Women in the Picture Book Talk 2: Monsters & Temptresses

Catherine McCormack is back at the Ashmolean Museum on Friday 30 October for Women in the Picture Book Talk 2: Monsters & Temptresses. It's the second of four talks she's giving as part of a series inspired by her book, Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking, and this one focuses on femme fatales, witches and monstrous women.

The whole series takes the Ashmolean's Aphrodite exhibition as its starting point, so if you've been through the galleries recently, you'll recognise the ground she's working from. This particular session pulls on the darker side of that tradition — the figures who don't fit the mould of the passive muse and instead lean into the dangerous, the occult and the unsettling. It's a chance to hear her talk through how these tropes have shaped the way women have been painted and perceived over the centuries.

If you can't make it in person, there's a Zoom option too, so you can follow along from home. The talk runs from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm in the Headley Lecture Theatre, inside the Ashmolean on Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH.