Beauty and Abstraction is the fourth in a series of six lectures by David Ward focusing on the work of six artists. The lectures investigate the experience of looking at paintings and the unparalleled capacity of the medium to hold stillness. They consider, in turn: the making of Henry Raeburns famous painting of an ice skater; the recent photo-work by Jeff Wall of a nineteeth-century 360-degree panorama in Geneva, painted in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War; intimacy and remoteness in Piero della Francescas great fresco cycle in Arezzo; the place of the optical in the abstract paintings of Patrick Heron; learning to see light in Vermeers paintings; the place of the viewer in relation to two paintings by Manet displayed at the Courtauld Institute; David Ward is an artist who has taught at the AA since 1999.