Essential Information
| Type | Talks and tours |
|---|---|
| Location |
Queen's House
|
| Date and Times | Alternate Wednesdays | 1pm-1.30pm |
| Prices | Free |
Delve into the history of the Queen’s House and its extraordinary art collection with a series of insightful talks by leading scholars and curators.
Check below to see what's on offer.
Upcoming talks
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Embrace the Canon, Interrupt History
Wednesday 1 November 2023 | 1pm – 1.30pm
Talk given by Gréine Jordan, PhD candidate, Royal Museums Greenwich and University of East Anglia
Can embracing the established canon interrupt history and maybe even change the future?
Kehinde Wiley’s Ship of Fools is a striking oil painting hanging in the Queen's House. It depicts four people (and a tree) in a small boat on a dark sea. The painting contains multiple references, textual and visual, to the Western Art Historical canon, with its very title being a nod to Hieronymus Bosch.
This talk will explore these historical and visual references, and what it means to use the established canon as a way of ‘interrupting’ history.
“Not one Planet in his Detriment”: Sir Frescheville Holles in poetry and astrology
Wednesday 15 November 2023 | 1pm – 1.30pm
Talk given by Jack Avery, Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford
Taking as its starting point Peter Lely's double portrait of Sir Frescheville Holles and Sir Robert Holmes from about 1672, this talk reveals the untold story of how the Restoration captain Sir Frescheville Holles served as a test-case for the period’s astrologers, and how this informed representations of Holles among both English mariners and writers and artists on land.
This talk will focus on the widespread poetry which worked to construct an image of Holles as a man of promise, and also on Roch’s journal, held at the National Maritime Museum, which retells the story of his naval career through the framework of early modern astrology. Together, these reveal new ways in which the naval action, poetry, and intellectual inquiry of the 17th century could be bound together by writers at sea and on land.
Britain's Royal Yachts
Wednesday 29 November 2023 | 1pm-1.30pm
Talk given by Ellis Huddart, PhD candidate, Royal Museums Greenwich and Birkbeck, University of London
Cultural icons or regal excesses? Discover the history of royal sailing craft, inspired by Henry Nelson O’Neil’s painting The Landing of HRH the Princess Alexandra at Gravesend, March 7 1863. This talk will explore how private royal sailing craft gradually came to be understood as shared cultural icons.
