10am till 3.30pm Village Hall, Church Road, Wickham Bishops, CM8 3JZ

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts, and across the cultures of Europe, from Italy to Norway.  She began her career as an academic in Slavic studies after completing her doctorate at Oxford and has held fellowships both in the UK and at the European University Institute in Florence.  In 2024 she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford.  

The author of several books, including biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and a study of Wagner's influence in Russia, she is also well known as a translator - her publications include acclaimed editions of Anna Karenina and Chekhov's stories for Oxford World’s Classics.  She has written on music and literature for institutions including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Salzburg Festival, and now writes about art for Apollo and The Burlington Magazine.  She is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Odesa, and its connection to modernist developments in Paris, Munich and Milan.  

She has led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where she lives, to the V&A in London, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.     

Programme for the day 

10.00    Registration and Coffee

 10.30 – 11.30 

Session 1 – Picasso in St. Petersburg: The Hermitage and its Masters of Modern Art - The pioneering Moscow collectors Shchukin and Morozov emigrated after the Revolution, and their collections were united to create the pioneering State Museum of New Western Art.  In 1948, however, Stalin ordered its closure. This lecture recounts the museum's history.  It tells how a brave female curator helped rescue the museum's most radical paintings for the Hermitage amid fears they would be destroyed, and what happened next to Matisse's The Dance and dozens of Cubist masterpieces by Picasso.

11.30 – 11.45     Break

 11.45 – 12.45

Session 2 – Matisse in Moscow: The Revolutionary Collection of Sergei Shchukin - In 1909, Henri Matisse received a commission from his Moscow patron Sergei Shchukin for two enormous canvases. After creating a scandal by showing Dance and Music at the Salon d'Automne, Matisse travelled to Russia to help install them in the stairway of Shchukin's mansion. This lecture tells the story of how a Russian industrialist fell in love with Matisse after infatuations with Monet and Gauguin, how Matisse fell in love with Russian icons, and how his riotous paintings electrified the artistic rebels of Moscow's young avant-garde.

 12.45 – 14.00    Lunch

 14.00 – 15.00

Session 3 – From Manet to Cézanne: The Morozov Brothers and the Parisian Avant-Garde - Mikhail Morozov, scion of Moscow's most famous merchant dynasty, became the first Russian to buy a painting by Van Gogh. After he died in 1903, having been unable to curb his life of excess, his younger brother Ivan became the first Russian collector of Picasso, and commissioned triptychs from both Bonnard and Matisse.  He also amassed eighteen works by Cézanne, his favourite painter. This lecture discusses the brothers' remarkable collections and their interest in contemporary art.

Cost: £40 per Blackwater Arts Society member/other Art Society member or £45 for guests. 

 Includes morning refreshments, a light lunch & glass of wine. 

 TO BOOK:

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Liberated, by rejection, from the dark constraints of the official Salon, the Impressionists found a new revision of painting out in the open air. Inspired by the Barbizon Painters in the forests of Fontainebleau, the New Painters found plenty of interest locally along the banks of the Seine. The attraction of bright natural light, space and a sense of the rhythm of time, plus the newly invented folding easel and the production of paint in tubes, allowed the New Painters to interpret nature first-hand, and for its own sake. Thus Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, Van Gogh and others gave us the most memorable and most loved of all genres, that of the brightly coloured Impressionist landscapes of France. The speed of Impressionist brushwork suggested an impertinent disregard for the proper diction of Salon painting and attracted much hostility in 1874 when they first exhibited together, but the rapid flashes of colour made with the square-ended hog bristle brushes conveyed something of the rapidly accelerating pace of life in the new Boulevards of Paris.

Hilary Hope-Guise

Lectures in the main museums in London for American universities, and has toured widely in the USA and lectured for the Smithsonian Institution. Has also worked for the Art Fund, taught courses for Cambridge University, has been a guest speaker on cruises. Trained as a painter at Central St Martin’s, she exhibits abroad, most recently in Berlin and France. Lives in London and in Provence.

It is often argued that Britain possesses the finest collection of ‘living’ stately homes in the world. It is harder to deny that they represent one of the country's greatest assets and its greatest contribution to the decorative arts worldwide. This lecture goes back in time to explain their origins in British history, the changing nature of society and the way country houses have evolved. This journey through their history illustrates the most magnificent examples in all their grandeur and beauty, while considering the impact they have had on society and its development. Consideration is given to changing roles and if they can still exert a powerful hold on society. How should we look on them today and how are they to survive and evolve in the future?  

Anthony Russell

As a cultural historian, writer and artist Anthony Russell has travelled much of the world. Lecturing originally to American university students on bespoke tours of Europe, he has lectured for the Arts Society since 2010. He spent six years as a consultant for Luke Hughes advising on the furniture needs of prestigious buildings throughout Britain, including museums, palaces, and cathedrals. At the British Museum, where for many years he ran outreach events and hosted visiting lecturers, he has been described as "Hugh Grant meets the Dalai Lama.” Committed to the 'search for civilisation' and as an advocate of nonviolence, he is the founder of The Chandos; supporting causes that promote understanding and cooperation, is on the committee for Uniting for Peace and a contributor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy in Burma. He is author of the book ‘Evolving the Spirit - From Democracy to Peace' commended by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Laureate, as meaning a great deal to her. He was also Founder of the Brockley Festival of Ideas and a Founding Advocate of CIVIL-ISATION. He is currently undertaking research for a new book on civilisation; what it is, whether we have it & how you get it.