Events
September - December 2026
ARTscapades’ autumn programme offering unique opportunities for you to explore art with online talks and study courses led by expert speakers is open for booking below. Net profits from our ticket sales go to help UK museums and arts-based organisations — and we are grateful for your support!
All events take place via Zoom Webinar and can be watched live including Q&A. Ticket holders will be emailed a link to join 24 hours in advance. In case you can’t make it on the day, ticket holders will also receive a link to view a recording of the talk, which will be available for one month.
Join us as David Hockney’s remarkable career is remembered by Martin Gayford, and for the next instalment of Katie Wignall’s Hidden History of London’s Bridges: Chelsea to Hammersmith.
Explore depictions of man’s best friend in art with The Dog’s Gaze. Be transported with our curators’ talks on the Royal Academy’s Painting the French Riviera, and the National Gallery‘s Renoir and Love. Get to know a different side of William Morris through his gardens.
Go deeper on our two-lecture Study sessions on the Bayeux Tapestry with Sally Dormer, on Saint Francis of Assisi in Art with Clare Ford-Wille and the upcoming Van Eyck: the Portraits exhibition with Richard Stemp.
If you missed booking a ticket to a recent online event you can purchase a link by visiting our on demand Recordings page. Looking for a present? Click here for details on gifting an ARTscapades talk.
Please be sure to subscribe to our E-newsletter updates by joining our free mailing list below. If you have any queries or feedback please do not hesitate to contact us.
Forthcoming Events
Wednesday 14 October, 6-7pm. £10
Join exhibition curator Ann Dumas as she draws on works in the Royal Academy’s major exhibition Painting the French Riviera, to reveal how this Mediterranean paradise captivated the modern imagination, and how its light, colour and beauty propelled successive generations of artists to new creative heights.
Read more and book here >
Wednesday 28 October 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Join co-curator Chiara Di Stefano for an engaging introduction to Renoir and Love, exploring the themes, ideas and artistic developments at the heart of the exhibition, offering fresh insights into Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) and his vision of modern life and the enduring appeal of his most beloved works — From stolen glances and lively dance halls to quiet moments shared between friends and families.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 5 November 2026, 10.30am-1pm. £20
For the first time in almost one thousand years, the 70-meter-long Bayeux “Tapestry” (in truth an embroidery!), has returned from France to England, where it was made. These two ARTscapades lectures by Dr Sally Dormer complement the British Museum’s Bayeux Tapestry exhibition open until 11 July 2027.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 10 November 2026, 2.30-4.30pm. £20
2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, one of Christianity’s most beloved figures. His image, shaped across centuries of artworks, stories and symbols, continues to resonate today. In this ARTscapades talk Clare Ford-Wille explores his life in the many frescoes and paintings created just after his death and beyond, both in Assisi and elsewhere.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 19 November 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Step into the gardens that fed Morris’s imagination with cultural botanist Gavin Francis Stoneystreet and discover a lesser known Morris: an intuitive artist, a forefather of the environmental movement, and dreamer with a wild sensitivity. Explore Red House, Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott House and the factory garden at Merton Abbey, to reveal the central role these places played in his life, patterns and work.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 1 December 2026, 5-7.30pm. £20
As an introduction to the National Gallery’s much heralded exhibition, Van Eyck: The Portraits, this Study Evening will examine the works displayed and place them in the wider context of the artist’s career as a whole, thereby including other important portraits in larger scale paintings which could not be included.
Read more and book here >
Past events
If you missed booking a ticket to a recent online event by expert curators and speakers, you can purchase a link to the on-demand recording by visiting our Recordings page.
Tuesday 6 October 2026, 6-7pm. £10
How is it that man’s best friend, the dog, has featured so frequently over centuries of western art?, Join historian and author Thomas W Laqueur to explore where and why — from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego — they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which artists convey our lives and our stories.
Read more and book here >
Wednesday 30 September 2026, 7-8pm. £10
Join Katie Wignall for the third instalment in her four part series for ARTscapades of the capital's river crossings. Since London was first founded, people have needed to travel across the Thames and the varied history of these bridges give us fascinating insights into the history of the city.
Read more and book here >
Wednesday 23 September, 6-7pm. £10
Join ARTscapades for an overview of the career of the indomitable artist David Hockney by his friend and collaborator of over thirty years Martin Gayford, renowned art critic and historian whose extensive interviews and writings on Hockney have provided deep insights into the artist's creative process, philosophical ideas and wit.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 17 September 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Turner’s generous bequest to the nation is a cause for celebration, yet has often led to disputes and debate. Join Dr Alan Crookham, curator of the current exhibition at Turner's House as he explores these issues, looking at how Turner’s relatives contested his will, before turning to the history of the display of the Turners at Trafalgar Square and the complicated relationship between the National and Tate Galleries as they determined the bequest’s final distribution.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 1 September 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Join lead curator Dr Olenka Horbatsch, for an illuminating talk on this British Museum exhibition. Featuring around 120 works by renowned artists including Rogier van der Weyden, Lucas van Leyden, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hendrick Goltzius, bringing together some of the best and most important Netherlandish drawings.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 30 July 2026, 7-8pm. £10
Join Katie Wignall for the second instalment in her four part series for ARTscapades of the capital's river crossings. Since London was first founded, people have needed to travel across the Thames and the varied history of these bridges give us fascinating insight into the history of the city.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 14 July 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Churchill came to painting relatively late in life and it immediately became a passionate, life-long hobby. Join Dr Lucy Davis, co-curator of Winston Churchill: The Painter at the Wallace Collection, as she talks us through this retrospective exhibition of nearly sixty of the former Prime Minister’s paintings, showing the range of subject matter of this ambitious amateur, who sought advice from the leading artists of the time.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 7 July 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Step back into the 1700s and into the most important room in Britain: the country house dining room. Dr Amy Boyington pulls back the velvet curtains on the ‘theatre of the feast’ to reveal how the Georgian elite used architecture, art, and an almost religious devotion to excess to cement their social standing.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 30 June 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Join Carol Jacobi, curator of this major retrospective exhibition now on view at Tate Britain. A truly global figure, Whistler re-wrote the rules of what it meant to be an artist. He pioneered new and innovative techniques, creating astonishingly beautiful, ethereal visions of modern life that would earn him a place as one of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 23 June 2026, 5-6.30pm. £10
The epitome of constant change, the Louvre spans the history of modern Paris from the construction of the medieval fortress in 1200 to the current New Renaissance project announced by President Macron. Join Russell Kelley for a journey through an institution that helped shape – and preserve – France’s extraordinary cultural heritage.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 18 June 2026, 6-7pm. £10
One of 17th-century Spain’s leading painters, Zurbarán remains less celebrated than his close contemporaries Velázquez and Murillo. The National Gallery’s exhibition is the first major monographic show dedicated to him in Britain, a rare opportunity to encounter his sumptuous, subtle art. Encompassing monumental single-figure saints draped in elaborate textiles, soaring altarpieces and exquisite still lifes, all bridging the boundary between earthly and divine. Dr Daniel Sobrino Ralston, exhibition co-curator, explores what makes Zurbarán's art so arresting and enduring.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 9 June 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Explore the allure of France and its influence on British artists from around 1880 to the present. Simon Morley focuses on their love for the French provinces - Normandy, Brittany, Provence - and travels in the footsteps of artists like Francis Bacon, the Bloomsbury Group, Leonora Carrington, David Hockney, Walter Sickert, and Christopher Wood.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 21 May 2026, 7-8pm. £10
Join Katie Wignall on a virtual exploration for ARTscapades of the capital's river crossings. Since London was founded, people needed to traverse the Thames and the varied history of these bridges give us fascinating insight into the history of the city. Part One will focus within the bounds of the City of London, from the world famous Tower Bridge to the hidden delights of Blackfriars.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 12 May 2026, 4-5pm. £10
Join Desmond Shawe-Taylor to explore the rich tradition of comic painting. Images and jokes go together - as cartoons demonstrate - yet we often miss the comedy in the Old Masters. The Dutch painters of the golden age are some of the funniest, but their work draws on comic painting from the previous century and in turn inspires a British tradition, dominated by the work of William Hogarth.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 30 April 2026, 6-7pm. £10
How do we frame time? Join Hilary Hope Guise for a look at how this concept has been depicted in art. First, with symbolic images, like the hour-glass, or the nails in Van Gogh’s boots? Yet iconography must evolve as the industrial world speeds up. In the 19th century the Impressionists’ rapid and cheeky images convey the pace of city life as in Monet’s flag-waving Paris, and later his time-capture in colours around his corn stacks. Brushstrokes speed up and disappear, annihilating human gestures in the consumerist images of the 20th century. Finally, in the installations of Andy Goldsworthy, time in Nature herself, is the great destroyer.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 28 April 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Join Hilary Hope Guise for ‘Space’, the second of an exciting series of three talks on the depiction of light, space and time in art.
In early Celtic and Anglo-Saxon times, space was frightening, harbouring invisible demonic spiritual forces that caused a great fear of emptiness, as found in the book of Kells. This ‘Horror Vacui’ in which no space is allowed is evident in centuries of art.
In the 17th century, space is re-born in the airy landscapes of Claude Lorrain in step with the intellectual freedom in the Enlightenment. We return to the horror vacui in the late 19th century in Rodin’s Gates of Hell which announce a century of war. Today, the humbling reality and vastness of Space shows us ourselves, as seen from the other side of the moon.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 23 April 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Join Hilary Hope Guise for ‘Light’, the first of an exciting series of three talks on the depiction of light, space and time in art.
In the Dark Ages, Europe was covered in thick forests and fears abounded. Not surprisingly, light took on a theological or philosophical meaning. As the Medieval age of Faith waned, shadows began to appear, confirming the physical source of light as being from the sun. In art, sacred figures cast shadows for the first time, leading to the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and reflecting the political upheavals of the late 16th century. In the 20th century, Nihilism plunged into the all-black canvasses of Ad Reinhardt, expressing a fear of light and human emotion. We then emerge into the 21st century and huge light installations by Olafur Eliasson.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 21 April 2026, 5-7.30pm. £20
For the first time in the UK, Michaelina Wautier is the subject of a major exhibition, opening at the Royal Academy of Arts on 27 March. Join Clare Ford-Wille with ARTscapades to explore the innovative and always exciting paintings by this trailblazing 17th-century Flemish artist whose life and work almost sank into oblivion after her death and was only rediscovered recently.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 16 April 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Artist and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie explores how some of the greatest paintings were created, from a blank surface to the finishing brushstroke. He unveils the methods and techniques of individual artists, bringing their studios to life at the very moment they produced their most celebrated works. Along the way a bigger picture is painted, charting how the evolution of painting materials has changed the course of human creativity.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 10 March 2026, 6-7pm. £10
Martin Gayford has known Dame Tracey Emin for many years and offers a uniquely personal insight into the artist’s extraordinary life and career. Discover more about Emin’s art and reflections on painting – how she approaches it, why it is fundamental to her – and what makes a truly powerful picture.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 3 March 2026, 6-7pm. £10
How do you tell a national story of art in the British Isles when geographically the land comprises 6,000 islands and its history is one of migration, movement, destruction and change? Join Charlotte Mullins, author of The Art Isles: A 15,000-year story of art in Britain and Ireland, as she brings to life Ice Age engravings in Wales, a Roman mosaic in Rutland, Pictish stones, stately home ceilings, Liverpool’s Pantheon, Belfast’s political murals and the Uffington White Horse.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 17 February 2026, 5-7.30pm. £20
The Wallace Collection is exhibiting a single painting, Caravaggio's Victorious Cupid, on loan from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin: it has never been seen in the UK before. This two-part ARTscapades Study Evening explores the painting in detail, discovering its place not only in Caravaggio’s career, but in the culture of early 17th-century Rome.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 3 February 2026, 6-7pm. £10
This ARTscapades talk accompanies the exhibition, Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk, held in partnership between Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. Exhibition lead curator Dr Amy Lim shows how Spencer’s art was rooted in both his personal relationships and his deep sense of place.
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Thursday 29 January, 5-6pm. £10
Tate Britain presents the first major exhibition to explore the intertwined lives and legacies of Britain’s most revered landscape artists: JMW Turner and John Constable, marking the 250th anniversary years of their births. Join lead Curator Dr Amy Concannon, for an ARTscapades talk to explore how these radically different painters and personalities challenged artistic conventions of the time, developing ways of picturing the world which still resonate today.
Read more and book here >
Thursday 15 January, 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Join ARTscapades for a lively discussion as art historian Elizabeth Goldring chats with Michael Prodger about her new definitive biography of Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497-1543), the artist who, more than any other, has shaped our image of the Tudor court for five hundred years.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 6 January 2026, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
This ARTscapades talk explores the RA’s major exhibition by internationally acclaimed American artist Kerry James Marshall. Guest curator Mark Godfrey walks us through and reveals how the show came about, how it is structured into 11 cycles of work and what the title ‘The Histories' suggests. He also discusses his long-standing relationship with Kerry James Marshall and why Marshall is considered one of the most important artists working today.
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Thursday 18 December 2025, 6-7pm. £10
JMW Turner is perhaps the most famous British painter, and 2025 sees the 250th anniversary of his birth. Join Walker Art Gallery curator Melissa Gustin for a trip through Turner: Always Contemporary, the landmark exhibition exploring Turner’s legacy from his lifetime through to today, with major contemporary loans alongside 19th and 20th- century works.
Read more and book here >
Tuesday 2 December 2025, 2.30-3.30pm. £10
Sir John Vanbrugh was one of Britain’s greatest architects and the designer of some of the most important and best beloved English country houses, including Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. Join Charles Saumarez Smith for his unique insight as author and exhibition curator.
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Tuesday 4 November 2025, 5-7.30pm. £20
Join us for a fascinating ARTscapades Study Evening with Janet Gough, featuring glass from every century over the past 900 years beginning with the windows installed at Canterbury Cathedral following the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and encompassing the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the hugely productive ‘long 19th century’, the Arts and Crafts movement, the creative commissions of the 20th century, and the innovative glass being commissioned by cathedrals today
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Tuesday 28 October 2025, 5-7.30pm. £20
This autumn there will be an exhibition in Florence dedicated to Fra Angelico (c.1395-1465), one of the most significant artists of the Early Renaissance. Across two locations and with connections to other sites in Italy, Fra Angelico will be the first major display of the artist’s work in over 70 years. Led by Dr Richard Stemp, our two part Short Course examines the Florence into which Fra Angelico was born, the development of his career and his influence.