DON'T MISS A SPECIAL EVENT ON TUESDAY, 20 MARCH! SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE TO FIND OUT MORE
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London Square
Effie Gray
Charles Dickens
Elizabethan portrait
Apollo
LECTURES, VISITS AND EVENTS
STOP PRESS! An extra event arranged for 17 May at 10.45.am: GARDEN TOUR
It may seem unlikely with snow still on the ground, but by 17 May, Kenwood’s rhododendrons should be out. Join us and Head Gardener, Paul Jackson, for a stroll. Download a booking form.
Forthcoming Events and Visits
To secure a place on any of the trips and events below please complete and return the relevant booking form. Please note that all Friends' trips and private views are for members only.
LECTURES DECEMBER 2011 - JUNE 2012
All lectures begin at 11.00 am (with the exception of the lecture on 15 April) and will be held in the Lecture Room until further notice.
Sunday, 22 January
London Squares
Todd Longstaffe Gowan
This lecture will unravel the story of London’s squares, how they came into being, who promoted, planned and built them, who lived there and what were the consequences in terms of lifestyle and urban development. Our lecturer is a published expert on garden history, and himself a garden designer, currently at work on landscape improvements to Kensington Palace.
Sunday, 19 February
Model Wife: Effie, Ruskin and Millais
Suzanne Fagence Cooper
Effie Gray’s marriage to John Ruskin, the celebrated art critic and art historian, her growing attraction to his young protégé, the brilliant Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, the scandalous annulment and her remarriage, make a great Victorian romance. Dr Cooper has written a much-acclaimed book on the subject (2010) and will bring this enthralling story to life for us. For many years, a Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, she is now a full-time writer and lecturer.
Sunday, 18 March
Dickens and London
Leonée Ormond
2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, Britain’s greatest novelist. Many of the best scenes in his books are drawn from the streets of London, which he knew intimately and loved, and the swarms of characters who inhabited them. Our lecturer, a Professor Emerita and fellow of King’s College, London, and a former president of the Dickens Fellowship, is an expert on the novelist, and the curator of the Dickens Exhibition, opening at the Watts Gallery in June 2012.
Sunday, 15 April Annual General Meeting at 10.30 am followed by the AGM
Elizabethan and Jacobean Pregnancy Portraits
Karen Hearn AGM at 10.30 and Lecture at 11.30 am
Although many women in the past spent much of their adult lives being pregnant, this is seldom apparent from surviving portraits. Anomalously, however, English aristocratic women were sometimes depicted as clearly with child, a theme that Karen Hearn was able to explore in an exhibition in 2002, which revealed just how popular and significant such portrayals were. She noticed that these portraits proliferated from the late 1560s until about 1630, in an era when many women feared that they would not survive childbirth. Karen Hearn, Curator of 16th and 17th Century British Art at Tate Britain, curated the ground-breaking exhibition, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530-1630,in 1995 and has contributed to the forthcoming publication of the Suffolk Collection’s Jacobean portraits at Kenwood.
Sunday, 20 May
Giambologna’s Bronzes and their Collectors
Charles Avery
The Flemish-born Giambologna became court sculptor at the Medici Court in Florence in the middle years of the 16th century. With his refined, mannerist style, he exerted a profound influence on European sculpture. He is famous for his large public commissions, like the Neptune fountain in Bologna, and for his life-size statues, but he also produced smaller bronzes that were eagerly sought after by monarchs, aristocrats and wealthy private collectors. Our lecturer, a former curator of sculpture at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has devoted a lifetime of study to Giambologna, and will lead us through this complex but fascinating subject.
We regret that latecomers to lectures cannot be admitted
VISITS JANUARY – JUNE 2012
Tuesday 10 January at 10.45am
Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
The august premises of the Royal College of Surgeons, is also the home of a fascinating museum. After a career as an Army surgeon in the 1760s, John Hunter became the country’s leading teacher of anatomy and surgery, having amassed a phenomenal collection of human and animal specimens. In 1783, he bought a large house in Leicester Square, specifically to arrange his collection into a teaching museum. As his fame grew, the collection was augmented by explorers such as Joseph Banks.
Recognising its importance for medical students, the government bought Hunter’s collection in 1799 and gave it to the Company (later the Royal College) of Surgeons. Since then the collection has continued to expand to over 3,500 specimens and is now in a modern display which was opened in 2005. The range is astonishing; it includes the skeleton of the ‘Irish Giant’ Charles Byrne (7ft 7ins) whose corpse was bought by Hunter in 1783, a portrait of Daniel Lambert, who died in 1809 weighing 52 stone and Churchill’s dentures. But this is not a freak show; it is a major historic collection still used for teaching.
Our guided visit will include a history of the collection and a tour of the highlights. We meet at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields at 10.45. The cost is £10 which includes the private tour. Download a booking form.
Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
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Tuesday 13 March at 1.45pm
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House
Last year Dame Rosalind Savill gave an enchanting talk about this world famous collection of fine and decorative arts housed in the sumptuous London townhouse of the Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. Reflecting the taste of these wealthy and discerning collectors, it is rich in French, Italian, Dutch and British Old Master paintings; works by Titian, Hals, Rembrandt, Poussin, Fragonard, Watteau, Canaletto, Gainsborough and Lawrence. The collection of French porcelain, metalwork and furniture is the finest outside France, and if that is not enough, there are exquisite Medieval and Renaissance objects and European arms and armour. Yet, on entering the house, one feels like a guest in a private residence.
Hertford House is a fine 18th century mansion, but it was Sir Richard Wallace, son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford who redeveloped the house with a range of galleries on the first floor and the top-lit Great Gallery, to accommodate his priceless collection. In 1897, his widow, Lady Wallace bequeathed the house and its collection to the nation. For the Centenary Project in 2000, exhibition and education areas were added, the courtyard was roofed in to create a restaurant and many of the rooms on the ground floor have been refurbished.
We meet at 1.45pm in the entrance to Hertford House and we shall have a private tour of the highlights of the collection. The cost is £12. After the tour, you may choose to have tea (not included) in the Courtyard Restaurant. Download a booking form.
PLEASE COMPLETE A SEPARATE BOOKING FORM (which you can download)
FOR EACH EVENT, ALSO PLEASE BRING YOUR MEMBERSHIP CARD
You will have received an invitation by now but, just in case you have not, you can download one here.
This is a special event to be held just before the House is closed.
A JACOBEAN CELEBRATION TUESDAY, 20 MARCH 2012
This will be a Jacobean Celebration with Wine, Music and Dance and a talk on Jacobean portraits. |
The dancing will be accompanied by the Nonesuch Dance Company who have performed at Hampton Court and other historic houses.
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