PROGRAMME Meetings will be held at Barnwell Village Hall and simultaneous Zoom hybrid transmissions will continue to be used at the discretion of the committee. Coffee will be available from 10:00am and the meeting will start at 10:50am. Guests are welcome for a fee of £10, but it is important to contact the Membership Secretary beforehand; oundlearts@gmail.com or 07917 632268. New Membership year 2026/67 Annual General Meeting at 10.45 am Followed by: Friday 18th September 2026 Caravaggio is not the only artist - a study of his contemporaries and their varied response to his revolutionary art Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe What misfortune to be an artist born at the same time as a dazzling personality like Michelangelo or Caravaggio! Perhaps we should pay more attention to the artists contemporary with and learning from such overpowering characters? This lecture repositions Caravaggio’s achievements in the period immediately following his brilliant but short career. Turning over the pages of art history, it presents the splendid achievements of many artists such as Gentileschi - father and daughter, the Spaniards Ribera and Velázquez, the Dutch Honthorst and the French artist de la Tour and, ultimately, connects him to Rembrandt. It also asks, “What happened next?” How was it that Caravaggio’s style came to lose its hold and that fashion in art began to change? The Cardsharps, c. 1594, by Caravaggio Public Domain Friday 16th October 2026 How Symphonies were born in a London Pub Robert Samuels Today we talk of “symphony concerts” and “symphony orchestras”, but where did these come from? The answer involves a fascinating story stretching across the whole of the eighteenth century, as the new and strange idea of just sitting and listening to music, rather than singing or dancing to it, gradually took off in musical life across Europe. One of the most surprising aspects of this story is the part played in it by Britain. This talk begins in a tavern in the Restoration London of Pepys’s diary, moves on through Haydn’s seasons in 1790s London, which he described as the happiest of his professional life, and then shows how Mozart and Beethoven, both of them friends and followers of Haydn, took up this new idea of a “symphony concert”. Like so many good ideas, this one really did begin in a London pub. Blue plaque erected by Marlborough Town Council at 114 High Street, Marlborough SN8 1LT. "Samuel Pepys Diarist 1633-1703 "...lay at The Hart a good house and there a fair and pretty town..." on 15th-16th June 1668 Parts of the inn's galleries remain in nearby buildings." Spudgun67 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Friday 20th November 2026 New advances in Ice Age Art Paul Bahn Ice Age art - dating from c. 40,000 to 12,000 years ago - continues to be found every year in the form of both portable objects and images on cave walls and on rocks in the open air. This talk will present a selection of the most recent discoveries, many of them still unknown to the general public and a few still unpublished. Most are in western Europe, but other regions from Florida to the Nile Valley have also entered the picture in recent years. Cave painting from the Tassili n'Ajjer mountains a mountain range in the Sahara desert, located in south-eastern Algeria. Friday 18th December 2026 Shepard’s Christmas James Campbell E H Shepard loved Christmas and this lecture describes, including his own words, much of the magic and joy of successive festive seasons, from those of his own childhood to others throughout his long life. We see a range of artistic styles from full colour images to pen-and-ink personal Christmas cards, with cartoons, drawings and watercolours, some featuring the iconic images from The Wind in the Willows (the snow in the Wild Wood…) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Pooh and Piglet from The House at Pooh Corner). Many of the images have not been published for over fifty years. Winnie-the-Pooh and friends send Christmas cards in this illustration after E.H. Shepard by Mark Burgess.Photo: Mark Burgess, © Disney. Friday 15th January 2027 The Influence of Astronomy and Cosmology on Medieval Art Valerie Shrimplin Building on ancient discoveries and the works of Ptolemy and Aristotle, astronomical ideas expanded during the Middle Ages as the motions of the celestial bodies were investigated, observations were made and monuments and artworks were inspired by astronomical insights. The influence of astronomy and the cosmos on medieval art is immense. Art works (including scientific drawings or images that have achieved artistic status over time) were often used to explain complex concepts that could be effectively clarified or explained more easily by images than by a written or oral description - either for specialists ‘in the know’ or for lay people as ‘the Bible of the illiterate’. Looking at examples of Judaeo-Christian art works between c. 500 to 1500 AD, this talk will provide an overview of examples from medieval manuscripts up to the Renaissance, including the depiction of features such as the Sun, Moon, comets and Milky Way, as well as images of the celestial and terrestrial regions of the universe, from Ptolemy and Aristotle to Dante and Copernicus. Oresme Spheres, Illustration of the Celestial spheres. Note that although the order of the spheres is conventional, with the Moon and Mercury closest to the Earth and Saturn and the stars farthest, the spheres are convex upward centered on God rather than convex downward centered on the Earth. Bibliothèque National de France; SteveMcCluskey, Public domain Friday 19th February 2027 The Silver Thread: Silver Filigree and Traditional Arts in Kosovo Elizabeth Gowing From the early Kosovan silver mines which are mentioned in Dante, through the twentieth century politics over Kosovo’s mines, which resulted in both a war and a golf course, a silver thread winds through Kosovo’s history. Its most intricate tanglings are in the country’s cultural capital, Prizren, where a seventh generation of filigree artisans use ‘filum’ and ‘granum’, zigzags, ‘mouse-tooth’ designs and other twists and turns to magic lacy creations from dull sticks of raw material. The results - in boxes, buttons, jewellery, religious ornamentation and the talismans of superstition - are a fine narrative of Kosovo’s history and traditions. Photos: Atdhe Mulla/K2.0 Friday 19th March 2027 Insatiable Appetites - Eating out in Georgian London Peter Ross Georgians of all classes dined out in pubs, coaching inns, French ordinaries and confectioners. They also ate all kinds of street food and had an almost insatiable appetite for buns. On a journey through London we will discover the early morning drinks consumed on the street before dawn, ‘nunchions’ served at coaching inns, Billingsgate dinners, confectioners’ cakes, syllabubs and ices, the proverbially thin ham dished up to diners at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, as well as the Jewish takeaway foods of the East End and even London’s first ‘Indian’ restaurant. Our journey will be illustrated from prints, paintings and broadsides of the period, some long neglected as a source for a forgotten but fascinating part of our Georgian ancestors’ way of life. Oyster stall by H.G Hine (1811-1895) and W.G. Mason (1820-1866) Public domain Friday 16th April 2027 Michel-Jean Cazabon: An Anglo-French Watercolour Painter in Nineteenth- Century Trinidad Timothy Wilcox A hero in his own country as one of the first locally-born artists, Cazabon (1813- 1888) enjoyed brief but enormous success for his paintings and prints of the lush scenery of the most southerly island of the Caribbean. A schoolboy in England, then a student in the art studios of Paris in the turbulent 1840s, Cazabon’s career encapsulates many of the contradictory tendencies of European and colonial life in the period surrounding the abolition of slavery. He used his art to overcome prejudice, depicting both tropical jungle and cultivated plantations as subjects worthy of notice, not only among his own social circles in Trinidad but also in the Paris Salon. Michel-Jean Cazabon - Forest Scenery near Tamana - 1837 - Yale Center for British Art. Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication Friday 21st May 2027 Persepolis: Art, Architecture and Ideology of the Persian Empire James Renshaw The Persian Empire exploded into life during the middle of the 6th century BC and was the largest empire in the world for the next two centuries. It stretched from the Mediterranean in the west to the Indus valley in the east, from the Eurasian steppes in the north to Egypt and Arabia in the south. In around 515, its third Great King, Darius I, commissioned the building of a new city, Persepolis, with his palace at its centre. We know a great deal about this palace, and one of its central features, the Apadana Staircase, can be seen in replica in the British Museum. What can the palace and its art tell us about the ideology of this extraordinary and influential empire? Eastern Stairway of the Apadana, Persepolis. Public domain. Friday 18th June 2027 “So they do cook, after all!” Raviolis, Bawden and the Great Bardfield Artists Jo Walton In 1932 the artist Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte moved into Brick House, in the Essex village of Great Bardfield, initially sharing the house with another artistic couple, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood. It was to be the beginning of a fascinating artistic community. In the years before and during the Second World War, painters, printmakers and designers settled in the village, relishing the peace while remaining within easy reach of London. While Bawden and Ravilious saw active service as War Artists (Ravilious dying in 1942), other artists captured the soon-to-change world of rural England through the “Recording Britain” project. By the mid-1950s a diverse, innovative but highly creative group had made Bardfield their home - much to the bemusement of the local villagers, who found the complex relationships and artistic focus of the newcomers rather baffling. In 1954 the artists invited the public into their homes and studios to see their work, starting the increasingly popular ‘Open Studios’ movement that now covers the country, and persuading some of their neighbours that artists could be quite normal people after all. Disclaimer: The Arts Society Oundle cannot be held responsible for any personal accident, damage to, or loss or theft of members’ personal property unless there is proven negligence. Legal liability insurance is in force.