Lecture Series | Catholic Chapels in N. England / Adam and Chippendale

Posted in lectures (to attend) by Editor on February 5, 2023

Upcoming lectures from the York Georgian Society:

Jan Graffius | From Borneo to York: The 18th-Century Chapels at Stonyhurst and the Bar Convent
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 February 2023, 2.30pm

Interior view of a private chapel with green walls.

Bar Convent Chapel, completed in 1769. Established in 1686, the Convent of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin at Micklegate Bar in York is the oldest surviving convent in England.

This talk will examine the history and contents of two extraordinary 18th-century chapels in the North of England. Both chapels were hidden from view, but both reflected very different aspects of English Catholicism. The 1713 Stonyhurst Shireburn inventory lists luxury artefacts from China along with those of the European baroque, salvaged medieval material culture, and the latest English Georgian fashions, all demonstrating a confident seigneurial Catholicism in a deeply rural setting. The flamboyant but hidden 1769 Bar Convent chapel of Mother Ann Aspinal and its associated 16th- and 17th-century relics and vestments speaks of a different community—religious sisters and recusant schoolgirls—navigating the political challenges associated with an all-female community in a volatile urban setting.

Jan Graffius is Curator of Collections and Historic Libraries at Stonyhurst College.

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Kerry Bristol | Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale at Nostell: A Matter of Equals?
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 March 2023, 2.30pm

Painting of two men standing at a table.

Unknown British artist, A Cabinet Maker’s Office, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, 53 × 70 cm (London: V&A, P.1-1961).

Nostell, the ancestral home of the Winn family near Wakefield, has long been recognised as an important commission for both Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale, one indicative of a close friendship between architect and patron and suggestive of a special relationship between the Otley-born cabinetmaker and a family who reputedly promoted his interests early in his career. Based on a fresh reading of the Nostell archive, this lecture will investigate the nature of the business relationship between Adam and Chippendale and query how and where they worked together at Nostell and when they worked independently of each other. Did the late 18th-century architect always have the upper hand, or could those who furnished a house exert more control?

Kerry Bristol is Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art at the University of Leeds.