Saturday Study
On campus and online
Saturday Study delivers short, intensive and, we hope, enjoyable events that help to give further context to our temporary exhibitions or use selected works from our permanent collections as starting points for the investigation of significant art-historical themes.
Saturday Study events take place in the Lecture Theatre at Vernon Square; they will also be recorded and made available online from the following Tuesday. Saturday Study aims to be as accessible as possible and offers concessions to recipients of Universal or Pension Credit and to full-time students. Companions of disabled participants are given free access. Refreshments and entry to The Courtauld Gallery are included in the course fee for on-campus attendees.
Study events happen on a Saturday morning or afternoon once a term.
Drawing on Arabian Nights – Orientalism in Context
Saturday 29 April 2023
On campus at Vernon Square £40 (£30 concessions)
or
Online as a recording £10 (£5 concessions)
This Saturday Study event will provide an opportunity to delve deeper into the ideas raised in The Courtauld Gallery exhibition Drawing on Arabian Nights (22 February – 3 June 2023).
Find out more
Archive of previous Study Events
“An Object of National Splendour”: Somerset House and the British Empire
The Courtauld Gallery reopened its doors to the public on 19 November. As audiences return to its home in Somerset House, our Study Day explores this magnificent building in depth. Somerset House was the most significant public building project in Britain in the late eighteenth century, and originally housed a number of key government offices, including the headquarters of the Navy Board, alongside England’s major learned societies. Our Study Day investigates the building’s sophisticated construction and external ornamentation, as well as its function and symbolic role within a wider network of British imperial spaces and architectures.
Speakers: Kyle Leyden, Dr Emily Mann, Dr Anne Puetz
Moderated by Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 11 December 2021
N.B. This event has passed.
Reflecting on Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits
Today, Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings achieve fantastic sums at auctions, his style is unmistakable, and his popular recognition arguably the highest of any modern painter. Collectively, we feel that we ‘know’ this artist. The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits (3 February – 8 May 2022), the first ever devoted to the artist’s self-portraits across his entire career, asks us to think again, drawing on new research about his social networks, and about the works themselves. Exhibition curator Dr Karen Serres will reflect on both entrenched myths and the new perspectives gained about Van Gogh as man and artist.
Speakers: Dr Karen Serres in conversation with Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 12 March 2022
N.B. This event has passed.
Object/Subject: Modern Women in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Expressionist Art
Women feature prominently in a number of key works from The Courtauld’s modern collections, appearing as barmaids, nudes, dancers or fashionable sitters in portraits. Looking beyond our own collections, it is clear that in much avant-garde art – mostly painted by men – women abound as ‘subject-matter’; as objects to be looked at, to put it another way. This event foregrounds a number of striking women artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn Becker, and explores the connections between women (as subject-matter and as agents) and wider nineteenth-century concepts and connotations of modernity. We shall look closely at the ways nineteenth century attitudes to women and their experience reveal themselves in paint, and ask how these differ when the woman herself is the producer of the work. Progressing into the early twentieth century, we shall discuss the boundaries to be negotiated by female painters, considering the ways in which they bridged the gap between their desire to work in a man’s world, and society’s expectations of an appropriate feminine identity. For each of these artists, complex questions of creative agency are at stake.
Speakers: Dr Anne Puetz and Dr Niccola Shearman
Saturday 14 May 2022
N.B. This event has passed.
Henry Fuseli and his Drawings of the 'Modern Woman'
Exhibition curators Professor David Solkin and Dr Ketty Gottardo discuss the life and work of one of British Romantic art’s most unusual figures, the Swiss-born painter and draughtsman Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). We’ll try to make sense of Fuseli’s private and highly inventive drawings of the ‘modern woman’, by considering their relationship to previous and contemporary figure studies.
Speakers: Professor David Solkin and Dr Ketty Gottardo
Moderated by Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 26 November 2022
N.B. This event has passed
The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig. New and Recent Works – In Context
Our Saturday Study event accompanies The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition of new and recent paintings and prints by Peter Doig (10 Feb – 29 May 2023). One of the most renowned British contemporary figurative artists, Doig lived and worked in Trinidad since 2000 before re-establishing himself in London in 2021. Our lecturers will set Doig into the wider context of post WWII British figurative painting before exploring his working practices and the themes of his large-scale expressive landscapes and figure paintings of Canadian and Trinidadian subjects, and of the recent experience of cultural relocation.
With exhibition curator Dr Barnaby Wright, independent curator and art historian Catherine Lampert and Dr Catherine Howe, Research Officer at Zaha Hadid Foundation. Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz (The Courtauld)
Saturday 25 March 2023. N.B. This event has passed