Talks & Lectures

Lit & Phil 200: Artists Series

These talks are organised by the Lit & Phil (you don't need to be a member in order to attend any of their public events), and tickets cost £4 per talk, from the Lit & Phil Library, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE, in person or over the phone (0191) 232 0192. It is advisable to book seats in advance; if you reserve a ticket and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as we often have a waiting list.

Three Pre-Raphaelite artists

Monday 31st March, 6.00 pm
1. The Art of Sir John Millais

In 1898 Whitworth Wallis, first director of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, visited the Lit & Phil to give a lecture on John Everett Millais, the former Pre-Raphaelite artist who had gone on to become President of the Royal Academy and who had died only two years before.
Following Wallis's example, this new talk looks at the remarkable way that Millais' style changed during his career, moving on from his early reinterpretation of Renaissance art to encompass the influence of more mainstream masters such as Velasquez and Reynolds.
Can we reconcile such late, popular works as "The Boyhood of Raleigh" and "Bubbles" to the more revolutionary notions of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, or was Millais always, at heart, an Academic painter hoping to work in the grand European tradition?

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event  |  £5: online booking

Monday 7th April, 6.00 pm
2. The Art of Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Birmingham Art Gallery has the largest holding of drawings by the late Victorian painter and designer Edward Burne-Jones, so it seems appropriate that in 1911 the artist's career was the subject of a Lit & Phil lecture by the Gallery's first director, Whitworth Wallis. A modern perspective on Burne-Jones may be rather different - are we attracted by the fairy-tale Romanticism of his subjects, set in a timeless, dream-like world influenced by Mediaeval art, do we look beyond this to the near abstract stylisation of his manner or are we more engaged by the eclecticism of his approach, which involved oil and watercolour paintings and book illustrations as well as designs for stained glass and the occasional painted piano?
This talk examines the status of the artist as an idiosyncratic second-generation Pre-Raphaelite who turned away from Naturalism to devise and embrace his own Aesthetic mode.

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event  |  £5: online booking

Monday 14th April, 6.00 pm
3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, artist and poet

Given the difficulty of disengaging the art of painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti from his personal life, it would have been fascinating to have heard another artist-writer, Sturge Moore, discussing him at the Lit & Phil in 1928, the centenary year of Rossetti's birth.
Gail-Nina's new lecture looks at Rossetti's art through the influences that shaped his creative imagination, from Dante to Poe to early Renaissance art to the work of such contemporaries as William Homan Hunt and Ford Madox Brown. Such sources fuelled the evolution of a style that followed a Pre-Raphaelite phase with watercolours resembling Mediaeval illuminations before going on to those yearning, stylised female figures whose strange, strong visual presence was unique in Victorian painting.

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event  |  £5: online booking