Art and War

This five-part lecture course, delivered by experts in the field, will interrogate the many and varied ways in which warfare has been depicted by artists in Great Britain, from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. This was a period of domestic and international ferment. It began with the threat of invasion by Spain’s mighty Armada, and ended with the Royal Navy’s dominance of the seas after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. Spanning military, naval, political and social history, as well as three hundred years of visual culture in Great Britain, the course will feature a succession of lectures focussing on a single work of art, or a sequence of such works. These will be used as the starting points for discussion, and will include some of the greatest icons of British art, including the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley and J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

Weekly lectures:

10 October (Week One): 'Introduction and the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I' by Jacqueline Riding and Christine Riding

17 October (Week Two): 'Representing War: from Versailles to Marlborough House' by Lydia Hamlett

24 October (Week Three): ‘William Hogarth’s March to Finchley’ by Jacqueline Riding

31 October (Week Four): ‘The Field of Battle: Military Painting in Eighteenth-Century England’ by Mark Hallett

7 November (Week Five): 'Turner’s Fighting Temeraire and Conclusion' by Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding

Booking:

Registration for the course is now open.

**Please note: you will need to register for each week individually. This is to ensure attendance does not drop. Apologies for the inconvenience.**