer on the inaugural BRAVO Cruise of Performing Arts alongside Katherine Jenkins, Julian Lloyd Webber and Ruthie Henshall. 

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During the Edo period of rule by the Tokugawa Shogunate (1615-1868), the arts of Japan gained in richness and diversity. With the rise of the merchant class and the growth of cities such as Edo (modern-day Tokyo), a new vitality was injected into traditional forms and an emerging middle class culture gave rise to exciting developments in the visual and performing arts. This lecture will consider the arts of the period including castle architecture, golden screen painting, ukiyo-e prints, textiles, lacquerware, and netsuke, as well as the emergence of the flamboyant kabuki theatre. It will provide a snapshot of both aristocratic and popular taste as Japan made the transition from feudal kingdom into modern state.

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Professor Marie Conte-Helm is a long-established Arts Society Lecturer with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic posts at various UK universities. She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, and as a member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts. She is widely published and has lectured throughout the UK and abroad. She is also an experienced cruise speaker and a Resident Historian with Viking Ocean Cruises, lecturing on many aspects of Asian Art and East-West Encounters. She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette by the Government of Japan in 2019.

But when first the ice fell on the lake, and the whole lake was frozen…O my God!  What sublime scenery have I beheld. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1799

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During the Romantic period, there was a surge of artistic interest in the season of winter. 

The coldest months of the year inspired a number of writers and artists; the poet William Cowper wrote pleasurably about the season from the warmth of his fireside; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Caspar David Friedrich were both inspired by the sublimity of the winter landscape; while William Wordsworth and Henry Raeburn created iconic ice-skating scenes in verse and painting.

This seasonal lecture will explore why Romantic writers and artists were so keen on ‘the frosty season’.  We will learn how their depiction of winter departed from that of earlier times, and how their legacy lives on today in our own ideas about this time of year.  

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Following a career in teaching, Annalie spent several years working on education programmes at museums and literary houses across the UK, including the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere; Wordsworth House in Cockermouth; Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire; and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. At Jane Austen’s House, Annalie won 2 Sandford Awards for Excellence in Heritage Education; she also worked with the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and Chawton House Library in promoting Austen’s work to young people. 

Annalie’s lectures focus on aspects of Romantic and Victorian literature. She uses her knowledge and personal experience of literary houses - and their collections - to offer a unique perspective on writers and their works. She is particularly interested in the material culture of writers’ lives, including the quirky and interesting; from the collar worn by Emily Bronte’s dog, Keeper, to William Wordsworth’s ice-skates. 

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is well known for its intricate brocades and unique weaving tradition, unmatched anywhere else in the world. Textiles are woven into every aspect of Bhutanese life, they represent status, wealth and expressions of spiritual devotion. The weavers (always women) are renowned for their stunning mastery of colour, pattern and design; whilst the men (usually monks) are highly skilled in embroidery and applique used to create Buddhist images, monastic furnishings and dance costumes. Bhutan had no currency before the 1960s, so cloth was the major form of wealth. It was used to pay taxes, to bestow as diplomatic gifts and to mark any social occasion. This lecture will introduce this outstanding art form and explain how textiles are crucial to Bhutan’s cultural identity.

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Zara is a freelance lecturer, art consultant and exhibition curator specialising in the art and culture of Tibet, the Himalayan areas and Mongolia. Initially based at the V&A, but also worked with the Central Asian Department of Bonn University, the Orient Foundation, the Royal Academy, Tibet House, the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside and Asia House. In addition to lecturing for The Arts Society, she lectures for museums, universities, Asian art societies, and private associations. Guest lecturer and tour guide on numerous trips to the Himalayas. Edited Masterpieces of Mongolian Art: Vol 1 and has published many articles in the field of Buddhist art and culture.

So many of our historical references for musical instruments can be found in works of art. Not only can these windows into the past show us what the instruments looked like but also the social context in which they would have been played. Music and different instruments also play a strong role within symbolism in art. Sophie explores the instruments in selected works and then gives live demonstrations on replicas of the instruments depicted.

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Sophie is a musician well-known for her prowess on the English border bagpipes and has become one of the foremost players of the instrument in the UK. She also plays a variety of early woodwind instruments such as shawm, rauschpfeife, crumhorm and recorder. She’s also one of a handful of British players of the baroque musette, an 18th century French bagpipe similar to the Northumbrian smallpipes.

When not touring with GreenMatthews, Sophie also makes instruments (she made her own baroque oboe) and works with respected luthier Tony Millyard on his flutes. Sophie is self-taught on all of her instruments.

Impressionist Berthe Morisot is known for her light-filled canvases of modern life: afternoons boating on a lake, young women in ballgowns, children playing. Yet, her contemporaries perceived a connection with the eighteenth century. Renoir considered her ‘the last elegant and ‘feminine’ artist that we have had since Fragonard.’ And the art critic Paul Girard, surveying the 1896 retrospective of her work in Paris,  declared, ‘it is the eighteenth century modernised.’

Eighteenth-century art fell from favour following the French Revolution but was ‘rediscovered’ in the mid-nineteenth century by collectors including Louis La Caze and Hippolyte Walferdin. Morisot copied works by Boucher in the Musée du Louvre and elsewhere; she experimented with red chalk, a technique closely associated with Rococo drawings. She also greatly admired the English painters Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, whose work she first encountered on honeymoon in the Isle of Wight and London in 1875.

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Dr Lois Oliver studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, completing an MA in Venetian Renaissance Art and a PhD thesis on The Image of the Artist, Paris 1815-1855. She worked at the Harvard Art Museums before joining the curatorial team at the V&A and then the National Gallery, where she curated several exhibitions and contributed to major re-displays of the collections. Currently Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Royal Academy, Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Notre Dame in London, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, Lois also writes audio and multimedia tours for clients including the National Gallery, Royal Academy, Royal Collection, and Tate, and has appeared on BBC Radio and TV. Also a keen violinist, Lois plays regularly with Kensington Chamber Orchestra and the Endellion Festival Orchestra.

Wine has been part of our global society for over 7,000 years, and the story tells of its origin and appearance in all societies across the Mediterranean and through Europe. There is rich evidence of the role wine has played in these societies and how it became an important component of faith, well-being and festivity. From the kwevris of Georgia in 5,000 B.C., the symposia in ancient Greece, the thermopolia of Pompeii, the hospices of Europe, to the dining tables of fine society wine has been ever present. Drawings, paintings, engravings, buildings, pottery and wine labels themselves all contribute to the story.

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