Society Events

Francesca Kaes, Curator, will introduce a wide-ranging selection of drawings and watercolours by Turner from the Museum’s outstanding collection, the product of several generous bequests from discerning private collectors such as George Salting (in 1910) and R.W. Lloyd (in 1958). Many of these are superb finished watercolours.

After this private view, which is expected to last about an hour, members are invited to retire to Abbott & Holder (30 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH) for drinks across the road in Museum Street. The Society is most grateful to Abbott & Holder for offering to host this reception, another opportunity to celebrate the anniversary year.

A two-mile walk from Ramsgate to Broadstairs with (optional and self-supplied) packed lunch en route, followed by train from Broadstairs to Margate, arriving by 3 p.m. to visit Turner Contemporary and view Turner’s Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate.

A social gathering at 21–22 Maiden Lane, with a laying of flowers at the Turner Society/Westminster City Council plaque marking the site of Turner’s birth and the Eamonn Hughes Turner-inspired sculpture nearby. Members will be invited to celebrate with an informal drinks/lunch party at the Porterhouse bar which now occupies the site.

While the traditional date of Turner’s birth, 23 April, is generally accepted, it is unsupported by firm evidence. However, 14 May – the date of the Society’s commemoration – is documented as the date of his baptism in the church of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, just yards from the house where he was born.

A Twenty-first-century case for ‘Early Turner’ - Lecture by Professor Leo Costello

While great attention has been paid to Turner’s later career, much less has been given to his early work. This lecture will consider both definitions of and stakes in the concept of ‘Early Turner’. It will begin by addressing the challenges to even creating such a category: where, for instance, to begin and end it and on what basis – the work or Turner’s biography? Next, I will consider the role his earlier works have played in the minds of his critics during and after his lifetime, up to the present day. Lastly, I will argue a more particular case for the modern relevance of ‘Early Turner’, not just for a fuller understanding of his overall work, but in the light of pressing contemporary concerns including climate change, disability and social justice. 

Leo Costello is Associate Professor and Chair of the Art History Department at Rice University, Houston, Texas. He has published on British art from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. His first book, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, was issued by Ashgate in 2012: his second, Early Turner in London, 1795–1819, is now under contract with Routledge.

The 2025 Pantzer Lecture is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Turner Society members who wish to attend in person have priority booking until Tuesday 18 March 2025, using a link that will be sent to them by email. Fifty places are available. After that date any remaining places will be open to the public who must book via the PMC website (www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk).

Both links provide the alternative of registering for livestream remote attendance.

A visit to ‘JMW Turner and Changing Visions of Landscape’ with Francesca Vanke, Senior Curator and Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art.

Charlotte Topsfield, the Scottish National Gallery’s Senior Curator in charge of prints and drawings, will host a private, out of hours view (starting at 9 a.m.) of the National Gallery of Ireland’s Turner watercolours from the Vaughan Bequest.

Expressions of interest for this event must be sent by 15 January 2025 to: jmwturnersociety@gmail.com

To be followed by an informal talk by Catherine Parry-Wingfield

Images of Turner – Boy, Man and ‘Afterlife’

After his arresting youthful self-portrait of c.1799, Turner seems to have avoided the fashionable image-takers of his day, even though some of them were his good friends. In later life, there are therefore a number of ‘stolen’ likenesses, some friendly, others less so. The talk concludes with the unexpected ‘afterlife’ of some of those images.

Catherine Parry-Wingfield has been a Turner Society committee member for some years. She has taught on many art history courses, and has lectured to art societies in the UK and abroad. Catherine chaired Turner’s House Trust before and during the conservation of Sandycombe Lodge, Turner’s retreat in Twickenham.

Amy Concannon, Manton Senior Curator of Historic British Art, will lead Society members through the rehang of the Turner Galleries and discuss the response from the public.

The Society’s summer outing will be to Petworth, where our tour will be guided by Emily Knight, the National Trust Curator. Members may like to prepare for this visit by watching her talk on ‘Turner at Petworth: Past Approaches and Future Directions’ given on 23 September 2023 on the second day of the Yale Center’s Symposium.

The 44th Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Professor Malcolm Andrews.

The lecture argues for affinities between Dickens’s prose evocation of Venice and Turner’s oils and watercolours of the city. Dickens, travelling in Italy in 1844, confided in a letter to a friend ‘I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility.’ Accordingly, when he came to write up his Italian travels in his book Pictures from Italy (1846), he gave a separate chapter to Venice, titled ‘An Italian Dream’. This chapter is a radical stylistic rupture from the broadly conventional travel narrative in the rest of the book. In that same letter Dickens invoked the Venetian paintings of Canaletto, Stanfield and Turner. The lecture explores some of the ways in which Dickens’s writing, attempting to represent the ‘indescribable’, might be seen to resemble Turner’s experimental melting of forms when he portrays Venetian scenes.

Malcolm Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies University of Kent. A past president of the Dickens Society of America and for 30 years editor of The Dickensian, he has published widely in the field of landscape aesthetics and visual arts. His publications include Landscape and Western Art, 1999 in the New Oxford History of Art series and A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, 2021, Reaktion Books.

6 for 6.30 p.m. This event is free of charge. Wine will be served after the lecture.

Turner Society members who apply by 31 March 2024 have priority booking. After that date the lecture will be advertised on the Paul Mellon Centre website, and Dickens Fellowship members and others will also be invited to attend. All bookings from 1 April onwards will need to be made directly to the Centre and will be treated on a first-come, first-served basis.

The catalogue of the Turner Bequest’s rich holdings of works on paper was launched on Tate’s website in 2013. Since then, over 30,000 entries for sketchbook pages and individual sheets have been published within a chronological framework covering all phases of Turner’s career, with some 7,500 remaining entries now in hand.

Supported by the current Tate Research team of four cataloguers, Matthew Imms (Senior Cataloguer and Editor) will introduce a series of informal presentations on aspects of the ongoing project. A variety of artworks will be displayed to illustrate the issues involved in each contributor’s investigations and discoveries.

The 14 March event is now fully booked, save for two places. Members who still wish to attend may apply to mon47@hotmail.co.uk to be placed on a waiting list for return tickets.

A link to this meeting will be circulated to members at a later date.

Lecture by Margaret Burr

B.G. Windus (1790–1867), a wealthy coachmaker who lived in Tottenham, north London, assembled an important collection of over 200 Turner watercolours which was memorialised in a well-known watercolour of his library by John Scarlett Davis in 1835. He also collected drawings by David Wilkie and was later a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Margaret Burr, a long-term Tottenham resident, co-edits the website ‘Turner in Tottenham’.

At the kind invitation of our Vice-President Guy Horton-Fawkes, we will visit the home of Turner’s patron, Walter Fawkes, where the artist stayed many times over a period of 25 years. Short talks will be given on the friendship between Turner and Fawkes and on Turner’s work carried out at Farnley. Members are invited to bring their own picnic lunches to enjoy in the grounds before assembling for the visit to the Hall.

Access to grounds, for picnics, from noon

The 43rd Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Dr Greg Smith, creator of the new free-to-access website ‘Thomas Girtin (1775-1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist’.

Click here for Access to Girtin Catalogue

Turner visited Kent throughout his life, from his early schooldays to his latter years in Margate. The county provided him with both subject matter and inspiration and he made depictions of its landscape, coastline, harbours, and monuments throughout his career.

Nick Reese, Joint Secretary of the Turner Society, who has embarked on a county-by-county study of Turner’s work, will examine aspects of the artist’s relationship with the ‘Garden of England’.

Annual General Meeting followed by ‘Turner in the Auction House’, a talk by Harriet Drummond, Senior Director and Head of Department, British Art on Paper, at Christie’s.

A link to the Zoom Meeting will be circulated to members nearer the date.

Lecture by James Hamilton

Antagonisms between Turner and Constable have been much manufactured and recorded across the decades with various admixtures of glee and admonition. This lecture will reveal something of the complexities of friendship between these two giants of nineteenth-century painting in their pursuit of a common purpose.

James Hamilton, a Vice-President of the Society, is an art historian and cultural historian, curator, lecturer and (in his spare time) watercolourist. His acclaimed biographies range from Turner to Faraday and Gainsborough. His latest biography, Constable: A Portrait, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, was reviewed by Andrew Wilton in TSN 137.

Led by Turner Society committee member Ian Guy

From his first visit to Margate as a boy to his last years, Turner often returned to Margate and the nearby coast. To walk along the pier and follow the coastal road along the cliff tops is to share sights that inspired him. Walkers may like to make their own, independent, visits to the old town and Turner Contemporary in the morning, before we assemble. Members and guests who do not wish to complete the entire walk are of course welcome to join the party and leave at any point.

Rendezvous at the entrance to Turner Contemporary, Margate, CT9 1HG from where the party will set off at 2 p.m. sharp. On reaching Broadstairs both walkers and non-walkers will appreciate its pleasant sea frontage (with easy walks) and they might like to enjoy tea and scones in the large upstairs room of the Charles Dickens pub which has a fine view across the harbour out to sea and is next door to the Dickens Museum which will remain open for late-coming walkers after its normal closing time of 4.30 p.m.

The return will be by train from Broadstairs to Margate Railway Station. Trains depart frequently from Broadstairs to both Margate and Ramsgate.

It would be helpful if members and friends wishing to join the walk would let Ian Guy know by email by Friday 17 June. Also would walkers and non-walkers indicate by that date whether they expect to take afternoon refreshments at the pub?

The coastal walk to Broadstairs is approximately six miles, so the full walk is for serious walkers with appropriate footwear.

The 42nd Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Timothy Wilcox

Throughout his career, from his first visits to Turner’s Gallery in 1804 to his dazzling reflections of the England and Wales series in the 1830s, Cotman mapped his own artistic course onto Turner’s own. The unequal dialogue tells us a little, perhaps, about Turner’s celebrity and a lot about Cotman’s struggles. According to Harold Bloom, influence causes anxiety; according to Cotman, anxiety causes influence.

Timothy Wilcox is a curator and writer with wide-ranging interests in the British watercolour tradition and beyond. The author of Cotman in Normandy (2012) and monographs on Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer, he is currently reconstructing J.R. Cozens’ commission for William Beckford.

Lecture by Dr Joyce Townsend

In his early life Turner worked in watercolour before he used oil, employing a whole repertoire of techniques to create lights in his compositions. This experience greatly influenced his methods when painting in oil. All his life he exploited newly invented pigments and innovative ways of marketing his works and his output was prodigious. This talk illustrates the considerable range of painting materials he used and how he used them, from his early watercolours to his well-known habit in later life of finishing his oils on the walls of the Royal Academy just before the annual exhibition.

Dr Joyce Townsend is Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate, where she investigates the materials and techniques used by British artists from the later sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and the ways such paintings have changed as they age. She is the author of How Turner Painted: Materials and Techniques (2019) and many other publications on Turner and other British artists.

The AGM will take place via Zoom on Saturday 4 December at 2.30 p.m. Log-in details will be sent to members nearer the time.

Including ‘Turner and Peter-boats’, a short talk by our Chairman, Pieter van der Merwe

Turner is recognised as the master of evocative representation of early paddle- steamers – at least in spirit rather than in pedantic detail. Another and smaller working vessel that features unusually often in his English marine subjects the now-vanished ‘peter-boat’, the typical lower Thames fishing craft of his time. This talk will explain their characteristics and use, based on examples found in his work and other contemporary illustrations.

Turner Society members are invited to visit recently restored Pitzhanger Manor, Sir John Soane’s country house at Ealing.

At 2.45 p.m., outside the entrance to the house, Catherine Parry-Wingfield will give a short talk on Soane and Turner, who was a frequent visitor there. The two men were great friends, and Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, which Turner designed himself, has many Soanian features.

Places for this visit and talk are limited. To receive details please apply to Margaret O’Neill, Flat 69, The Atrium, 30 Vincent Square, London SW1P 2NW with your name, phone number and email address.

TS members coming to this event will be asked to book their visit to the house individually at a time that suits them. For further information about Pitzhanger and the current exhibition of works by Julian Opie, go to www.pitzhanger.org.uk

The Turner Society’s 41st Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Professor Stephen Bann

Stephen Bann is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Bristol University. His recent publications and current interest are in the field of print culture, where Turner was a notable innovator, collaborating with printmakers of successive generations to experiment successfully with new techniques and formats. This lecture will examine diverse series from the Southern Coast (1816–24) to the Rivers of France in the mid-1830s, and will argue that Turner’s engagement in the production of such serial publications also helped to provide him with a specific sense of mission which was ultimately fulfilled in some of his major artistic achievements.

This will be a Zoom lecture and details of the log-in arrangement will be circulated to members nearer the date.

The Annual General Meeting of the Turner Society will take the form of an online meeting.

Further details will be emailed to members in due course.

The visit to the ‘Turner’s Modern World’ exhibition will be replaced by an online talk by the curators together with a question and answer session, arranged specially for the Society on the date of the cancelled visit.

Further details will be emailed to members in due course.

Talk by Cecilia Powell

Although Turner is rightly acclaimed for his originality, we should not forget that his work was grounded in his admiration for the art of the past, where a major role was often played by mythology. This talk will show that his interest in mythology, especially that of Greece and Rome, is far more prevalent in his sketches and drawings than is usually supposed.

Entrance is free, but numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill (see above) to reserve a place and receive details.

A reception to mark the issue in February of the new £20 note featuring Turner

Senior officers of the Bank will talk about the process of selection and design leading to the new banknote and Pieter van der Merwe, Chairman of the Turner Society and a maritime historian, will discuss The Fighting Temeraire which is depicted on the note. After the reception there will be an opportunity to visit the Bank’s fascinating Museum.

Places for this special event, in which The Friends of Turner’s House will also participate, are strictly limited and the Bank’s security requirements must be strictly observed. Applications by those wishing to attend have to be submitted to c@parry-wingfield.co.uk by 30 November 2019 but late applications will be considered if space permits. Successful applicants will receive details of the arrangements (by email only) directly from the Bank.

Our former Chairman Andrew Wilton will speak about the genesis of his recently published Turnerian novel The Painter's Boy: An Historical Caprice.

Entrance is free without ticket. Wine and mince pies will be served after the lecture. The agenda for the AGM will be circulated separately.

Talk by Colin Harrison

To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of John Ruskin on 8 February 1819, Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art in the Department of Western Art, will introduce a selection of the Turner watercolours presented by Ruskin to his old university, together with other watercolours which formed part of the Teaching Collection in the Ruskin School of Drawing.

Numbers are restricted, though if there is sufficient demand the talk will be repeated at 3 p.m. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill (see above) to reserve a place and to receive details.

The Society will make a return visit to Petworth House for a tour guided by its Collections Manager, Andrew Loukes. After picnicking or lunching at Petworth, we shall also visit Fittleworth Mill House from 2.30 p.m., where we shall be shown round by a member of the owner’s family and be served light refreshments.

Participants will need to obtain their own entrance tickets for Petworth House (a National Trust property). Numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill (see above) to reserve a place and to receive details.

Lecture by Nicola Moorby

2019 marks two hundred years since one of Turner's most significant European expeditions, his first tour of Italy, an experience which both consolidated and expanded his landscape vision. Drawing upon recent cataloguing of the Italian sketchbooks, this talk will discuss his approach to Italy’s treasures and traditions and examine how he assimilated that material within his wider practice.

Nicola Moorby is an independent art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Formerly at Tate Britain, she has worked extensively on Turner, including as co-editor and author of How to Paint like Turner (2010) and as co-curator of the interactive exhibition, Colour into Line: Turner’s Experiments (Tate Britain, 2008–14). She has been a long-term member of the team preparing the Tate’s new online catalogue of the Turner Bequest and has particularly worked on the sketchbooks of the 1819 and 1828 Italian tours.

Entry is free, without ticket. Wine will be served after the lecture.

Talk by Nick Reese

Following last year’s highly successful talk on the West Country drawings, Nick Reese examines Turner’s drawings made in and around Petworth and Fittleworth, destinations which the Society is to visit in June.

Entrance is free, but numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill (see above) to reserve a place and to receive details.

Private view introduced by Anne Hodge

Anne Hodge, the Gallery’s Curator of Prints and Drawings, will provide us with private access to the annual display of the Vaughan Bequest and accompanying material, prior to the display being open to the public.

Entrance is free but numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill at 69 The Atrium, 30 Vincent Square, London, SW1P 2NW to reserve a place and receive precise entrance/meeting details. Participants should book their own accommodation and transport to suit their convenience.

Including ‘Turner's Titles’ - lecture by Nick Powell

Does it matter what we call Turner’s paintings? Theories about painting titles have been developed, broadly speaking, only in relation to the modern period, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; Turner is the one earlier artist who has received much attention from the theorists. This talk will look at the remarkable variety of methods employed to identify/explain Turner’s works from his lifetime to the present day: by the artist himself, printmakers, cataloguers, curators and registrars. It will consider just what counts as a title and will examine the purpose (or purposes) of Turner titles and their effect on the viewer.

Entrance is free without ticket. Wine and mince pies will be served after the lecture. The agenda for the AGM will be circulated separately.

Lecture by Franny Moyle

Franny Moyle writes: ‘Turner was born in London in 1775, a Georgian, and died in 1851, a Victorian. My book The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner gave me one of the most compelling reasons to look again at Turner’s biography and to re-establish the achievements of the lesser recognised Georgian Turner alongside the more familiar and popular output of the Victorian man. As part of this I asked whether there was a consistent world view of Turner shared between these two versions. By the end of the research I felt sure there was.’

Entrance is free, without ticket.

The Hickman Bacon Collection – some 400 works in total, in superb condition – is probably the most important collection of English watercolours in private hands. It reflects the personal taste of Sir Hickman Bacon, Bt, who put it together in a period of only about 20 years from 1895. As Eric Shanes wrote, ‘his taste was mainly for evanescent and impressionistic effects’ and thus ‘the collection is especially strong in the type of late, ethereal Turner watercolour that became widely popular only with the advent of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s.’ The Society is privileged to have been invited to a private viewing of a selection of gems from the collection.

Entrance is free, but numbers are restricted and early booking is recommended. Members will need to travel independently to Raveningham (Beccles station is 3 miles distant and Norwich station 12 miles) and we shall gather at the Hall at noon. A light lunch in the tearoom may be ordered in advance (£10 on the day) or members are welcome to picnic in the grounds.

Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill (see above) to reserve a place and to receive further details.

The 39th Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Sam Smiles

Sam Smiles writes: ‘Turner is habitually understood as an artist who developed highly sophisticated images of places and their visual apprehension. A great deal of research has concentrated on the physical environments he depicted, real and imaginary, and their realisation in pictorial terms. While Turner’s representation of space has, therefore, become a key concern, his approach to time has received rather less attention. It is, however, something that he engaged with throughout his career on a number of different levels.’

Entrance is free, without ticket. Wine will be served after the lecture.

Talk by Nick Reese

Between 1811 and 1814 Turner undertook three summer tours of the West Country during which he gathered material for his Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England series. As well as the drawings in his sketchbooks, the tours inspired Turner to make a number of watercolours and a series of marvellous oil sketches around Plymouth and the Tamar Valley. Nick Reese will talk about his personal selection in front of the works themselves.

Entrance is free, but numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill at 69 The Atrium, 30 Vincent Square, London SW1P 2NW to reserve a place and to receive details.

Including ‘Sandycombe Lodge: Returning Turner To Twickenham’ - lecture by Catherine Parry-Wingfield.

After an extended period of planning and fund-raising and a year of conservation at Sandycombe Lodge, the Chairman of Turner’s House Trust will focus on how some of the elements of its presentation to the public have been determined – the ‘why, how and who’ of a fascinating project.

Entrance is free without ticket. Wine and mince pies will be served after the lecture. The agenda for the AGM will be circulated separately.

Talk by Peter Hall, followed by a guided walk.

Peter Hall, Curator of The Lightbox, will describe the exhibits in the exhibition ‘Turner in Surrey’ which explores Turner’s travels through the county (the historic county as constituted prior to 1889). Weather permitting, he will then guide the group along the Basingstoke Canal, depicted by Turner.

Entry to this event is free for Turner Society members only. Please meet in the foyer. Walkers need to be reasonably fit.

Sandycombe Lodge, the villa designed by Turner as his country retreat, has undergone complete renovation and reopens to the public this summer.

The Society has arranged a special visit to the newly restored building and its displays.

Numbers are restricted and our party will be split into two or three groups. Each tour lasts about 45–50 minutes. There will be an entrance charge of £6. To reserve a place, please apply with SAE and your cheque (made payable to the Turner Society) to Margaret O’Neill, 69 The Atrium, 30 Vincent Square, London SW1P 2NW.

Introduced by Andrew Wilton.

The collection of Turner drawings and watercolours in the British Museum is large and important, including bequests by John Henderson, George Salting and R.W. Lloyd. Many of these are in superb condition; Lloyd in fact bequeathed his magnificent finished Turners to the Museum explicitly to complement the studies and sketchbooks in the Turner Bequest. The removal of the Bequest to Tate has foiled that enlightened plan, but Lloyd’s collection still enjoys an illuminating context. Our visit provides an opportunity to see a wide range of fine Turners in a traditional print room setting.

Numbers are restricted. Please apply to Margaret O’Neill to reserve a place and receive details.

The 38th Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Cecilia Powell.

Turner’s travels along the Rhine and its tributaries, together with his many depictions of the area, were the subject of Cecilia Powell’s research at the Clore Gallery in 1989–90 and featured in her Tate catalogues, Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel (1991) and Turner in Germany (1995).

The bicentenary of Turner’s first visit to the Rhineland in 1817 provides an opportunity to review our understanding of that tour. This will lead on to a wider consideration of the handling of Turner research generally in the digital age.

6 for 6.30 p.m. Entry is free, without ticket. Wine will be served after the lecture.

Members are invited to a private tour of ‘Samuel Prout: A Grand Tour in Watercolour’ (www.badafair.com/exhibitions/loan-exhibition.html). This will be an exhibition of paintings by Samuel Prout (1783-1852). It will include works from private collectors that have not been on public display for more than 50 years.

The tour will take place on Tuesday 21 March 2017 at 3.00 p.m. at BADA 2017 (www.badafair.com), Duke of York Square, King’s Road, London, SW3 4LY. The tour will conclude with champagne.

There is no charge and participants will also have free entry to the BADA 2017 fair.

The allocation of places is now full.

Talk by Pieter van der Merwe.

Our Vice-chairman Pieter van der Merwe will show us the ship models once owned by Turner (which formed the subject of his recent article in TSN 124) together with a selection of associated maritime material held by Tate Britain.

Numbers are limited. Please apply to Margaret O’Neill to reserve a place and receive details.

Private view introduced by Charlotte Topsfield.

Charlotte Topsfield, the Gallery’s senior curator in charge of British prints and drawings, will provide us with private access to the annual January display of the Vaughan Bequest at the National Gallery of Scotland. The Gallery will open to the public at 10 a.m. and it will, of course, be possible to remain there after the conclusion of the private view.

Entrance is free, but numbers are restricted. Please apply with SAE to Margaret O’Neill to reserve a place and receive precise entrance/meeting details, together with information about other exhibitions then showing in Edinburgh. Participants should book their own accommodation and transport to suit their convenience.

Including ‘W.L. Wyllie (1851–1931): Victorian Turnerian’ - lecture by Pieter van der Merwe.

The marine work – especially the etchings – of William Lionel Wyllie is both familiar and popular, yet his subject range and quality as an artist, especially in watercolour, are under-recognised. He published on marine painting and in 1905 wrote a biography of Turner, an artist he greatly admired and often emulated. This illustrated talk will follow his Turnerian vein, based on his studio archive, the c.7,000 Wyllie images purchased on his death for the National Maritime Museum.

Entrance is free, without ticket. The agenda for the AGM will be circulated separately.

Colour is the essence of Turner’s work, and his distinctive, sometimes eccentric use of vibrant colour was central to his success as an artist. Featuring more than 70 works, this exciting exhibition, curated by Ian Warrell, will highlight Turner’s engagement with developments in colour theory and his adoption and exploitation of new materials. Beginning with the more traditional ‘Old Master’ aesthetic that Turner quickly matched and then superseded, the exhibition (8 October 2016 to 8 January 2017) will chart the impact made by the artist’s experimental techniques.

Entrance is free, without ticket. Meet in the gallery foyer.

Lecture by Andrew Wilton.

Thomas Lawrence was a virtuoso – the equivalent in portraiture of Turner in landscape – and they were contemporaries. By 1814 when the Allied leaders came to London to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat, it was appropriate that Lawrence should record them for posterity. His spectacular series of likenesses, finished in Vienna and Rome, was later assembled in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, one of the greatest achievements of any British painter.

Entrance is free, without ticket.