2024 marks the bicentenary of our much loved national treasure – the National Gallery. Home to one of the greatest collections of European art, it is also a repository of headline grabbing stories surrounding acquisitions, controversial conservations, thefts, film appearances, acts of vandalism and scandals… Lydia Bauman, a guide and lecturer at the National Gallery for over 35 years, will tell those stories against the backdrop of some of the most glorious masterpieces in the collection.

Lydia Bauman was Born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, (19th-20th century art – Distinction for thesis on Matisse’s Illustrations to Poetry). She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London’s National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the latter as a guest speaker for travel companies. Since the pandemic began in March 2020 Lydia had devised and delivered a programme of upwards of 180 online lectures to her own group Art For The Uninitiated.

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