LONDON.- The National Gallery today announces the launch of a new in conversation series, Picture This, with broadcaster and host of the BBC’s This Cultural Life, John Wilson.

Leading figures from a wide variety of fields, including fashion, science, music, literature, gastronomy and film, will join John once a month to reflect on their life and work through the lens of a National Gallery painting.

This new series will open with John in conversation with iconic British model, advocate and writer Erin O’Connor MBE. She rose to fame in the nineties when fashion was performance-led. She danced through flames, walked on water and flew through the air for fashion houses including Alexander McQueen, Galliano and Christian Dior.

The National Gallery’s first artist-in-residence Maggi Hambling CBE will join John in April to discuss Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the Age of 63, and its importance to her own life and artistic practice. In May, actor David Harewood OBE will join John in conversation. In June Sir Michael Palin will take a closer look at Joseph Mallord William Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

Using the National Gallery’s advanced technology, these works of art will be displayed in breathtaking detail in the Pigott Lecture Theatre, bringing the audience closer to the artist and the subject than ever before.

This series will also offer paid work experience to young people who have come through the National Gallery Articulation programme, our national programme for young people, designed to use art as a springboard to develop vital oracy, independent research, and presentation skills.

Picture This will take place monthly in the National Gallery’s newly refurbished Pigott Lecture Theatre in the Sainsbury Wing and will be broadcast live online.

Tickets go on sale to members of the National Gallery today (Monday 16 February), and will be on general sale from Friday 20 February.