Impressionism & Modern Life: Art History Reframed: Autumn 2025 Lecture Series

Art Historian Dr. Matthew Whyte offers a new lecture series, which takes the audience on an art-filled journey through the often beautiful, sometimes scandalous, and always fascinating moments in the development of Western civilisation.

Week 2: Impressionism & Modern Life

This lecture explores the development of Impressionism, the style most commonly associated with the beautiful paintings of Claude Monet. These paintings and their loose style have become almost universally familiar. What drove these artists to paint like this? What does this new style seek to do? This lecture begins with the artist Édouard Manet, credited as one of the first artists to turn resolutely from the past and paint modern life. Following the advice of writer Charles Baudelaire, Manet resolved to make his art relevant by painting the present rather than the past. His focus on the fast and fleeting nature of French modernity spurred on the Impressionists to develop a new approach to capturing movement and atmosphere, the effects of modernity that would prove elusive to the new technology of photography.

1. Tues 16 September
The Pre-Raphaelites & The Birth of Modernism

2. Tues 23 September
Impressionism & Modern Life

3. Tues 30 September
Post-Impressionism

4. Tues 7 October
The Artist’s Inner World – Expressionism & Surrealism

5. Tues 14 October
The New Industrial Era – Futurism to Pop Art

6. Tues 21 October
The World Transformed – Cubism to Abstract Art