To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in America, the lecture will explore 25 iconic works of American art, including Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic,’ Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother,’ Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. We will trace the history of America through paintings, sculptures, land art, and photography that exemplify vital moments in American history, such as the Gold Rush, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement; key styles/movements, such as the Hudson River School, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art; and showcase ground-breaking artists from the indigenous Native American peoples through to the virtuoso portrait painter John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kara Walker and many more.

Marie-Anne Mancio trained as an artist before gaining a DPhil in Art and Critical Theory. She has lectured in art history for the City Lit, Tate Modern, the Course, Art in London, the V&A, Dulwich Picture Gallery, HENI films and the Ben Uri gallery. She also runs art history study tours abroad for ACE, and curates exhibitions and writes for the InFems art collective

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.