This lecture will explore the life of one of the most famous and iconic Mexican artists of the twentieth century. It will situate her within an extraordinary historical context, and explore her family background and her battle as a child with polio. Her flamboyant character will be set against her deep sadness in love and in pain after an appalling accident left her disabled physically but able to paint while in her hospital bed. We will chart her meeting with the great figure of Diego Rivera, muralist and revolutionary, and her subsequent love affair with him, their turbulent marriage, divorce and re-marriage. Often scrutinising her self-portraits, we will also be able to see her rise to international fame and her liaisons with extraordinary characters of the time such as Leon Trotsky and her untimely and very public death in 1954.

Jacqueline Cockburn is a course director and lecturer at the V&A and also lectures at The Royal Academy. She is Managing Director of Art and Culture Travel, running residential and curated courses and tours abroad.

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 Angilcanum, 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.