Discovery Days and Visits 2025/2026:
Discovery Days in locations around Budleigh Salterton, and include three sessions and last from 10am to approximately 3pm.
Discovery Days & Visits
Thursday 13 November 2025 10am to 3pm
A history of the Medici family: their huge contribution to Renaissance Art, including patronage of Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli and many more. Also managing to produce Popes and Royalty!
The Medici were in many ways an unattractive family. Ruthless in pursuit of profit for their Florentine bank, which had branches in every city of the known world, they were greedy for success, merciless to those who opposed their ambition and vicious in their own internal squabbles. And yet without them we wouldn’t have Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, the Fra Angelico frescoes in San Marco, Donatellos “David” or the majestic Michelangelo sculptures in the Medici chapel. The Platonic Academy wouldn’t have been founded and the doors for the Baptistry would never have been cast.
Speaker: Douglas Skeggs
Douglas Skeggs read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time, he has given over 7,000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of ‘The New Academy of Art Studies' for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at 'The Study Center', 'Christie's' course'The History of Art Studies' and other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hanger in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He helped set up the Abercrombie & Kent “Private Label tours” and is presently cultural adviser to Ultimate travel.
He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on 'Whistler' and the exhibition video on 'William Morris.' Three one-man exhibitions of his paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, 'River of Light', has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.
29 January 2026 10am to 3pm
The most popular and glamorous style of the 20th century which included architecture, furniture, ceramics, jewellery. Covering examples of all this and looking especially at British Art Deco, and Erté the French artist and designer who became revered as “The Father of Art Deco”.
Pamela Campbell-Johnston
Pamela has an MA Hons Art History from St Andrew's University.
She has over 30 years of lecturing experience to undergraduates, adult groups, and to Friends and Patrons of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the RA’s Adult Education Department. She has also conducted numerous guided tours, residential trips and focused gallery talks on individual works of art. She specialises in British Domestic Architecture and Modern British Art - with a particular love for the 1920s and 1930s. She has had permanent career at Royal Academy of Arts for 12 years.
She has also undertaken work experience at Bonhams, Art Loss Register and National Trust. She is now a freelance art consultant and lecturer. She recently curated a collection for the Lansdowne Club.