The Course, Creation (Birds and Beasts) 7/15

Founded in 1994, THE COURSE offers art history lectures, opera and literature courses, guided museum visits and London walks.

This inspirationally compelling new course creates strength and variety from the vastness of its subject: the Creation of the World and everything in it as encountered by artists and writers throughout the centuries. Now we can read, look at, see what they saw from hill-top, valley-side, shore-line, doorway and windowsill across land, sea and sky: the Earth, and human life in all its glory and diversity. Each week’s programme names just some of the featured artists and writers.

Birds and Beasts They feel like kin, luring us to a life we can only aspire to. We envy their freedom, breathe easy that our survival is less precarious. Hardy, Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Smart, Blake, Gray, Burns, Dickinson, Neruda, Tennyson, Clare, Baudelaire, Coleridge, Yeats; Rubens, Poussin, Géricault, Titian, Correggio, Veronese, Tintoretto; cave paintings from Spain, France, South Africa; Middle Eastern frescoes; Rothko, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Snyders, Jan Brueghel, Brancusi, Rousseau, Flanagan.