We are delighted to announce the return of Dido Powell’s London Art Gallery Tours, starting on Sunday 11 February. This year we are offering a series of four tours, focusing on ‘The Ugly and the Beautiful in Art’. If you have done the tour before you will know what a wonderful way this is to spend a Sunday morning. Dido Powell is an artist and teaches the history of art. Her tours are always well informed and insightful.

Each tour costs £12 or you can book the whole series for £45. You can book by contacting Wendy Earle: wendyearle@talktalk.net. To be sure of your place on the tours — detailed below — please book early.

FULL SERIES
Sunday 11 February:
Ugly Art (Tate Modern)
Sunday 17 March:
From Ugly to Ideal (National Gallery)
Sunday 28 April:
The Ideal Turns Sour (Tate Britain)
Sunday 19 May:
Artists’ Inspiration (British Museum)

Tour 2: From Ugly to Ideal

The tour will start with Renaissance examples of ugly creatures and people in paintings, dealing with religious morality, good and evil, spiritual damnation and images of ‘magnificent absurdity’. We will also see how ugly people and objects are used in allegorical pictures as well as in didactic moral narrative paintings.

Ideas of good and bad taste will be explored through portraits aspiring to the academic ideal of beauty and through landscapes which inspire fear and awe, emotions excited by both beauty and terror, the latter previously associated with ugliness.