This year’s Arthur Batchelor Lecture will be given by T.J. Clark, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. Clark’s lecture will focus on a single figure – the woman by the column – in seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage, one of a sequence of gripping canvasses depicting the Seven Sacraments (now in the National Gallery of Scotland).

Admission is free and there is no need to book.

“We are delighted that T.J. Clark is giving this year’s Arthur Batchelor Lecture. He is one of the most important art historians of our time and it is wonderful to be offering our students and local people the chance to hear him speak” – Professor John Mack, Head of the School of World Art Studies and Museology and Chair of the Sainsbury Institute for Art (SIfA).

T.J. Clark will be speaking about a woman who is partly concealed by a column in Nicolas Poussin’s painting, Sacrament of Marriage. Two paintings by Poussin were the subject of Clark’s 2006 book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. In this book he reflects on the works and the experience of viewing them in innovative and critically powerful ways.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Clark published a series of highly influential books on nineteenth-century painting in France which set a direction for the subsequent ‘New Art History’. In particular, Clark’s work pays particular attention to images as sites of meaning through practices of close reading. This has recently extended to intimate studies of particular paintings in the Western tradition, considered individually and in series.