Painterly portraits: Oil painting course
- Monday, 6 October 2025
- Monday, 13 October 2025
- Monday, 20 October 2025
Enrol
| Standard: | £360 |
| Concessions: | £324 |
Please book a ticket to attend this course which will take place in the Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
Tickets include entry to the National Gallery. Please arrive in good time to access the building and find the event.
Bookings close 10 minutes before the event begins.
Concessions are for full-time students, jobseekers, and disabled adults.
This event is open for House and Exhibition Members priority booking until Thursday, August 21, 2025.
About
Refine your oil painting technique and deepen your understanding of portraiture through this three-week practical course, inspired by paintings in the National Gallery Collection.
Working from a life model each week, you will explore how artists across centuries have captured the human face with feeling, structure and painterly expression. Each session focuses on a different approach to portraiture, taking inspiration from Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Degas.
Led by artist and tutor Adele Wagstaff, the course takes place in the Clore Art Studio as well as sessions inside the Gallery to observe and draw directly from paintings. From bold tonal studies to luminous colour and expressive brushwork exercises, you will be guided through a range of techniques to strengthen your observational skills while developing confidence in proportion, composition and your own painterly practice.
All materials are provided, and your works are yours to take home. Handouts with extra resources will be provided in advance of the sessions.
Painterly Portraits: Oil Painting Course
Working from a male model, this session explores how Rembrandt used bold tonal contrast and innovative layering techniques to construct haunting portraits that bridge the centuries. We will start by introducing the basics of portraiture and oil painting. After a focused viewing of selected works in the Gallery, we return to the studio to create portraits with a focus on the use of dramatic light and dark.
Week two draws on Gainsborough’s looser, unfinished portraits in the National Gallery’s collection to explore expressive brushwork and tonal sensitivity. Working from a female model and using a mid-toned ground, participants will create open, atmospheric portraits with a limited colour palette. The session includes time in the Gallery to sketch from paintings by Gainsborough and his contemporaries.
In the final session, we turn to Degas's Impressionistic portrait studies of light, colour and character. After viewing works in the Gallery, we will return to the Clore Art Studio to work from a female model. Through drawing and oil painting, the session encourages livelier mark-making and experimentation with colour and personality in the portrait.
Your tutor
Adele Wagstaff trained at Newcastle University and the Slade School of Fine Art where she focused on working from the nude in sustained poses. Her practice continues to explore the human figure, anatomy and portraiture through drawing and painting. She has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the BP Portrait Award, and her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery, Royal West of England Academy, Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Canadian Portrait Academy. Adele is an experienced tutor, who has taught at the Royal Academy, as well as the Slade School of Fine Art, Art Academy London and Pallant House Gallery, and she has written two books: 'Still Life Painting in Oils' (2012) and 'Painting the Nude' (2015), both published by the Crowood Press.