Wednesday 15 March: Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn to Deliver 2017 Rumble Fund Lecture in Classical Art

Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn (University of York) will deliver this year's Rumble Fund Lecture in Classical Art on 'Beauty and Classical Form' on Wednesday 15 March 2017.

Professor Prettejohn is co-curator of two current exhibitions: Flaming June: the Making of an Icon at Leighton House Museum until 2 April 2017, and Alma-Tadema: Classical Charm (Fries Museum, the Netherlands, until 7 February; the Belvedere, Vienna, 24 February to 18 June; Leighton House Museum, 7 July to 29 October). This lecture explores the ways in which modern artists may help us not merely to understand, but genuinely to see the beauty of classical form. It takes as a test case the art of Frederic Leighton, a nineteenth-century painter so often treated with condescension as the last of the ‘academic classicists’. The lecture argues that the seriousness of Leighton’s engagement with classical form may be seen, instead, as progressive and forward-looking.

The Rumble Fund Lecture on Classical Art will take place in the Great Hall of the Kings Building on the Kings College London Strand Campus at 18:00.  For further details, including how to book free tickets, see the History of Art Department website.

Image: Frederic Leighton, Flaming June, 1895 (detail) ©Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc.