Enfilade

John Carter, View of the Library at Strawberry Hill, watercolour, 23.7 × 28.8 cm, from Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa … at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill, 1784). The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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From Strawberry Hill:

Collectors and the Country House Library
Strawberry Hill, 19 October 2017

The shelves of Horace Walpole’s Library at Strawberry Hill, emptied in the great sale of 1842, have recently been filled with the loan of books from the library of Aske Hall, North Yorkshire. To celebrate this event, we are holding a study day on Collectors and the Country House Library. Particular themes are the evolution of country house libraries and how the libraries of art collectors such as Walpole support and enrich our understanding of their broader collections. Country house libraries may develop over generations of owners, but they may also strongly reflect the personality and interests of one collector, whether as bibliophile or in the broader history of collections of works of art. We will be looking not only at Walpole, but at a broad range of other collectors and their collections to show how much these libraries can reveal. Refreshments including a light lunch will be provided. For further information, please contact claire.leighton@strawberryhillhouse.org.uk. This event is kindly sponsored by the Delmas Foundation

P R O G R A M M E

9.30  Coffee

9.50  Welcome

10.00  Morning Papers
• Megan Aldrich, Saxon or Gothic? An Antiquarian Library at Stowe
• Stephen Clarke, ‘Quite a Paradise of Well-Conditioned, Beautiful Books’? Horace Walpole’s Library at Strawberry Hill

11.00  Break

11.10  Keynote Paper
• Mark Purcell, The Country House Library

12.05  Claire Reed, The Library at Osterley Park House

12.35   Lunch and tours of the house

2.15  Afternooon Papers
• Giles Mandelbrote, A Metropolitan Collector: The Library of Sir Richard Ellys (1682–1742) at Blickling Hall
• David Pearson, Bugs and Bindings: Eighteenth-Century Insect Rolls
• Stephen Lloyd, The Library of the Earls of Derby at Knowsley Hall

3.30 Questions and final discussion

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