The Arts Society Coventry – September lecture

The first lecture in the 2024-25 programme will be on Tuesday 10th September at the NEW, EARLIER time of 6.30pm (doors open for refreshments at 6.00pm). This month’s speaker is Dr. Matt Wates, who will be talking about The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Religion, Art and Science. Given the nearby current Victorian Radicals exhibition in Birmingham City  Museum and Arts Gallery, we hope that members will be interested to learn more about their background. 

The work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – formed in London in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais – relates in important ways to contemporary debates in art, religion and science. The connection between pictorial and religious traditions had been lost during the Reformation, but the growth of nonconformism generated considerable theological debate at a time when science was challenging religious truths. In mid-19th century England, religious painting was a open to innovation, in the context of burgeoning Victorian interest in new scientific endeavours such as geology and botany. The extraordinary attention to detail in the group’s paintings are often like scientific illustrations, at a time when to be modern was to be scientific – one reason why art historians’ exclusion of the group from the canon of modernism might reasonably be challenged. 

The venue is the Drama Theatre at Barr’s Hill School, Radford Road, Coventry, CV1 4BU.  There is free onsite parking very close to the theatre and is easy to get to either by car, on foot from the city centre or by bus.  The event is free to Arts Society members; £10 to non-members (£5 to students) including pre-lecture refreshments. For membership details and further information, see www.theartssociety.org/coventry 

 A link to a separate document on the right-hand side of this webpage gives directions and  you can also find details of all the forthcoming lectures in the 2024-25 session.