Lecture-2026

Towards the end of her life May Morris (1862-1938) - designer, craftsperson, and younger daughter of William Morris – wrote, ‘I’m a remarkable woman, always was, though none of you seem to think so’. Overshadowed in her lifetime by the achievements of her illustrious father, thankfully today May Morris is recognised as a leading figure in the Arts & Crafts Movement. Excelling in the field of embroidery, she was Head of Embroidery at Morris & Co. by the time she was twenty-three.

This lecture focuses on the travels of artists, musicians and writers in Scotland during the period when the romance of the Highlands, fostered by the tales of Ossian, made Scotland a destination for those such as Turner, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Coleridge. The talk is illustrated by the music of Chopin and Mendelssohn. The routes of the travellers and the highlights (including Fingal’s Cave, the Falls of Clyde, the Trossachs, etc.) are shown by means of slides of paintings and drawings (including Mendelssohn’s little known sketches), as well as present-day views of the same scenes.

Rome, as we all know, was not built in a day. It took centuries to construct the eternal city, and Rome’s glorious monuments and those who created them are the focus of this talk. It is sometimes hard to see beyond the ruins of today, so using masterpieces of Roman art and reconstructions and with the Emperors as our guides, we’ll go on a journey through Rome in its golden prime: from the splendid civic hubs of the great Imperial Forums to the beautiful, soaring temples of the gods, the dazzling gleam of marble and mosaic in the great public baths and the roar of the crowds at the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum.

The arrival of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo in St Ives at the beginning of the Second World War marked a significant moment, both for them and for the artists already living and working in the small Cornish town. These three artists were key players in British modernism and soon challenged the status quo of the existing artists’ colony, established at the end of the 19th century. They inspired and, in Hepworth’s case employed, a younger generation of artists before they too were challenged by new ideas. This lecture will chart the rise of St Ives as a centre for modern art after the war and show that it was not only Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo who achieved international success but other artists such as Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. This success led to the town becoming a focal point for post-war avant-garde art which led the eyes of the modern art world to focus, for a brief period, on St Ives.

In this lecture we will learn how the great film director Alfred Hitchcock used London, and how it influenced his life and his art. Still both instantly recognisable and widely acclaimed over 40 years after his death, Hitchcock’s greatest and bestremembered movies are usually selected from his Hollywood days. However, he spent almost exactly half his life in London and Essex, and the influences of these formative years on his later work were enormous. From his inventive use of London locations in the 1920s and ‘30s in classics such as The Lodger and The 39 Steps, to his inspired deployment on film of the West End’s theatre stars, Hitchcock never forgot the city. And as it helped shape his life and imagination, so he shaped it on the cinema screen.