You can view he Sporting Art Talks on the BSAT YouTube Channel.
Upcoming Talks
Thursday 20th February 2025: 2pm
Sally Bills: Jim Meads: His Life and Legacy
Sally
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Thursday 20th March: 2pm
Tim Cox: A Portrait of Ben Marshall
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Previous Talks
BONUS TALK
Katherine Field is Senior Editor of the Philip de László Catalogue Raisonné and the British Sporting Art Packard Curator. She was invited to give the Paul Mellon Lecture at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond Virginia in November 2023. The Lecture is based on the exhibition 'Sir Alfred Munnings: A Life of His Own' and gave Katherine an opportunity to speak about her passion for Munnings and his art and to share images of his work some of which are not available for public viewing. Please follow the link below and enjoy a fabulous lecture.
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Thursday 16th January 2025: Zoe Carmichael: 'From City Life to Sculptures, a Cavalry of Creativity'
Zoë Carmichael SEA is an award-winning sculptor who specialises in bronze sculptures of animals, particularly the equine form. She is inspired by a lifetime spent in the saddle at local and International level enabling her to capture the spirit and soul of each animal. Zoë won the BSAT Best in Exhibition Award at the SEA ‘Horse in Art’ Exhibition 2023 and again in 2024 and she became the first ever Sculptor-in-Residence for the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment.
Zoë's presentation takes you through her introduction to sculpture (via cake making!) her training in Florence and onwards into the world of pagentry and tradition with the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment.
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Thursday 5th December: Erica Munkwitz: Ladies Aside: Equestriennes in the BSAT Collection
Erica Munkwitz is an historian of modern and European history and the author of "Women, Horse Sports and Liberation Equestrianism and Britain from the 18th to the 20th Centuries".
Erica previously presented a well-received webinar entitled ‘The History of Women and Horse Sports’ and we are delighted that she has agreed to bring her knowledge and enthusiasm to a second webinar.
The talk will focus on images of women on horseback in the British Sporting Art Trust Collection. Erica subtitled it ‘Who you should see on your next visit’, an invitation to visit us at Palace House and inspect the paintings with a different eye and understanding.
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Tuesday September 24th 2024: " Collecting and Understanding British Sporting Prints " Presented by Dr. Mitchell Merling, former Curator of European Decorative Arts and Paul Mellon Curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. We will be joining the U.S.A. based Friends of Sporting Art for the first of their Sporting Art Webinar.
Thursday 4th July 2024: Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is running an exhibition entitled ‘Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body’, 19th July—3rd November 2024. Through art, fashion, film, photography and more, the exhibition looks back on the pivotal moment when traditions and trailblazers collided, fusing the Olympics’ classical legacy with the European avant-garde spirit. It was a breakthrough that forever changed attitudes towards sporting achievement and celebrity, as well as body image and identity, nationalism and class, race and gender. Professors Caroline Vout and Chris Young, co-curators of the exhibition, will talk about the changing attitudes of the time and the art it inspired.
Due to copyright permissions is has not been possible to upload this talk. If you would like any information about the subject covered please contact me: admin@bsat.co.uk
Thursday 4th June 2024: Tania Still '11am'
Tania Still is aYorkshire based artist who concentrates on painting different breeds of hounds, horses and quarry, conveying the changing attitudes within rural life. Her painting ‘11am’ was recently installed at the head of the stairwell in Palace house. Tania will talk about her career and her particular passion for horses and hounds.
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Thursday 25th April 2024: Eclipse, Stubbs and racing in the 18th Century
2024 is the 300th birthday of George Stubbs. One of Stubbs’s most important paintings is of Eclipse, the forefather of 95% of all thoroughbred horses in the world today. Nick Clee, author of Eclipse: The Rogue, the Madam and the Horse that Changed Racing, will talk about the horse, the painting and racing in the eighteenth century.
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December 2023: William Newton Sculptor: In converstion with Tim Cox
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16th November 2023 :Erica Munkwitz:The History of Women and Horse Sports
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21st September 2023: Sally Mitchell:Museum of the Horse. Tuxford.
Sally Mitchell, owner and Director of the Museum of the Horse, Tuxford tlks about some of their interesting exhibits and the history of the museum.
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July 20th 2023: Ripley:Household Cavalry Coronation Year ExhibitionThe Photographic artist RIPLEY has been commissioned this Coronation Year to represent the Household Cavalry. They will go on display during the July Festival in Newmarket at the National Horseracing Museum (NHRM) in Gallery 6.
Ripley has created twelve large scale portraits. The imagery features soldiers from The Life Guards and the Blues and Royals mounted on their horses and posed on buildings throughout London, overlooking the capital from Trafalgar Square to Canary Wharf.
Ripley completed primary photography with the Household Cavalry at Hyde Park Barracks in 2017, the portraits then took a number of years to complete due to the complex nature in which they are composed in both the real world and in post-production.
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June 22nd 2023: Contemporary Sporting Artist
The Painting 'John Holliday in Belvoir Wood' by Charles Church has recently gone on display in Palace House. Charles will talk about this commission and discuss his approach to Sporting Art.
Charles Church is an internationally-renowned painter of horses, landscapes and country life. Born in 1970, he was brought up on the Northumbrian coast where he developed a keen eye for the horse from an early age and soon became a recognized talent as an equestrian artist. In his mid-twenties he was apprenticed to the American artist Charles H Cecil in Florence, learning to paint by “sight-size”; an understanding of movement adopted by Masters like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Velasquez dating back to the 17th century.
Charles’ work, therefore, displays an unrivalled confidence and mastery of draughtsmanship, colour and tone with a lyrical purity of style. Studying his subjects from life, en plein air, his paintings have a heightened sense of light and a natural flow about them that is coupled with a truth and spontaneity.
“Great British”, his latest exhibition on Cork Street, was a critically-acclaimed sell-out, prompting the then HRH Prince of Wales to describe Charles as “a very remarkable young artist with a unique sensitivity and profound understanding of his subject matter”. Arguably, Charles Church is the Alfred Munnings of our time.
Amongst other prestigious racing commissions, Charles has painted over thirty-seven Group or Grade 1 winners, including Arc de Triomphe winners Hurricane Run, Dylan Thomas and HH the Aga Khan’s Zarkava; the World Champion Goldikova; US Champion, Mineshaft; the Australian Champion Sire, Fastnet Rock; Grand National Winner Mr Frisk; Cheltenham Gold Cup Winners, Synchronised and Master Oats plus Pour Moi and Authorized, winners of the Epsom Derby.
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May 25th : Katherine Field (BSAT Packard Curator):Twentieth Century Sporting Art galleries at Palace House National Horseracing Museum
Katherine Field is the BSAT Curator. During the past few weeks she has masterminded a complete redisplay of the top floor of Palace House at National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket, creating four galleries dedicated to twentieth century sporting art.
The largest gallery gives space to the BSAT collection of paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings which with the addition of loans from The Munnings Art Museum and private collectors gives an introduction to the artists work. The display also reflects on Munnings' love of Horseracing and Newmarket. Another gallery focuses on images of twentieth century country pursuits and includes works by Lionel Edwards, Cecil Aldin and and a new acquisition by Gilbert Holliday. The final room showcases the BSAT rarely seen collection of John Skeaping drawings and pastels. Skeaping's sculptures can also be found across the Museum site and within Newmarket. The talk will be an excellent introduction to the new displays and an opportunity to ask questions.
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Online Sporting Talk
27th April 2:00pm
Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney
Xavier Bray ( Director of Wallace Collection)
Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney opens to the Public at the Wallace Collection tomorrow. We are very fortunate that Xavier Bray the Director and Curator of the exhibition is taking time out to speak. The exhibition has been has much reviewed in the National Press. The exhibition explores our devotion to four-legged friends across the centuries. Through carefully selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, works of art and even taxidermy, the exhibition highlights the unique bond between humans and their canine companions.
Dog portraiture developed as an artistic genre contemporaneously with its human counterpart – dogs are represented in the earliest cave paintings alongside humans – and it flourished, particularly in Britain, from the 17th century onwards. More than any other nationality perhaps, the British have both commissioned and collected portraits of dogs.
Bringing over 50 works of art to Hertford House, Portraits of Dogs presents a broad range of portraiture showing dogs in all their different shapes and sizes, with each painter or sculptor challenging themselves how best to represent mankind’s most faithful and fearless friend.
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Racehorse portraits have been at the heart of sporting art since the late seventeenth century. Wootton, Seymour, Stubbs, Ferneley, Munnings and many more have memorialised champions and lesser animals for their owners. Flying Childers, Whistlejacket and Eclipse continue to be celebrated as works of art as well as racehorses. Others have lost their identity to appear in auction catalogues as ‘brown racehorse with jockey up’. This talk explores the history of racehorse portraiture and what these pictures can tell us about the development of racing over the centuries.
Tim Cox worked for nearly forty years in the media department of an advertising agency. In parallel he collected books and other printed material related to the worldwide history and organisation of thoroughbred horse racing and breeding. The collection of 18,000 books is now housed in a custom-built library. Tim is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the British Sporting Art Trust and co-author of The Heath and the Horse: A History of Newmarket Heath, a major study on the history of horseracing published in 2015.
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16th February: Chris Stride:From Pitch to Plinth
Since 2010 Chris Stride founder of the Sporting Statues Project has been recording the Sporting Statues of the World they have published several academic papers and magazine articles, and collected information on over 1000 statues. Chris Stride will talk about the project. Whether you agree that Sporting Statues are absolutely art, or not, it’s clear that they are an important part of our sporting heritage, and provide a permanent link to the UK’s sporting past for our communities and for generations of sports fans to come.
12th January: John Hickman: Charles Hunt : The Engraver
Charles Hunt was one of the most skilled and prolific engravers of his day (1820-1880). He flourished during the boom period of the English sporting print when the British enthusiasm for field sports was at its height and the emerging middle classes wanted vigorous and colourful images of sports to decorate their walls. He produced print after the great artists of his day. Including Alken Herring Pollard and Hall.
John Hickman great great great grandson of Charles Hunt began a collecting his ancestors works as a student. He was inspired by omission and inaccuracies to publish the definitive biography and collection of his works. A must for any sporting print collector.
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Thursday 15th December: Professor Anne Massey:Tom Carr :Sporting Painter
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Thursday, October 6th: Dr Nathan Flis: New Light on Francis Barlow (1622–1704), Britain’s First Sporting Artist
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Thursday 15th September: David Haycock: Lucy Kemp-Welch : Her Private World
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Thursday July 7th: Dr Oliver Cox: Building a Sporting Art Collection: The 4th Marquess of Bute and the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart
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Monday 6th June: Katherine Field: Curator: Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) “A Life of his Own”
A tour of the exhibition at National Horseracing Museum
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Thursday 7th April: Jasper Jennings: Early Impressions: Printed images of Cricket in Georgian England
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Thursday 10th March 2:00 pm
Tour of the Sporting Art Displays at National Sporting Library &
Museum Middleburg, Virginia
Claudia Pfeiffer: Deputy Director & George L. Ohrstrom, Jr. Curator
National Sporting Library & Museum
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Thursday 17th February: Joanna Meacock: Curator (British Art) Glasgow Museums: Glasgow Boy Artist Joseph Crawhall: A beautiful natural horseman and our champion jockey
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Thursday 13th January: Anna Tietze.: Curator Abe Bailey Collection: Abe Bailey Collection.
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2021
Thursday December 9th 11:00amSally Goodsir: Curator Decorative Arts, Royal Collection TrustSporting Art and George IV
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Thursday October 21st: Imogen Gibbon: Deputy Director and Chief Curator Portraiture National Galleries of Scotland
Painting Games:– Sporting Art Highlights from the National Galleries of Scotland
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Thursday September 16th: Chris Garibaldi: Architectural History of Palace House Newmarket: - Latest Research
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Thursday June 17th: Jenny Hand: Director: Munnings Art MuseumSir Alfred Munnings: – Mansions, Parks and Lakes
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Thursday May 13th: Alexandra (Sally) Fletcher: Packard Curator: NHRM :Sporting Talk: The Forgotten History of Everyday Speech
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Thursday April 15th: Katherine Field, Exhibition Curator: Lionel Edwards (1878-1966) Seen from the Saddle
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8th March 2021:Dr Hannah Clark : Thoroughly Modern Meltonians
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