Talks & Conversations

Richard Ormond is the grandson of Violet Sargent Ormond, sister of John Singer Sargent. Former deputy director of the National Portrait gallery and director of the Maritime Museum, he is co-author of the nine volume Catalogue Raisonné of Singer Sargent’s work and curator of two recent major exhibitions of his portraits and watercolours as well [...]

Inhabiting a dark and dangerous world of sex, violence and religion, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio still managed to create some of the greatest paintings in the history of art – despite himself and his circumstances. Art critic, historian, award-winning broadcaster, author and expert on Caravaggio, Andrew Graham-Dixon tells us a part of the artist’s tempestuous tale [...]

Witty and entertaining speaker Guy Fraser-Sampson is the author of three Mapp and Lucia novels, all of which were optioned by the BBC. He will be talking about the Cotswolds’ origins of the original stories and of the crazily eccentric loves and lives of their creator, E.F. Benson and his amazing family. Join us in [...]

We are thrilled to welcome New York Times best-seller and award-winning author Donna M. Lucey to this year’s festival to talk about her seductive, multi-layered, new book Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas. In what the New York Times describes as a “rollicking snow globe version of an almost unimaginable world of wealth” Lucey [...]

At a time of great change at the V&A we look forward to a lively discussion between former director Sir Roy Strong and current Director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt. Sir Roy Strong CH FRSL, former director of the National Portrait Gallery until 1973, director of the V&A until 1987 and patron of the Broadway [...]

British artist Charlie Calder-Potts selects her favourite commissions to date and shares some of the stories, studies and photographs behind her paintings. From her time as an Official War artist with the British Army in Afghanistan to the private sponsorship that took her to the Syrian and Yazidi refugee camps of Northern Iraq Charlie discusses [...]