In 1915 Sir Winston Churchill took painting lessons from Hazel Lavery - a renowned beauty and wife of the successful society portraitist, John Lavery. Join expert Frances Fowle as she reveals the importance of the Laverys and contemporaries, including Walter Sickert, in influencing Churchill’s development as an artist.

We will see how all had close links with France and shared an interest in Impressionism. But while Lavery, working in North Africa and on the Mediterranean coast believed in working out of doors, Sickert adopted a very different approach.

About the speaker: Frances Fowle is Emeritus Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh and was for many years Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland. She has curated numerous international exhibitions, among them Impressionism and Scotland (2008), Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe, 1880-1910 (2012), American Impressionism: A New Vision (2014), Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh (2016), A Taste for Impressionism (2022) and An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location (2024).

Her books include Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (2010), Globalizing Impressionism (2020), The Art Market and the Museum (2025) and Scottish Art in the Industrial Age and The Historical Dictionary of Impressionism (2026). She has spoken about Monet and Van Gogh on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and has appeared in films such as The Danish Collector: Delacroix to Gauguin (2021) and John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger (2024).

Watch online: This talk will also be broadcast live from the museum via Zoom. Book a free ticket online to receive a Zoom link. Ticketholders will also receive a link to view a recording of the talk, which will be available for two weeks only.