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Discover more about JMW Turner's works on animals with our online lectures!

Tickets £9 per lecture, or £24 for all 3

Cannot make it on the day of the lecture? We will record the events and make these available for ticket-holders ONLY.

15 May- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them….In Turner's Work – Nicola Moorby, Curator of 'Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts' – 6.30 – 7.30pm

We don't immediately think of J.M.W. Turner as an animal painter of animals, but they regularly feature as elements within his landscapes. As an introduction to the 2025 exhibition at Turner's House this lecture explores the intriguing appearance of birds and beasts within his paintings, revealing their narrative, symbolic or decorative function. We will also meet the creatures known to be part of Turner's household at various points in his biography and examine what they reveal to us about the man himself – his family, friends, personality and private life.

3 July – Farnley, Fawkes, and Feathers: J. M. W. Turner's Illustrations for an Ornithological Collection – Lucy Bailey 6.30-7.30pm

This talk will consider the friendship between Turner and his patron, Walter Fawkes (1769-1825), in particular focusing on the background to Fawkes's Ornithological Collection. MP, and landowner, Fawkes lived at Farnley Hall in Wharfedale, Yorkshire. From around 1809, the family and other members of the estate's community began collecting feathers and specimens of birds, arranging them in albums according to the order in Thomas Bewick's History of Birds (1797). Chief amongst the artists who provided illustrations for the project was Turner who painted twenty watercolours of birds. Rarely studied in the artist's oeuvre, these bird portraits will be considered within the context of the cultural hub nurtured by Fawkes at Farnley, and the important role played by country houses in fostering the development of scientific investigation.

11 September – Turner and the Avian – Professor Leo Costello, Chair and Associate Professor of Art History, Rice University, Texas 6.30 – 7.30pm

This talk will consider the long and, not surprisingly, complex engagement with birds throughout Turner's career. It will look in depth at Turner's numerous watercolours of individual birds from the extraordinary "Farnley Book of Birds" featured in the exhibition at Turner's House, and consider these in relation to current discourses of hunting, ornithology and natural philosophy. But the talk will also catalogue the many different thematic and formal roles that birds played in paintings and watercolours of many subjects throughout his career. In particular, it will assess the potential ecological and environmental implications of Turner's avian engagements, and ask what we might learn from them today.