Our events are recorded and on-demand to ticket holders for a month. Proceeds from ticket sales benefit UK museums, galleries and other arts-based organisations.
William Hogarth, The Laughing Audience, 1733-37.
Images and jokes go together - as cartoons demonstrate - yet we often miss the comedy in the Old Masters. There is a rich tradition of comic painting, which derives from Christian morality - in particular the medieval concept of the Seven Deadly Sins - and the Classical division of drama into the three genres: Tragedy, Comedy and Satyr Play.
Join Desmond Shawe-Taylor, former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures at the Royal Collection Trust, to explore ways in which these traditions intertwine, literary comedy often helping the viewer to get the visual joke. 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.
This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live with Q&A, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.