The evening's discussion will focus on the gallery's London Art Week exhibition, 'Romantick Situations' - Castles and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

The title of the exhibition stems from Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s description of Morlais Castle in south Wales, which he was taken to see by his patrons, the Bute family, in 1789. As Britain prospered at home and prevailed overseas, Georgians increasingly felt a sense of uninterrupted connection with Britain’s ancient and mostly mysterious past. To them the huge castles in strategic and often dramatic settings stood for the turbulence, drama and territorial upheavals of the Middle Ages. For landscape painters already awakening to the stirring scenery to be found across the British Isles, its majestic castles, abbeys and ruins had an irresistible allure and contributed to the rise of the Romantic movement.

About the gallery

John Mitchell Fine Paintings is an independent family business established in 1931. Now in its third generation it is run by brothers James and William Mitchell. They specialise in buying and selling European and British paintings and drawings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Over the firm's ninety year history they have sold paintings to many national and international institutions; most notably in recent years the earliest Dutch painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, a winter landscape of 1611 by Adam van Breen.