Poetry in paint: Discovering Titian's process
- Friday, 28 November 2025
- Friday, 5 December 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
Artist Lucian Freud once called ‘Diana and Actaeon’ and ‘Diana and Callisto’ ‘simply the most beautiful pictures in the world.’ Created as part of Titian’s poetic ‘poesie’ series for King Philip II of Spain, these masterpieces continue to inspire artists with their complexity, sensuality and storytelling power.
In this two-week course, we will take ‘Diana and Actaeon’ as our starting point, looking closely at Titian’s composition, use of colour and light, and the way gesture and glance animate the painting’s narrative. Working directly from the paintings in the Gallery and a life model in the studio, and using traditional oil painting techniques, we will explore how Titian's technical skill brings movement, emotion and drama to the canvas. Throughout the two sessions, you will develop technical skills in oil painting by learning more about Titian’s innovative painting practice.
This course is designed for learners and artists of all levels. All materials are provided, and your works are yours to take home. Handouts with extra resources will be provided in advance of the sessions.
starting with the position and pose of Actaeon in the composition, we will explore how this affects the narrative of the painting by experimenting with the pose inspired by the changes Titian made to the figure as he worked on it. Using a life model, we will develop the composition making gestural drawings with a brush and fluid black paint. Then, the forms will be modelled with earth colours and white, hand-mixed oil paints.
In the second session, we will explore the role of colour in the composition and the way Titian uses it as a single element to describe the forms and their position in space. We will look at how colours can appear through a whole composition: changing hue and appearing in key places in strong tones, enhancing the narrative. We will introduce these ideas into our own compositions with colour blocking and glazes using oil colours and glazing medium inspired by Titian’s palette.
Your tutor
Joanna Conybeare is an artist and Gallery Educator at the National Gallery. She has led multiple adult courses and has worked in Primary and Secondary schools in London and the south coast as a teacher and subject lead for Art and Design. In her own artistic practice, she uses clay, porcelain and terracotta to explore the figure, enjoying the immediacy of the material that enables her to ‘draw’ three-dimensionally.