Friday 7 October 2005, 19.00–19.30

For many people in France and Britain, the end of the nineteenth century signalled more than just a dramatic change in industrial and working patterns; it also saw the appearence of new entertainment spaces and increased opportunities for ordinary people to experience popular culture.

The new era in leisure was one of the themes which painters such as Edgar Degas, Walter Sickert and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec took as their inspiration, and it became the subject of many of their paintings of the music hall, the ballet and the theatre.

This discussion focuses on the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen Calloway, curator of prints at the Victoria & Albert Museum and author of Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess (Phaidon Press, 1994) and Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (Overlook, 1999), and Matthew Sturgis, author of Walter Sickert: A Life (HarperCollins, 2005) and Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (Picador, 1995), join Tate curator Martin Myrone in the exhibition to talk about their favourite paintings in the exhibition.

Meet in Room 5 of the exhibition.

Tate Britain 
Free with timed exhibition ticket, booking required

  

This event is related to the Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870–1910 exhibition