Exhibition | Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Opening this week at the Soane Museum:
Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 7 June — 10 September 2023
Bouke de Vries’ latest work—beautifully displayed in the Museum’s Foyle Space— responds to William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
Inspired by Hogarth’s series of original paintings at the Soane Museum, de Vries draws on his love of storytelling, and talent for symbolism through ceramics, with eight newly created porcelain vases presented in various states of (dis)repair. Starting with an immaculate celadon vase, de Vries treats the following seven increasingly deteriorating vases with a variety of restoration processes and glazes, which parallel the moral and physical degeneration of Hogarth’s anti-hero Tom Rakewell. Cracks appear in the surface, the vessels slump and implode—with obvious and drastic methods of repair failing to save the vase or Rake from their ultimate demise.
Originally working in fashion before retraining as a restorer, Bouke de Vries began creating his works of art in 2008. He has since gained a significant following and now has work in an impressive range of international public collections, including the National Museum of Scotland; the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. De Vries sees an inherent value in the discarded objects he reinvents, giving a new lease of life to a broad spectrum of ceramics otherwise destined to be thrown away.
Bouke de Vries in Conversation with Louisa Buck
13 June 2023, 7pm BST
To celebrate the opening of his new exhibition Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress, ceramic artist Bouke de Vries will discuss his latest work with Louisa Buck, a contributing editor and London contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a regular reviewer and commentator on BBC radio and TV. The evening includes an exclusive out-of-hours viewing of the exhibition and the opportunity to view Hogarth’s paintings that inspired the series in the Picture Room.
Book tickets here»
Lecture Series | Peter Miller on Conservation as a Human Science
From the Warburg:
Peter Miller, On Conservation as a Human Science
E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series
In-person and online, Warburg Institute, London, 13, 14, 15 June 2023
‘Conservation’, ‘preservation’, ‘care’—these words are frequently used today, but by different people, speaking to different audiences. On Conservation as a Human Science makes the case for treating conservation as a single human activity with an intellectual history of its own. Then, focusing more particularly on the kind of conservation done to man-made things it explores the entwined relationship between conservation and history. Like archaeology, to which it bears a close resemblance, conservation explores the depth of time stratigraphically to answer questions about what was in the past from what survives into our present. But, turned around, history, too, can function as a form of conservation—indeed, this was an initial self-definition that persisted into the age of modern, academic history. The ambition of this project is to shift how we understand conservation for a twenty-first century in which climate change will make the task of conservation and the challenge to conservation a more urgent part of public and private life. Moreover, rethinking conservation as a human science also opens up a new perspective on the organization of knowledge at a time when inherited distinctions between disciplines and fields and ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ learning, like those between the ‘head’ and the ‘hand’, are being reconsidered.
Lecture 1 | Tuesday, 13 June, 5.30–7.00pm
In Search of Conservation’s History
Lecture 2 | Wednesday, 14 June, 5.30–7.00pm
Conservation as History
Lecture 3 | Thursday, 15 June, 5.30–7.00pm
History as Conservation
Free and open to all with advance booking, in person at the Warburg Institute, or online via Zoom.
Organised by the Warburg Institute and sponsored by Princeton University Press, the E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series features prominent humanities scholars who address pressing concerns in art, literature, and ideas, across historical periods.
Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor of Cultural History at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and incoming President of the American Academy in Rome. He is the author of a series of books on the early seventeenth-century antiquarian, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, on the history of antiquarianism, and on the modern study of objects as evidence. He co-curated Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margarieta van Varick (BGC, 2009); What Is the Object? (BGC, 2022); and Conserving Active Matter (BGC, 2022), the exhibition and website that concluded the ten-year long project he directed, “Cultures of Conservation,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His main current interest is in the how and why of research, whether done by professional historians or by curators, conservators or artists. He has been at Bard since 2001. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, and University of Maryland, College Park. He was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Online Talk | Kate Hunter on Three Maps
From the SHARP listserv and Eventbrite:
Kate Hunter | Unexpected Adventures Told in Three Maps: Western Australia, the Indian Ocean, and Captain James Cook’s First Voyage
Online, Thursday, 8 June 2023, 1pm (EDT)
Kate Hunter, Senior Specialist at Daniel Crouch Rare Books, in conversation with Arthur Dunkelman, Curator of the Jay Kislak Collection, University of Miami Libraries
The University of Miami Special Collections cordially invites you to a ‘Conversation on Cartography’. Kate Hunter will share stories about three maps. The first is a map of Western Australia, where she grew up. The second is a Dutch East India Company [VOC] 18th-century chart of the Indian Ocean on vellum that helped the company establish a trade route that netted a fortune. Last, Hunter will look at a silver punch bowl whose upside-down surface includes an engraved early rendering of Captain James Cook’s first voyage (1769–70).
Kate Hunter has helped private collectors and institutional libraries to acquire and catalog maps, globes, and atlases the world over. Currently, she is the senior specialist at the New York office of Daniel Crouch Rare Books. She is also consulting curator and cataloger for the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla, California. During her three-decade career, Hunter has witnessed great changes, from a landscape over-populated by independent bookshops, to one almost bereft of them. According to Hunter, much of today’s commerce takes place online, and that has transformed the way collectors collect—from compulsive completists focused with detailed wish-lists to trophy-hunting connoisseurs.
The program will be followed by an audience question and answer session. Free and open to the public, the event will be hosted via Zoom. It will also be streamed via Facebook Live. All events in this series will be recorded for on-demand access following the broadcasts.
Lecture | Michael Yonan on the Bavarian Rococo
This week in Chicago, at Northwestern:
Michael Yonan | The Bavarian Rococo, the Outlier of Eighteenth-Century Art
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Wednesday, 17 May 2023, 5pm
Wieskirche, designed by the Zimmermann brothers, near Steingaden, Germany, 1745–55, view toward altar (Wikimedia Commons, 2019).
Bavarian rococo art and architecture has long received both attention and derision from art historians. It is incredibly sophisticated in design and seemingly totally out of sync with the broader narrative of European art: backward-looking, regionally influential, and exuberantly unrestrained in its abundant use of ornamentation. As part of the Warnock Lecture Series, this talk will explore what we can do with this visually arresting art and suggest that it deserves a firmer place in art history.
Michael Yonan is Professor of Art History and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis. His areas of research are eighteenth-century European art, the decorative arts, material culture studies, and art historical historiography and methodology. He is the author of Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (2011), Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (2018), and with Stacey Sloboda is co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (2019). In 2022 he was visiting guest professor at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. He is currently writing a book on materiality in art history.
Lecture | Forgeries, Replicas, and Native American Art
‘Mato-tope’s Shirt’, likely made by George Catlin (Washington, DC: National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, NMNHanthropology 8420507). More information is available here»
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From the Bard Graduate Center:
Janet Catherine Berlo | Not Native American Art? Forgeries, Replicas and Other Vexed Identities
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 May 2023, 6.00pm
In Native North American artistic traditions, what is a replica? What constitutes a copy? In contrast with the larger field of art history, there is almost no literature on forgeries and replicas in this sub-field. Join us for Janet Catherine Berlo’s lecture, adapted from the introduction to her forthcoming book, Not Native American Art, where she considers notions of replicas, copies, tributes, forgeries, pastiches, and even digital surrogates as they apply to archaeological, historical, and contemporary Native arts of North America.
Register here»
Janet Catherine Berlo, professor of art history and visual and cultural studies emerita at the University of Rochester, holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. She is the author of many publications on the Indigenous arts of the Americas, including the most widely-used textbook in the field, Native North American Art, with Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford, second edition 2015). Berlo has also written on American art history and quilt history. Her forthcoming book, Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions will be published by the University of Washington Press in July 2023.
Research Lunch | Fionn Montell-Boyd on 18th-C Photography
David Allan, Lead Processing at Leadhills: Pounding the Ore, detail, 1780s, oil on canvas, 38 × 58 cm
(Edinburgh: National Galleries Scotland)
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From the Mellon Centre:
Fionn Montell-Boyd | Manufacturing Pictures: Photographic Experimentation at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 5 May 2023, 1pm
In the decades before photography was announced to the public in 1839, a number of individual experimenters devised ways of using the light-sensitive properties of metallic salts to form images. This paper takes up two sets of investigations of particular significance, carried out between 1780 and 1802: those of Elizabeth Fulhame, an amateur chemist working in Edinburgh, who used metallic reductions to adorn textiles, and of Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous Staffordshire potter Josiah, who developed a process by which images of objects of varying transparency could be formed on samples of prepared paper and leather.
Fulhame used photochemistry to transform pieces of silk, linen and calico into lustrous novelties, with elite consumption in mind. Creating maps of cities and waterways in silver and gold, her vision of commercial utility aligned with contemporary developments in the Forth valley, including the modernisation of the cloth trade and the introduction of a network of canals, described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations as “the greatest of all improvements.” Wedgwood’s experiments, too, were enmeshed in an industrial landscape: new methods of chemical image transfer were on the rise in the potteries, a setting in which the division of labour had grown apace, stimulated by new mass markets and long-distance trade. Working in different parts of Britain, Fulhame and Wedgwood appear not to have been in contact, yet they moved in overlapping circles of industrialists and reformers who sought to define chemistry as an enterprise of public benefit.
Examining the ways in which these experiments were tied into industrial networks by way of both the materials from which they were made and their pictorial function, this paper traces early photography’s response to the demands of the manufacturing economy. Fulhame and Wedgwood’s published accounts both came to be cited by later experimenters in 1839, yet their roles have been minimised within a history of photography centred on figures for whom there are large bodies of extant photographs. This rereading of Fulhame and Wedgwood’s experiments seeks to open up the discussion over photography’s origins, providing an expanded frame through which to consider the medium’s relationship to modern industry.
Book tickets here»
Fionn Montell-Boyd is a doctoral candidate in history of art at the University of Oxford, whose thesis examines the political economy of the emergence of photography in Britain between 1780 and 1841, with a focus on the role of silver as the commodity which formed photography’s light-sensitive basis. Her research foregrounds the materials of photography and the labour behind their production; themes she has developed through teaching and exhibition making. Prior to her doctoral studies, she obtained degrees from the University of Oxford and University College London and worked as a curatorial researcher for the Ashmolean Museum.
Online Conversation | Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas
From the invitation:
Paris Spies-Gans and Martina Droth in Conversation | A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830
Online, 3 May 2023, 12.00pm (Eastern Daylight Time)
Maria Cosway, The Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, 1781–82 oil on canvas (Chatsworth: The Devonshire Collection).
Please join the MA State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (MA-NMWA) and our sister committees in the UK and France for an exciting virtual event on Wednesday, 3 May 2023. Paris Spies-Gans and Martina Droth will discuss Spies-Gans’ important first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830.
Just as the National Museum of Women in the Arts founder Wilhelmina Cole Holladay sought to challenge the assumption that there have been ‘no great women artists’ by collecting and publicly exhibiting many indisputably ‘great’ works of artist women, so too has Paris Spies-Gans investigated the same assumption, through evidence-based analysis. Her body of work includes site and time-specific research that reveals how women have found ways to achieve critical and commercial success despite the obstacles they have faced. Both women—Wilhelmina, the collector, and Paris, the scholar—intend their work not as end-points but as part of ongoing discussion and learning. Tracing the activity of more than 1,300 women who exhibited more than 7,000 works of art across genres at premier exhibition venues in London and Paris throughout the Revolutionary era, the book demonstrates that women artists professionalized in significant numbers a century earlier than scholars have previously thought.
Paris Spies-Gans’s scholarship and resultant discoveries complement the mission of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and its committees, three of which are presenting this event. Martina Droth, as interlocutor, will use her expertise to contextualize the material in A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. We hope you can join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion. Although this event is free of charge, advance registration is required; details about the event will then be sent to registered attendees. International guests are invited to use this email to register: contact@ma-nmwa.org.
Paris Spies-Gans is a historian and historian of art with a focus on women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression. She holds a PhD and MA in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University. Her work prioritizes women artists and their writings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, illuminating how women have navigated sociopolitical barriers to participate in their societies through diverse forms of intellectual and creative expression, even with the obstacles they regularly faced—and especially at moments of political revolution and change. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press in June 2022. It was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation and received the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Louis A. Gottschalk Prize, Honorable Mention, for an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century. She is currently working on her second book, A New Story of Art (Doubleday/US and Viking/UK).
Martina Droth is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Yale Center for British Art, where she oversees collections, exhibitions, and publications. Her curatorial work and research focus on sculpture and British art. She was the Chair of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History from 2016 to 2022. Current and recent curatorial projects include: Bill Brandt | Henry Moore (Hepworth, Sainsbury Center, and YCBA, 2020–23); Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery (YCBA and Fitzwilliam Museum, 2017–18); and Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (YCBA and Tate Britain, 2014–15). Prior to joining the Center, she was at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, where her exhibitions included Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (HMI and John Paul Getty Museum, 2008–2009) and Bronze: The Power of Life and Death (HMI, 2005). Her forthcoming projects include an exhibition on Hew Locke.
New Book | Beauty and the Brain
On Thursday, 4 May 2023, at 7pm (EST), Rachel Walker will discuss her book at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. The event will be live-streamed via YouTube. Registration is required for both in-person and online attendance.
From The University of Chicago Press:
Rachel Walker, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0226822563, $45.
Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America.
Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature. While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
Rachel E. Walker is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford, where she teaches courses on the history of race, gender, and science in America. Her recent article “Facing Race,” received the Murrin Prize for the best article published in Early American Studies in 2021.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Founding Faces
2 A New Science of Man
3 Character Detectives
4 The Manly Brow Movement
5 Criminal Minds
6 Facing Race
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Lecture Series | 2023 Wallace Seminars on Collections and Collecting
This year’s Wallace Seminar Series on Collections and Collecting:
2023 Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online and/or In-Person (depending upon session), The Wallace Collection, London, last Monday of most months
Established in 2006, the Seminars in the History of Collecting series helps fulfil The Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries in Paris and London. Seminars are normally held on the last Monday of every month, excluding August and December. They act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting, and are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists and all those with an interest in the subject. Each seminar is 45–60 minutes long, with time for Q&A.
Book your place via the Wallace Collection website. Bookings will open a few weeks before each seminar. A detailed summary of each forthcoming seminar will be provided around the same time. The 2023 Seminars in the History of Collecting will be on Zoom and livestreamed via YouTube for the months of January to April. We hope to be able to hold our seminars in hybrid format from the month of May, in person at the Wallace Collection and live on YouTube. For enquiries or to join our mailing list, please contact collection@wallacecollection.org.
Monday, 30 January
Simon Spier (Curator, Ceramics and Glass 1600–1800, Victoria & Albert Museum, London), Creating the Bowes Museum: Collectors, Dealers, and Auctions in Mid-19th-Century Paris
Monday, 27 February
Caroline Dakers (Professor Emerita in Cultural History, University of Arts London), Millionaire Shopping: The Collections of Alfred Morrison (1821–1897)
Monday, 27 March
Thomas Cooper (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge), Reconstructing the Art Collection of May Morris (1862–1938)
Monday, 17 April
Diana Davis (Independent researcher), ‘Fertile in Resources and in Ingenious Devices’: Ferdinand de Rothschild and His Dealers Revealed through the Archive
More information available here»
Monday, 22 May
Jonathan Conlin (University of Southampton), Knickerbocker Glory? Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater (1848–1933) and the Collecting of American Silver
More information available here»
Monday, 26 June
Alessia Attanasio (PhD candidate, University of Birmingham), The Fortunes of Baroque Neapolitan Art in English Collections during the Grand Tour, 1680–1800
Monday, 31 July
Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck, University of London), Slavery and the ‘Life’ of a Painting: Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child and the Taylor Plantations of Jamaica
Monday, 18 September
Ellinoor Bergvelt (University of Amsterdam), The Collection of William Cartwright (1606–1686) at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Monday, 30 October
Barbara Lasic (Senior Lecturer, MA in Fine and Decorative Art and Design, Sotheby’s Institute of Art), ‘Like a Tale from the Thousand and One Nights’: Reconstructing the Taste and Collections of William Williams-Hope (1802–1855)
Monday, 27 November
John Holden (Independent author, researcher, and an Associate at Demos) and Rebecca Wallis (Cultural Heritage Curator, National Trust), Ralph Dutton (1898–1985), 8th Baron Sherborne: The Life of a Collector
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Note (added 29 June 2023) — The posting was updated with a change for July’s presentation; originally Peter Humfrey (Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of St Andrews) was scheduled to speak on “The Picture Collections of the Poet Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) and of His Siblings.”
Royal Oak Programs, Spring 2023
18th-century offerings from the Royal Oak Foundation this spring:
Robert Sackville-West | Knole: A Private View into One of Britain’s Great Houses
Charleston Library Society, Charleston, 21 March 2023, 6pm ET
Set of pastels at Knole by Rosalba Carriera: Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset at bottom right and his Italian mistress Lucia Panichi, at bottom left (Photo by Ashley Hicks, from Knole: A Private View of One of Britain’s Great Houses, Rizzoli, 2022).
The Sackvilles have inhabited Knole, one of Britain’s greatest houses, for more than 400 years. In his talk, Robert Sackville-West, the 13th generation of the family to live at Knole, will take Royal Oak members on a personal tour of this ‘calendar house’, with its legendary 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and 7 courtyards. Lord Sackville will illustrate the smoldering spirit of Knole, from the state rooms—with the finest collection of 17th-century Royal Stuart furniture in the world and outstanding tapestries—to the private apartments filled with portraits by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Sir Peter Lely, and Reynolds. He will include a trip behind-the-scenes into the labyrinth of cellars and show attics filled with family mementos.
He will describe his ancestors who inhabited his family home—the grave Elizabethan statesman, the good-for-nothing gadabout at the seedy court of James I, the dashing cavalier, the Restoration rake, the 3rd Duke of the ancien régime—who inhabited his family home and were described by Vita Sackville-West (born at Knole) as “a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy.” Lord Sackville will talk about the way his family has shaped and furnished the house and describe how Knole itself has shaped the Sackvilles, influencing their lives and their relationships up to the present day. The talk will feature stunning images of the interiors and architectural and decorative features taken by Ashley Hicks for Knole: A Private View of One of Britain’s Great Houses, published by Rizzoli in 2022.
More information available here.
Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville, studied history at Oxford University and went on to work in publishing. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company that, in parallel with the National Trust, runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole.
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Oliver Gerrish | Distinguished to Eccentric: Norfolk Country Houses
Online, Zoom Webinar, 20 April 2023, 2.00pm ET
Also available as a digital rental from April 21 to May 5
Houghton Hall.
For centuries, Norfolk’s wide-open skies, unspoilt coastline, and rich and beautiful agricultural land have inspired writers and poets, artists, and designers, as well as architects and builders. Join architectural historian Oliver Gerrish on an enchanting visual journey through Norfolk’s rich architectural heritage. From the Jacobean splendors of Blickling Hall, believed to be the birthplace of Anne Boleyn, to the early Palladian elegance of Raynham Hall, possibly influenced by Inigo Jones’ circle, and for 400 years the seat of the Townshend family.
When one thinks of Norfolk, two of the grandest private houses in England immediately come to mind: Houghton and Holkham Hall. More than a country house, Holkham, designed by William Kent and Lord Burlington for the Earls of Leicester, can be described as a symmetrical Palladian palace. The sublime grandeur continues inside in the Marble Hall, which was modelled on a Roman basilica, with steps leading to the impressive State Rooms on the piano nobile.
The other neo-Palladian Norfolk ‘palace’ is Houghton Hall, one of England’s most beautiful stately homes designed by Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, with lavish interiors by William Kent. Both of these stately homes were built to reflect the wealth, taste, collections, and power of its inhabitants. Oliver will also examine private Norfolk houses from the 19th and 20th century. One from the Arts & Crafts movement is E.S. Prior’s 17-bedroomed Voewood in High Kelling, Norfolk, which is now owned by a well-known book dealer.
Finally, we will see the quirky Edwardian Sennowe Park, remodeled by George Skipper in 1900–1907 for the grandson of the founder of Thomas Cook travel. Known for its imaginative design, barrel vaulted library, and Art-Deco style tiling, the house is rarely on view.
More information available here.
Oliver Gerrish has a Master’s degree in architectural history from the University of Cambridge. He is a trustee of the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and helped to found their Architecture Awards. For over 10 years he was actively involved with The Georgian Group, for whom he re-founded and successfully led the Young Georgians from 2002 to 2016. He was one of the youngest feature writers for Country Life, and has written for The Georgian magazine and reviews for House and Garden and others. He has lectured nationally on subjects ranging from the masters of the Arts and Crafts to the role country houses play in the lives of younger people. He regularly organizes tours of historic buildings throughout Britain for private clients and charities.
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Rufus Bird | St. James Palace: From Leper Hospital to Royal Court
The Union League of Philadelphia, 2 May 2023, 6.30pm (with an option for dinner)
The General Society Library, New York, 4 May 2023, 6pm ET
Also available as a digital rental from May 5 to May 19
Bird’s eye view of St James Palace.
Visitors to London may recognize the red brick building at the bottom of St. James’ Street—St James’ Palace—and its location near many Pall Mall clubs and boutique hotels. St James’s Palace is a remarkable building at the heart of the history of the British monarchy and served as the official residence of the British monarchy from 1698 to 1837. However, despite its pivotal role in British history, St. James’s Palace is the least known of the royal residences.
While King Charles III and the Queen Consort live at Clarence House, their home is actually one of several structures which formed a part of the buildings that emerged from the Tudor palace in 1530s. St. James’s medieval origins were as a leper hospital dedicated to St. James. The palace’s history also includes stories of murder; family arguments between father and son; a lost masterpiece building by William Kent; and lavish royal apartments. Over the centuries, St. James’s Palace survived dilapidation and fire, 19th century reconstruction, and remained the location for important international diplomacy. Rufus Bird—whose office was in the heart of St. James’s Palace for over 10 years—will bring to life the stories of this remarkable palace. He will explore the role of the palace a principal seat of the British monarchy after fire consumed Whitehall Palace, and explain the building’s impact on the development of London and the West End.
More information on Philadelphia available here and for New York available here.
Rufus Bird is an art advisor at Gurr Johns where he is Director of Decorative Arts and Heritage Collections, Europe. After receiving History of Art from Cambridge University, he joined Christie’s as a graduate trainee and joined the Furniture Department in 1999. In 2010, he was appointed by HM Queen Elizabeth II as Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art, and then in 2018 as Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art. At the Royal Collection, he was responsible for about 500,000 works of decorative art across fifteen residences. He is one of the authors of the official history of St James’s Palace published by Yale University Press and Royal Collection Trust in 2022.
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Jeremy Musson | ‘Still Life Drama’: Dennis Severs’ House Revived
Online, Zoom Webinar, 9 May 2023, 2pm ET
Also available as a digital rental from May 10 to May 24
Drawing Room of the Dennis Severs’ House (Photo by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies).
Step back in time at the Dennis Severs’ House, located at 18 Folgate Street in London. Visitors are invited to participate in what the American founder called “a still life drama.” This extraordinary multi-sensory experience allows guests to walk through each room of the house feeling as if the 18th- and 19th-century inhabitants have only just withdrawn a moment before.
Collector and founder Dennis Severs bought the semi-derelict 18th-century Spitalfields house in the 1970s. With no desire to restore, Severs wanted to honor what he imagined were the echoes of the house’s history. He created the fictional story of a Huguenot silk merchant’s family named Jervis, who lived in the house for generations from 1724 to 1914. Each room tells the triumphs and tragedies of this fictional family through the original objects Severs bought from London’s street markets and sale rooms, atmospherically lit by candlelight. Painstakingly assembled over 20 years, many of the rooms were mocked up in the manner of stage scenery using inexpensive materials—all conveying a haunting sense of London’s past: silk waistcoats are flung on rumpled bed clothes, a card game has just ended, fires crackle, and steam rises from a filled punch bowl.
Jeremy Musson recently featured this unusual house in Country Life Magazine. Jeremy will speak about the house which he says “defies categorization…and is a house of mystery and paradox.” He will illustrate the rooms—recently repaired and conserved by the trustees during COVID lockdown—and show English houses that possibly influenced Severs’ designs. He also will show how the founder used costume and set designers, as well interior designers, to create a remarkable home that captures a moment in time and history.
More information available here.
Jeremy Musson is a leading authority on the English country house. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and sits on a number of boards and trusts including the Country House Foundation. He was awarded an M Phil in Renaissance History at the Warburg Institute, University of London in 1989 and was architectural editor of Country Life from 1995 to 2007. Before joining Country Life in 1995, Jeremy was an assistant regional curator for the National Trust in East Anglia. He has written and edited hundreds of articles on historic country houses, from Garsington Manor to Knebworth House. He also presented 14 programmes on BBC 2, making up two series called The Curious House Guest in 2005–07. He lectures and supervises for academic programmes with Cambridge University, London University, and Buckingham University, as well as the Attingham Summer School. His books include Up and Down Stairs: The History of the English Country House Servant (2009), English Country House Interiors (2011), Robert Adam: Country House Design, Decoration & the Art of Elegance (2017), The Country House: Past, Present, Future: Great Houses of the British Isles (2018), and Romantics and Classics: Style in the English Country House (Rizzoli, 2021).
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Sophie Chessum | Clandon Park: Uncovering the Secrets of the Past
Online, Zoom Webinar, 23 May 2023, 2pm ET
Also available as a digital rental from May 24 to June 9
Recovered items following the fire at Clandon Park.
National Trust Curator Sophie Chessum witnessed the devastating fire at Clandon Park, Surrey on the night of April 29, 2015. The Palladian style house, a NT property, had been built in the early 1730s by Thomas Onslow and his wife to impress and entertain their friends, and included a Marble Hall with richly carved marble fireplaces by John Michael Rysbrack. Everyone was safely evacuated, but the 2015 fire raged through the house, leaving Clandon literally open to the skies.
Firefighters and NT staff tried to salvage some of the remarkable artifacts and objects, but the inside was gutted. Planning for the house’s future started almost before the cinders had cooled. Within weeks cranes removed the dangerous timbers and bricks, and a self-supporting scaffold was designed to wrap and roof the four-story structure. Everyone hoped for restoration, but after years of forensic investigation and consultation with experts, it was not deemed possible apart from the Speaker’s Parlour. The NT and teams of experts developed a new approach that celebrates what survives of the 18th-century building and seeks to tell the stories about how this masterpiece was built. The fire may have destroyed much of Clandon’s interior, but it also revealed how the house was constructed and crafted. Hidden secrets from Clandon’s history now revealed include: construction dating from timbers, stones reused from the previous Jacobean structure, hidden doorways and alcoves, and paneling in the State Bedroom.
Sophie will talk about that fateful night, show some of the salvaged fragments and objects under conservation—including the State Bed—and explain what curators and specialists have learned about the house. She will describe the current project which gives access to spaces conserved, offering visitors a unique ‘X-ray view’ and celebrating the craft skills of the people who created some of England’s greatest country houses.
More information available here.
Sophie Chessum is Clandon Park’s Senior Project Curator. Chessum has been with the National Trust since 1998, when she started as a Curatorial Researcher. Since 2002 she has been a curator for a number of internationally important houses, collections, gardens, and landscapes including Clandon Park, Claremont, Hatchlands Park, Hinton Ampner, Petworth House, Polesden Lacey, The Homewood, Uppark, and Woolbeding. She has been a consultancy manager at the National Trust since 2013, where she provides specific consultancy support to Ham House, Sutton House and 575 Wandsworth Road, Osterley Park, Morden Hall Park, Rainham Hall, Carlye’s House, Fenton House, Red House, and 2 Willow Road. In addition she is the curator for Ham House, Richmond Surrey. Since the fire at Clandon Park in April 2015, she has been seconded to lead the salvage elements of this project, providing curatorial expertise on the house and its collection and working closely with archaeologist and conservator.
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Justin Scully | Saving Fountains Abbey: Project Update
Online, Zoom Webinar, 1 June 2023, 2pm ET
Also available as a digital rental from June 2 to June 16
Flooding at Studley Royal Water Garden.
In 2020, Royal Oak donated $250,000 to preserve one of England’s most magnificent sites which was one of the first places in the UK to become a World Heritage Site in 1986. Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal Water Garden is an awe-inspiring landscape, owned by the National Trust since 1983. Cistercian monks established the Abbey in 1132, manipulating the River Skell to harness its power for grinding grain into flour. Over time, the Abbey became one of the largest, richest, and most influential Cistercian sites in Britain—until the Dissolution in the 1530s by Henry VIII.
In the early 18th century, John Aislabie began transforming his nearby landscape garden of Studley Royal into a picturesque design that incorporated the entire wooded valley and featured a huge water garden with lakes, grottos, canals, and cascades. Paths were created with viewpoints that centered on classical statues and follies. In 1767, his son William bought the neighboring Abbey ruins to incorporate them into the landscape and to create the ultimate vista or ‘Surprise View.’ Centuries later, the garden design is much the same, but this important landscape is often flooded from the River Skell. To save the site, the National Trust has partnered with conservation organizations, local farmers, and landowners to implement a natural flood management program.
Justin Scully, the site’s General Manager, will update Royal Oak members on the on-going progress of these efforts, including the planting of woodland and hedgerows and the creation of ponds and meadows to slow the water flow. He will illustrate the changes and explain the challenges faced by the preservation team. Additionally, he will talk about the surviving relics of the Chinese Garden and the wider 18th-century and monastic landscape, as well as exciting discoveries in the historic archives.
More information available here.
Justin Scully is General Manager at Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal Water Gardens, National Trust. The site is one of the busiest properties in the National Trust welcoming in excess of 600,000 visitors per year. Justin has worked for the National Trust for 14 years and in his 6 years at Fountains has overseen multi-million pound investment in visitor infrastructure and conservation, as well as the Skell Valley project, a £2.5m landscape scale conservation project.
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