Daily schedule
After registration on Sunday afternoon, we invite you to a welcome meeting in the Amersi Lecture Theatre in New Quad, where you will meet your tutors. Join us in Deer Park afterwards for our opening drinks reception, followed by dinner in Brasenose’s historic dining hall (informal dress).
Seminars take place on weekday mornings. Most afternoons are free, allowing you time to explore Oxford, enjoy a variety of optional social events (see details below), or to sit back and relax in one of the college's atmospheric quads.
Your course culminates on Friday evening with a closing drinks reception and gala farewell dinner at which Certificates of Attendance are awarded. For this special occasion smart dress is encouraged (no requirement to wear dinner suits or gowns).
Social programme
We warmly invite all Inspiring Oxford students to take part in our optional social programme, with all events provided at no additional cost. Events are likely to include:
- Croquet on the quad
- Chauffeured punting from Magdalen Bridge
- Expert-led walking tours of Oxford
- Optional visit to an Oxford Library or the Ashmolean Museum
- River Thames afternoon cruise
- Quiz night in the college bar
- Scottish country dance evening (where you do the dancing!)
Seminars and field trip
Monday
The Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists
Our course opens with an introduction to academic painting in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, considering the enduring influence of Renaissance ideals and the authority of the Royal Academy. Works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, J M W Turner and William Blake will provide context for understanding the artistic environment against which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood emerged.
We will then explore the ideals and achievements of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, together with the critical writings of John Ruskin. The session concludes with an examination of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Finally, attention will turn to Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Symbolist movement, with particular reference to Aubrey Beardsley.
Tuesday
From Impressionism to Post-Impressionism
Our second day begins with an overview of late Victorian and Edwardian painting, focusing on artists such as Frederick Lord Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Singer Sargent. Discussion will also consider the position of women artists, including Elizabeth, Lady Butler and Lucy Kemp-Welch, addressing both their opportunities and the institutional constraints they encountered.
Subsequent sessions examine the impact of Impressionism on British art through the work of James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer, and the formation of the New English Art Club. The day concludes with Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists (1910), which introduced Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso to the British public, and with an exploration of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Wednesday
War and Modernism
Today our focus turns to the early twentieth century and the emergence of Modernism. The short-lived but influential Vorticist movement represented by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska will be discussed in the context of the pre-war avant-garde.
We then consider the profound impact of the First World War through the art of Paul Nash and C R W Nevinson, before concluding with an in-depth study of Sir Stanley Spencer, whose distinctive vision bridged the sacred and the everyday in a uniquely personal form of modern expression.
Thursday field trip
Oxford’s Art Collections
An all-day field trip will offer the opportunity to view key works discussed during the course. The morning will be spent at the Christ Church Picture Gallery, exploring its Renaissance holdings. After lunch back at college, we visit the Ashmolean Museum to examine its notable collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British art.
Friday
From Retrenchment to the Neo-Romantics
Our final day examines artistic developments in Britain following WWII. The restrained lyricism of Eric Ravilious will be considered alongside Ben Nicholson’s advocacy of abstraction. The arrival of Surrealism in Britain will be discussed as a catalyst for new directions in the work of Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington.
We conclude with the Neo-Romantics (including Graham Sutherland and John Craxton) whose work reflects both a reaction to Modernism and a renewed engagement with landscape, myth and imagination.
