15th May 2025 10.45am repeated 2.15pm at The Henley Rugby Club. Live transmission 10.45am only. For more information on all lectures please contact Sarah Barry on SarahBarry63@yahoo.co.uk or 07879 611782.
Lydia Bauman
Review of the Lecture, by Professor Gurney
How do you summarise a hundred years of British art in an hour’s lecture? Our lecturer, Lydia Bauman, very amusingly structured her lecture around various British characteristics, such as a liking for a cup of tea or having a stiff upper lip or discussions about the weather. The well-chosen art illustrated was from the period 1850 to 1950, ranging from sentimental Victorian family scenes to more realistic post-Second World War realism, but still keeping the themes. British art at this period was influenced to some extent by what was developing elsewhere in the world, such as the work of the French Impressionists or the discovery of Japanese art, but was also quite isolated from the wider art world, only linking more broadly after the Second World War. The art illustrated was very well-chosen, and the lecture communicated much learning in a very light and amusing way. Lydia Bauman is an artist as well as a lecturer, and explained the art with an artist’s eye. She has lectured for many years at the National Gallery in London, and her knowledge shone through this very enjoyable lecture.
One example of the artworks included in Lydia’s talk is shown here. This night scene by John Atkinson Grimshaw [Photo Attribution: John Atkinson Grimshaw, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons] reminded Lydia of the time she lived in Yorkshire. “When I first came to England, I lived in Leeds and I became very acquainted with these very chilly, very damp Autumn and winter evenings and late afternoons, which were sort of chilling and went right through you. And yet, you know, in the evening in the, in the Moonlight, it becomes something quite magical. Grimshaw is able to convey that on a very still evening. You can see that the leaves are rotting on the ground. There is a sense of squelchiness and dampness in the air. It is just very, very well observed.”
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This is a survey of a hundred years of Art in Britain from the Victorian Leopold Augustus Egg to Francis Bacon.
This talk examines ways in which Britain’s isolated position resulted in an art which, while occasionally showing European influences, for most part remained steadfastly and uniquely British. Expect a tongue in cheek analysis of such popular British archetypes as the "stiff upper lip", a "nice cup of tea", "no sex we are British" and of course "the weather"!
(Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
Lydia was born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, (19th-20th century art - Distinction for thesis on Matisse's Illustrations to Poetry). She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London's National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the latter as a guest speaker for travel companies. Since the pandemic began in March 2020 Lydia had devised and delivered a programme of upwards of 180 online lectures to her own group 'Art For The Uninitiated'.
