The Arts Society St Albans

07/09/2026

An exhibition on 'Renoir and Love' at the National Gallery opens in October.

04/09/2026

Monthly lecture on Wednesday 10th October 2026 at 10:30am-11:45am in the Abbey Theatre - St Albans

Seventeenth Century Dutch Painting
Speaker: Douglas Skeggs

This lecture will follow the AGM which begins at 10am with a short coffee break in between.

• All visitors welcome
• Free for TASSA members
• £7.50 for non-members, but please contact the Membership Secretary, Jane Sayers in advance if you would like to attend

This lecture will follow the AGM

Seventeenth century Dutch art was quite different from any other art of that period. It dealt with the real lives of its people: at times ordered, at others b***y or self important, and occasionally tragic. This lecture looks into why this is so. It shows how Holland achieved its independence through its bitter wars with Spain; how its new Protestant mentality would allow astonishing advances in science, as Rembrandt shows in his portrait of Dr Tulp; how its merchant wealth will be reflected in serene seascapes by Van de Velde and Van Goyen, its civic pride in the brilliant portraits of Frans Hals, and its insistence on moral order and well scrubbed households in the enigmatic poetry of Vermeer.

Douglas read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 8,000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at The Study Centre, for Christie's course on 'The History of Art Studies' and at other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hangar in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his own paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.

03/09/2026

31/08/2026

🎨 5 + 6 September 10:30am - 3:30pm| Herts Open Studios

Join Herts Visual Arts for a weekend of creativity, as the Assembly Room In St Albans Museum becomes a giant studio where members of the local arts organisation create their artworks live.

🎟️ Free entry.

28/08/2026

From the 1950s to the 2020s, Kusama produced vivid paintings, sculptures and vast installations that often drew on her experience of hallucinations

27/08/2026

25/08/2026

Until 23 August

23/08/2026