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Monthly lecture on Wednesday 10th October 2026 at 10:30am-11:45am in the Abbey Theatre, Holywell Hill, St Albans AL1 2DLSeventeenth Century Dutch Painting
Speaker: Douglas Skeggs
This lecture will follow the AGM which begins at 10am with a short coffee break in between.
• All visitors welcome
• Free for TASSA members
• £7.50 for non-members, but please contact the Membership Secretary, Jane Sayers
This lecture will follow the AGM
Seventeenth century Dutch art was quite different from any other art of that period. It dealt with the real lives of its people: at times ordered, at others bawdy or self important, and occasionally tragic. This lecture looks into why this is so. It shows how Holland achieved its independence through its bitter wars with Spain; how its new Protestant mentality would allow astonishing advances in science, as Rembrandt shows in his portrait of Dr Tulp; how its merchant wealth will be reflected in serene seascapes by Van de Velde and Van Goyen, its civic pride in the brilliant portraits of Frans Hals, and its insistence on moral order and well scrubbed households in the enigmatic poetry of Vermeer.
Douglas read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 8,000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at The Study Centre, for Christie's course on 'The History of Art Studies' and at other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hangar in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his own paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.
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Event venue
Abbey Theatre - St Albans, Westminster Lodge - Holywell Hill,Saint Albans, United Kingdom
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