Art History Lectures

1.  A Romantic Idyll:
J.M.W.Turner’s views of Devon and Cornwall 

Discover  Turner’s  pioneering vision of the South West through his art from Land’s End to  Tintagel, Plymouth to Torbay. In this lecture Wallace looks at how Turner’s paintings conveyed the romance of this unspoilt part of England with its castles, cliffs, rivers and working harbours, all created with an exaggeration of scale and perspective which amplified the message of romance in the viewers imagination. They inspired him to produce watercolours which were made into prints that made him a household name. Wallace compares the paintings, sketchbooks and prints Turner made from this journey and further visits to Devon in 1813 and 1814.

Online Recording

Cost £14

2. From Black Beauty to War horses
The Equestrian painter Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869 -1958)

In this talk Art historian Catherine Wallace includes the wide range of settings for these equestrian paintings and Kemp-Welch’s use of various techniques. Whether her subjects were at work ploughing the fields or hauling timber, being used to launch lifeboats, or pull guns and charge at the enemy on the battlefields, Kemp -Welch painted horses on a scale and in a way that competed with and surpassed many of her male rivals. Wallace looks at the challenges Kemp – Welch frequently faced as a female artist in an a traditionally male dominated subject area of art and compares their works. This lecture also includes the paintings by some of the students taught by Kemp Welch when she ran the Bushey School of Art from 1906 – 1926 as well as her later paintings depicting the circus and race horses.

On Line Recording

Cost £14

3. Prints, Personalities and Pots
The Art of Sir William Nicolson (1872 – 1949)

Sir William Nicholson was initially a woodblock artist creating many prints and illustrations of books such as The Almanac of Sports by Rudyard Kipling.

He developed his painting style from 1900 onwards specialising in still lifes and landscapes. He was also a very successful portrait painter and captured some of the key creative figures in London Society at the time including J.M Barry, Max Beerbohm and Gertrude Jekyll. He was the husband of Mabel Pryde – an accomplished painter and was the father of Ben Nicholson, the leading avante-garde artist of the 1920s and 30s in the UK.

William Nicholson rarely talked or wrote about his work. It was through son Ben and his wife Winifred that we get a greater understanding of William Nicholson’s work especially his virtuosic still lives. This lecture by Art historian Catherine Wallace explores the various subjects, styles and techniques of this modest British master.

Online recording

Cost £14

4. Flowers, Frames and Freedom
Gluck (1895 –1978)
The story of Hannah Gluckenstein’s life through her art

This lecture follows the story of a unique voice in art both through the subject matter of her paintings and her frames as well as her personal identity.

In this lecture Catherine Wallace, discusses the complex personality and various art works of Hannah Gluckstein known as Gluck 1895–1978. Gluck was born in to a wealthy family but rejected very early on in her youth the expectations her family had of a young heiress. She rebelled by going to Art School and then discovered Lamorna in Cornwall in 1918 meeting artists such as Alfred Munnings and Laura Knight who encouraged her to paint. She would return to live and work there for many years.

As well as insisting that she would just be known as Gluck – she deliberately dressed like a man and had numerous love affairs with both married and single women throughout her life. She became an artist of the Jazz Age and her work ranged from backstage scenes as well as stars of the theatre such as Ernest Thesiger, to crowd scenes at the races, boxing matches or outside courts in murder trials. She became an artist of great technical skill and precision best shown for her flower paintings enhanced by her lover Constance Spry’s floral creations. Gluck was also a highly respected portrait painter producing crisply delineated portrayals from Society hostesses to High Court judges.

Although a conventional painter, her invention of a frame, known as the Gluck frame was a pioneering idea which moved art into the interior design business. She spent a good deal of her time in later life taking on the paint companies trying to get them to standardize artists colours.

Thursday 29 January 2026 6.00pm at The Poly, 24, Church Street Falmouth Cost £13 +£1 Poly fund (Discounts for students and those on benefits) Tickets from

https://thepoly.savoysystems.co.uk/ThePoly.dll/TSelectItems.waSelectItemsPrompt.TcsWebMenuItem_0.TcsWebTab_0.TcsPerformance_2888211.TcsSection_1165

Saturday 31 January 2026 11.30am at Kea Community Centre, Playing Place, Truro TR3 6ET

Cost £14 

Tuesday 3 February 10.30am 2026 on Zoom/Recorded on Youtube

Cost £14

5. The drawings of W. Barns Graham CBE (1912 – 2004)
Form, Line and Landscape from St. Ives to Lanzarote

This lecture  traces the importance of drawing throughout the career of this important British painter who was born in Scotland but lived much of her adult life in St. Ives, Cornwall.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is known as a painter of abstract work and part of the Modernist group of artists in St. Ives. Throughout her life she practiced the discipline of drawing which she used to inform her paintings and to explore different ideas. These drawings are important works in their own right and in this lecture Catherine Wallace highlights some of the main themes that reflect Barns- Graham’s journey through life.

From her figure studies at Art School in Edinburgh in the 1930s, her drawings of the camouflage factory where she worked in St. Ives during World War II; her constructivist drawings of glaciers in Switzerland in the late 1940s; her landscapes of Italy in the mid 50s ; the line drawings and rhythmic patterns she made back in St. Ives in the 1970s; the accurate line drawings of buildings in St. Ives and Stromness, Orkney in the 1980s to some of her most dynamic drawings of volcanic rock on the island of Lanzarote in the 1990s.

Barns-Graham always experimented with different medium to use in her art and that included her drawings, this lecture looks at the wide variety of techniques and medium she used so effectively in her graphic works.

Saturday 28th February 2026 11.30am at Kea Community Centre, Playing Place, Truro TR3 6ET

Cost £14 

Tuesday 3 March 10.30am on Zoom/Youtube

Cost £14

6. A Figure Painter in a Modernist World:
Francis Hewlett RWA (1930 – 2012) 

Francis Hewlett was a well-known painter in Falmouth, having taught at Falmouth School of Art (now University College Falmouth) from 1963 – 1981 as Head of the painting department. His art training first in Bristol at the West of England School of Art under George Sweet followed by the Slade School under Claude Rogers and William Coldstream, gave Hewlett the building blocks of his painting career. He inherited the views of the Euston Road group who rebelled against modernism in the UK in the 1930s and their aim to re-establish the importance of painting traditional subjects in a realist manner. This was the philosophy of Hewlett’s teaching at Falmouth and his own artistic practice.

In this talk the works Hewlett created are discussed including his sideways move into sculptural ceramics. In 1977 he was appointed by the Welsh Arts council and the University of Wales to the Gregynog Arts Fellowship which gave him a year out to paint in Wales. This rekindled Hewlett’s belief in painting again and from 1981 after retiring from teaching on health grounds he dedicated his time to painting his surroundings in Falmouth, his family and revisiting subjects such as the Bristol Empire Theatre, Bristol and Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris that he had drawn as a student in the 1950s.

Saturday 28 March 11.30am at Kea Community Centre, Playing Place, Truro TR3 6ET

Cost £14 

Tuesday 31 March 2026 10.30am on Zoom/Youtube

Cost £14