Enfilade

This Friday at 6.30pm (GMT) via Zoom:

Adriano Aymonino, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland
Online Book Launch, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 19 November 2021

Hosted by Sir John Soane’s Museum in their beautiful library, and presented in collaboration with the Society for the History of Collecting, this virtual event will celebrate the publication of Adriano Aymonino’s new book, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

The central decades of the eighteenth century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period’s most important campaigns of patronage and collecting was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Sir Hugh Smithson (1712–86) and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716–76). This book examines four houses they refurbished in eclectic architectural styles—Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle—alongside the innumerable objects they collected, their funerary monuments, and their persistent engagement in Georgian London’s public sphere. Over the years, their commissions embraced or pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. Patrons of many artists and architects, they are revealed, particularly, as the greatest supporters of Robert Adam. In every instance, minute details contributed to large-scale projects expressing the Northumberlands’ various aesthetic and cultural allegiances. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism and historicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour and the Enlightenment.

S C H E D U L E

18.30  Introduction by Frances Sands (Curator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s Museum)
18.40  Talk by Kate Retford (Professor of Art History, Birkbeck, University of London)
19.10  Talk by Adriano Aymonino (Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Programs, Department of History and History of Art, University of Buckingham)
19.30  Conversation and questions moderated by Adriana Turpin (Director of Institut Des Etudes Superieurs Des Arts UK)