Art History Classes available in London and Online

Ever since its inception two-hundred years ago, the National Gallery has been open to the public free of charge. Starting with a small collection, it has grown to just over 2,500 paintings including some of the greatest masterpieces in Western European art. Each week, this gallery-based course will tell the story of the National Gallery through its art, taking you across its permanent collection, delving into the lives and stories of individual works and the artists that created them. Each session will look at approximately eight pictures in detail. Leslie will look forward to escorting you around an institution that is so loved by the British public it has become a home from home, a place of refuge, the Nation’s mantlepiece.

Each week a selection of paintings will be discussed by the class in front of the actual works. This is an opportunity to understand our national collection in greater depth by looking and discussing with students the paintings, while also affording them an opportunity to look at the actual paint, the physically/size of the images and thus the original uses of the objects. This course will also look at how and why paintings are placed gallery spaces, how there are lit, why some paintings are under glass and why some are not, and how different curators hang different rooms.Across this ten week the course we will also address the history and genesis of the National Gallery building itself in the context of the Collection. The National Gallery has a limited supply of stools available if you need them.

The course traces foreign artists from the Tudor period through to the Renaissance and Baroque, looking at their origins and how they came to work in England. It will examine the contributions of artists such as Holbein, Gerrit van Honthorst, William Dobson, Paulus van Somer, van Dyck, Peter Lely, and Rubens. It will ask how they influenced the British School of painting and assess their legacy.

What do all the strange signs and symbols in the paintings mean, and what is this fascination with Greek mythology all about? If it all seems impenetrable to you, and you like to find out what paintings really mean, this is the course for you. It will give you the tools to crack the hidden codes behind paintings in any art gallery, and indentify the seemingly mysterious figures in great works of art.

This course aims to look at the stories which are often re-told in secular and religious Italian Renaissance painting around, 1400-1600. Most often the stories came from antique literary sources which had survived through the middle ages and were the preserve of the rich and cultured.

Join broadcaster and author Leslie Primo on a journey to discover Western European art from classicism through to late Victorian art and Impressionism. On the course we will delve into the lives of various artists, their cultural backgrounds, and their influence on subsequent art movements.