The two great early nineteenth-century British landscape painters Turner and Constable have long been compared and contrasted. These sorts of  comparisons  between famous artist contemporaries – one thinks also of Gainsborough and Reynolds or Picasso and Matisse – can be illuminating. However they can also be misleading, which is arguably the case for Turner and Constable who are too often seen as rivals rather than as artistic colleagues both striving for the promotion of a new type of British landscape art.

The speaker, Anne Lyles, is an art historian and independent curator specialising in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British landscape painting.  She worked at Tate Britain for twenty-five years and has co-curated, and contributed to the catalogues of, many exhibitions on the art of J M W Turner, John Constable and British watercolours.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast click here to be taken to the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture series is sponsored by The Friends

 

 

In the halls of natural history museums all over the world, you can peer through the glass and come  face-to-face with the ghosts of extinction. Extinction has been going on as long as there has been biological life – in fact over 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct – but extinction usually happens at a slow pace.  We are now, however, living through the Sixth Mass Extinction, with species rapidly going extinct because of human actions.

In this talk, based on her new book Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2025), our speaker will take visitors on a journey to encounter the extinct.   Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research focuses on cultural histories of animals.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast, click here to visit the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture  series is sponsored by The Friends

 

 

This final lecture of the current series is about the Neolithic monument of Avebury and the exciting new interpretations that are emerging from new campaigns of fieldwork and archive investigation.  One of the pre-eminent monumental landscapes of Europe, Avebury has been vexing researchers since its discovery as an object of antiquarian enquiry in the mid 17th century.  However, despite nearly 400 years of study, what we don’t know about Avebury still dwarfs what we do.  In an attempt to rectify this, the last decade has seen a burst of new studies at the site; investigations that are not only challenging and unsettling accepted stories, but also shedding remarkable new light on the emergence and history of this monumental landscape.

The speaker, Professor Mark Gillings, is a landscape archaeologist based in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the University of Bristol.   He fell in love with Avebury as a child after watching Children of the Stones (from behind the sofa, naturally) and has been carrying out fieldwork at the site with his friend Josh Pollard (University of Southampton) for nigh on 30 years.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast click here to be taken to the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture series is sponsored by The Friends