Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 2.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Afternoon only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

Imogen, a popular speaker, will take us through the history and design of this unique and colourful tile tradition.

This is a craft that is in daily use in Portugal whether for house and road signs, public notices or for advertising a business. It will have started as a way of keeping a building cool and clean but developed into an art form in itself.

Portuguese delight in them grew out of a dynastic marriage between Manuel I and Isabella of Aragon in 1503 when he filled the rooms of the palace at Sintra with azulejos to make her feel at home. They had a boost around 1700 when largely blue-and-white designs became fashionable, sometimes with whole buildings covered with them such at St Catherine’s in Porto. Azulejos are now so valued in Portugal that a law was passed in 2017 to prevent the demolition of buildings with significant numbers of tiles.

At Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0UD from 10.00 am

Includes refreshments and two lectures

The 16th to 18th centuries in India witnessed the golden artistic period of Mughal Rule, marked by a unique flowering of art and architecture. The lectures will show how Persian, European and local Indian styles influenced art and architecture

For full details and booking click here

Drinks and Nibbles afterwards - please stay and enjoy the company

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 2.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Afternoon only lecture

In so many country houses open to the public both stables and carriage houses have been converted into either the restaurant or gift shop. Whilst completely understandable from an economic perspective, this change in function sometimes serves to divert attention from their original purpose and significance. Often the focus of important architectural commissions, they were fundamental elements to the house and estate without which neither could function effectively. This lecture aims to redress the balance by looking at the architectural history of the British stable through a wealth of artistic sources, examining their design and evolution from the late medieval period to the end of the 19th century when literal ‘horsepower’ started to give way to its mechanical alternatives.

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 2.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Afternoon only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

In this lively presentation John shares his knowledge and lifelong enthusiasm for wine in general and the huge contribution that ‘wine art’ makes to our colourful world.

Many of today’s imbibers now seek out wine accessories from the past such as corkscrews, bin labels, drinking glasses and bottle tickets to adorne their ‘cellars’.

There are numerous wonderful paintings of wine being made and wine being drunk in celebration, especially by many of the Impressionists.

Wine or rather the drinking of it also lends itself to wicked and sometimes very funny cartoons.

Finally, we shall explore wine labels from around the world. Today the high standard of graphic art displayed on wine labels is amazing.

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 2.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Afternoon only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

This lecture provides a colourful introduction to the secret world of our 2000-mile inland waterway network and looks at all aspects of their exceptional artistic, architectural and engineering vernacular. Features range from sweeping aqueducts to tiny bollards; from colourful historic narrowboats to 'Roses and Castles' artwork; from grand World Heritage Sites to quirky listed buildings. A well-known architectural historian once described our canals as a 'poor man's art gallery'.

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG, Guests £10 on the door

Come early to enjoy refreshments

Lecture at 2.30 repeated at 7.30

Sarah Cove ACR founded the Constable Research Project in conjunction with the V&A Museum in 1986 to study John Constable RA’s materials and techniques from the technical and scientific point of view. Since then she has examined over 250 works from collections worldwide, from tiny oil sketches on fragments of canvas, paper supports and boards to the ‘six-footers’, some of Constable’s most famous and iconic paintings including The Haywain (1821), The Leaping Horse (1825) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). She has developed a technical chronology that assists with the dating of his known works, relatively few of which were signed and dated by the artist and is also useful for the attribution (or not) of newly discovered pictures. Sarah Cove has been instrumental in the attribution of three significant Constable oils for BBC1’s Fake or Fortune? series, appearing in 2014 and 2017. In 2014 she set up a Facebook page that is hugely successful in raising awareness of her research so that now she is regularly contacted by people that think they have a found a previously unknown Constable!! Some have, some have not, as you will see in this lecture which gives a ‘behind the scenes’ look at how such decisions are made and will describe some extraordinary successes but also crashing disappointments. Stories will include, at opposite extremes, a hugely publicised oil sketch reputedly worth £250,000 that turned out to be a copy and the chance discovery of a fabulous, almost abstract, oil study of the 1830s that had formerly belonged to an American G.I

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0UD

Come from 12.30 to enjoy welcome drinks and a chancee to socialize.

Naomi Collick is the curator of the Castle's collections.  She will talk about the Castle's history and its last owner, Denys Eyre Bower who built the collections.

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 7.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Evening only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

2027 is the 500th anniversary the birth of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, one of the strangest and most intriguing artists of all time. He captivated his contemporaries with his depictions of the human face composed of objects such as fruits, flowers, fish and books. After centuries of obscurity, he was rediscovered in the 19th century and then revered by the Surrealists who saw him as a pioneer for their mining of the subconscious. Arcimboldo worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, one of the greatest collectors in history who acquired masterpieces by Bruegel, Titian and Durer. He also assembled hundreds of artists, wizards and alchemists at his castle in Prague. This lecture examines Arcimboldo’s unique career in the context of his patron’s grand project of pursuing occult knowledge at the frontier of art and science.

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 7.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Evening only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

2024 - 2028 marks one hundred years since Winnie-the-Pooh was introduced to children of all ages in the four iconic books created by A A Milne and E H Shepard. First seen in When We Were Very Young (1924), Winnie-the-Pooh and the characters of the Hundred Acre Wood had their own adventures in Winnie-The-Pooh (1926), with Now We Are Six (1927) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), giving us more wonderful poems and stories which include the introduction of both Tigger, Kanga-and-Roo and Poohsticks. This lecture tells the story of how these much loved books were created by the genius of Milne and Shepard’s groundbreaking collaboration and why they remain embedded in our national identity

Limpsfield Church Hall RH8 0DG 7.30pm, Guests £10 on the door

Evening only lecture, come early to enjoy refreshments

Fancy Liqueurs and Sky High Kickers: The Invention of the Can-Can – Jonathan Conlin

French Can-Can has long been synonymous with the "Gay Paree" of the Moulin Rouge, immortalized by Parisian artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. While researching the history of can-can I was surprised to discover that this famous dance, supposedly the "national dance" of the French, in fact owed its origin to London as much as Paris. In this lecture I reveal how an unlikely Anglo-British, cross-Channel exchange of artists, impresarios and tourists led to the creation of can-can: a fusion of a revolutionary Parisian dance (the chahut) and London's rather more coy skirt-dancing