Watch "Rebellion & Romance: Art in the Age of Revolution”  in your own time, at home 

• These 12 art history talks will be recorded on Zoom, posted onto Rose's YouTube Channel and sent directly to your email between January 14th 2026 and May 20th. 
• You will have until 1st June to watch all the talks.  
• The Bundle costs AED2100 or £435. Use Early Bird code "REVOLUTION" for 30% off (applicable until 24th December 12pm GMT). If you'd prefer to make a bank transfer to a GBP account please email Rose on [email protected]. 

The 18th and 19th centuries were an age of dazzling splendour and violent upheaval. Empires crumbled, cities boomed, revolutions raged and society was reinvented again and again. Across Europe artists responded with visions that were bold, beautiful, radical, funny, unsettling and defiantly modern.

In this new series, Rose Balston traces this extraordinary journey. From the glittering canals of Canaletto’s Venice to the erotic golden shimmer of Klimt’s Vienna, we meet the painters who transformed how we see the world. Rose’s talks will explore the glamour and grit, politics and passion, beauty and rebellion of this extraordinary period of European art history. Each session reveals not just the art, but the people behind it: their loves, rivalries, scandals and dreams.

This is a story of reinvention - and the beginning of modernity itself.

WEDNESDAY 14 JANUARY - Canaletto: Venice, Vice & the Grand Tour

Venice in the 18th century was a city in elegant decline — bankrupt, politically irrelevant, yet still intoxicating. English gentlemen flocked there to gamble, flirt, drink, fall in love and buy art by the suitcaseful. Chief among their prizes were the sparkling Venetian views of Giovanni Canaletto, whose luminous canvases allowed them to bring home a slice of La Serenissima: sunlit canals, shimmering reflections, dogs yapping, gondoliers calling, laundry whipping in the breeze.

In this session Rose will step into the world of theatre and tourism to discover why Canaletto became the superstar of the Grand Tour — and why his vision of Venice continues to seduce us today.

WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY -William Hogarth: Sex, Satire on the Streets of London

Hogarth takes us straight into the noise and chaos of Georgian London. His bitingly satirical scenes expose a city teeming with infidelity, drunkenness, gambling, corruption and tragedy — yet told with extraordinary wit. Rose will focus on Marriage A-la-Mode in the National Gallery, London, a masterclass in storytelling that tears into the hypocrisies of arranged marriage.

More than any artist of his age, Hogarth shows us the unvarnished truth of 18th century life. There is no greater visual dramatist — and no sharper observer of society — than the great William Hogarth.

WEDNESDAY 11 FEBRUARY - Reynolds & Gainsborough: The Battle for Beauty

Sir Joshua Reynolds brought romance, drama and classical grandeur to portraiture with his invention of the “Grand Manner,” turning society portraiture into a weapon of prestige.Meanwhile Thomas Gainsborough unleashed his sitters in a flurry of magical brushwork — those “odd scratches and marks” that, by “a kind of magic,” transform into luminous faces and fabrics.

Fiercely competitive yet dazzlingly gifted, these two artists shaped the Golden Age of British portraiture. This is a story of rivalry, celebrity, and the creation of a national style.

SATURDAY 14 FEBRUARY - Rococo Romance this Valentine’s Day

This Valentine’s Day Rose will focus on decadently saucy scenes from Madame de Pompadour’s France. She’ll explore how this indefatigable patron of the arts used painting and porcelain to promote her position with the Royal Court. We’ll explore the origins of the Rococo movement by looking at paintings by Watteau, before moving on to Boucher, Fragonard and porcelain from the Sèvres factory. We’ll uncover hidden meaning and fascinating tales of 18th century aristocratic life in France that typify the exuberant reign of Louis XV and the new Rococo style. 

 WEDNESDAY 25 FEBRUARY -  Jacques-Louis David: Art & Revolution

The French Revolution detonated the political order of Europe — and at its heart stood Jacques-Louis David, painter, politician, propagandist. With cool, classical precision, David crafted images that became icons of revolution, heroism and sacrifice.

This talk explores how David’s life, ambition and downfall were woven into the violent upheavals of 1789 and beyond, and how his art became the visual language of a new political age.

SUNDAY 8 MARCH - Women, Power and Paint: Striving for Equality in Revolutionary Paris

Amid the upheaval of the French Revolution, a quieter cultural revolution was taking shape as the first professional female painters challenged artistic inequality. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard forged remarkable careers in a male-dominated world, defying convention and demanding visibility.

As we mark International Women’s Day 2026, their achievements feel especially powerful. In a time of intense political and social change, they used skill and determination to redefine what women could accomplish. We’ll look at their portrayals of the Royal Family and evolving ideas of motherhood, but most of all, at their self-portraits — bold acts of identity and agency that signalled a new artistic future shaped by women.

WEDNESDAY 11 MARCH - Francisco Goya: Darkness, Doubt & the Birth of Modernity

Is Goya the last Old Master — or the first modern one? His career veers from glittering court portraitist to disillusioned witness of war, madness and human cruelty. Amid the horrors of the Peninsular War and a Spain ravaged by famine and disease, Goya tore through convention to ask radical new questions about humanity.

The results — terrifying, brilliant, and deeply moving — continue to speak to us with astonishing urgency. His art forces us to confront ourselves, and the world we’ve created.

WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL - John Constable: The Quiet Radical

Constable’s paintings may grace biscuit tins, but beneath their pastoral charm lies an artist of striking intensity — romantic, stubborn, fiercely committed to truth. His devotion to the English countryside, and his battles with the Royal Academy, shaped one of the great artistic rivalries of the era: Constable vs. Turner.

In this session we uncover the man behind the “quintessential English” façade — passionate, poetic and quietly revolutionary.

WEDNESDAY 8 APRIL - J.M.W. Turner: Storms, Sun & the Edge of Abstraction

If Constable’s achievements were quietly profound, Turner’s were loudly epic. Obsessed with storms, fire, energy and above all the sun, Turner pushed painting to the brink of abstraction. His critics mocked him; Ruskin hailed him as “the father of modern art.”

This is the wild story of an artist who spat on his canvases, worshipped light, shocked the Royal Academy, and turned landscape painting into an electric, emotional force.

WEDNESDAY 22 APRIL - The Pre-Raphaelites: Rebellion, Beauty & the Medieval Dream

Meet the rebellious students who detonated Victorian art. Rejecting industrial ugliness and Royal Academy convention, Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt looked back to a pre-Raphaelite world of clarity, symbolism and moral intensity.

Their paintings — rich in detail, poetry, sensuality and natural beauty — explore love, faith, gender and myth. Rose’s talk uncovers the dazzling, provocative world of the Brotherhood and the revolution their art sparked.

WEDNESDAY 6 MAY -  James McNeill Whistler: Aesthetics, Scandal & the Art of the Nocturne

Dandy, wit, outsider and provocateur, Whistler stood at the threshold of modernity. From his “Nocturnes” to his “Symphonies,” he insisted that art existed for beauty alone — infuriating John Ruskin, enthralling Oscar Wilde, and reshaping artistic taste on both sides of the Channel.

In this session we explore Whistler’s sense of colour and tone, his duels with critics, and his enormous influence on the future of modern art.

WEDNESDAY 20 MAY - Klimt & Schiele: Gold, Desire & the Shock of the Modern

Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was a city of contradictions — opulent yet anxious, glittering yet fractured. In this charged atmosphere, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele forged two of the most distinctive artistic voices of modernity.

Klimt dazzled the world with shimmering gold, eroticism and symbolism, creating icons of sensual beauty that scandalised polite society. Schiele, in contrast, stripped the human body to its rawest truth: twisted poses, burning eyes, a psychological intensity still startling today.

Together they reveal a world on the brink—where beauty and danger meet, and where modern art begins to confront the deepest questions of identity, sexuality and the self.