Society of Antiquaries of London Launches Fundraising Series
Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House.
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From the press release, via Art Daily:
The Society of Antiquaries has launched a series of fundraising events Past Matters: Shaping Our Future at Burlington House in support of the Society’s bold vision to transform its historic home into a world-leading centre for the study of heritage. The talks series will take place from 28 October to 19 November 2025 with tickets now available to buy online. These autumn events will enable the Society to commission architectural plans to shape the Society’s future at Burlington House and increase access to the vast collections, expand the Society’s research and education programmes, and create dynamic new spaces for exhibitions, seminars, and events. This will ensure that Burlington House remains a place of inspiration, scholarship, and discovery for generations to come.
George Vertue, Lady Jane Grey, 1748, engraving.
Alongside the talks, Abbott & Holder (30 Museum Street, opposite the British Museum) will sell some early engravings by George Vertue for the Society of Antiquaries from 21 October until December 2025. Seven prints of the 18th-century engravings made from plates by the Society’s first official engraver, George Vertue (1684–1756), all duplicates with copies still part of the Society’s Collection, will be for sale with 65% of the sale price going to the Society. The enterprising Vertue combined his work for the Society with illustrious private commissions and the production of independent engravings, which he sold from his shop in Drury Lane. His ‘tablatures’ of historical royal portraits were ‘collected, drawn, and engraved from ancient original pictures’.
Natasha McEnroe FSA, General Secretary and CEO of the Society of Antiquaries of London, says: “Thanks to our kind sponsors so far we have raised £1.3 million (27%) of the £4.8m cost of the Society’s 999-Year Lease. We invite supporters to sponsor our home in square feet:£500 cover a square foot of Burlington House, while ‘Foundation 1707 Sponsors’ will sponsor four square feet of Burlington House with £2,000 (costs can be spread with monthly Direct Debits). Our supporters will all get a special ‘Bond of Support’ designed by British artist Adam Dant.”
All events cost £30 per person, with tickets available on the Society’s website. Geoffrey Munn’s Halloween talk can also be followed online at a cost of £6. The Society is collaborating with the St. James’s Hotel & Club for the Past Matters season and supporters are able to enjoy a special three-course lunch offer of £30 including a glass of bubbly and event attendees can exclusively enjoy a 20% discount on the exquisite art-inspired afternoon tea by showing their ticket confirmation. The hotel is just across the road in St James’s; pre-booking is essential and the offers are available until 30 November; they can be booked here.
Sale of Early Engravings of the Society of Antiquaries at Abbot & Holder
October — December
From 21 October we are offering seven prints of engravings made from plates by the Society’s first official engraver, George Vertue (1684–1756) for sale with the gallery Abbott & Holder.
Royal Patrons and Collectors in the 20th Century, from King Edward VII to Queen Elizabeth II
Tuesday, 28 October, 6pm
Join Tim Knox FSA, Director of the Royal Collection, for a lively exploration of royal taste and patronage from Edward VII to Queen Elizabeth II.
Myth and Magic: A 16th-Century Charmstone and Its Links to the Society of Antiquaries
Friday, 31 October, 6pm
On Halloween night, join Geoffrey Munn OBE FSA, as he unveils the extraordinary tale of a mysterious 16th-century rock crystal charmstone.
Drawn to Discovery at the Antiquaries
Thursday, 6 November, 5pm
An evening reception with Abbott & Holder at the Antiquaries for a curated selection of highlights from the Society’s remarkable collection of over 55,000 prints and drawings from the 17th to 20th centuries.
Hats off to Tradition: Tales from The Cocked Hat Club
Wednesday, 19 November, 6pm
Roll up! Roll up! Join us for a unique evening that lifts the lid on one of the most curious—and least known—aspects of the ‘Old Lady’, as the Society of Antiquaries is affectionately known.
Talk | Christine Stevenson on Vanbrugh and His Clients
Sir John Vanbrugh, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, 1705–22. Seat of the Dukes of Marlborough.
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From The Georgian Group, in anticipation of Vanbrugh300 in 2026:
Christine Stevenson | John Vanbrugh and the Art of Client Management
The Georgian Group, 6 Fitzroy Square, London, 21 October 2025, 6.30pm
The early eighteenth-country houses designed by John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), including Blenheim in Oxfordshire and the now-lost Claremont in Surrey and Eastbury in Dorset are, or were, remarkable for their bold forms and unorthodox ornament. Yet in one respect Sir John’s work was supremely delicate: the ways in which he persuaded clients that boldness and unorthodoxy were the most economical routes to displays appropriate to their status. His arguments are gossipy, funny, and often suspect. They present the architect less as a designer than as a hedge against financial and reputational risk. At the same time, they offer us a fascinating insight into the sometimes-fraught social and familial relationships in play when it came to spending money on a house. Georgian Group members, £15 / non-members, £18; tickets include a glass of wine.
Booking is available here»
Online Talks | Finding Moses Williams
Upcoming from The Library Company of Philadelphia:
Finding Moses Williams
Online, Wednesday, 19 November 2025, 1.00–3.30
Silhouette of Moses Williams, perhaps by Raphaelle Peale or by Williams himself, after 1802, 9 × 8 cm (Library Company of Philadelphia).
This program of illustrated talks by five speakers will focus on the identification of the exceptional hollow-cut paper profiles created by Moses Williams (1776–1830) at Peale’s Philadelphia Museum and on presenting new historically accurate information about Williams’s life and family. Moses’s parents were manumitted by Peale in 1786 and Moses, who was born enslaved, was then indentured to Peale by his parents until age twenty-eight
Raised within the Peale family, Moses was literate and trained in skills for creating and installing the Museum’s displays of art and natural science. After the installation of a physiognotrace device for creating hollow-cut paper profiles in 1802, Moses was freed and given the concession to operate this new attraction. The popularity of this inexpensive form of portraiture and the highly accurate and elegant profiles Moses cut, made him financially independent.
Recent research into Moses’s life provides us with a clearer understanding of his artistry and other activities, as well as his death date and the identity of his descendants. And, the story of Williams’s birth family illuminates how the practice of indenture used by Free Black families, like the Williams family, was a strategy for seeking financial stability.
A small selection of Moses Williams’s profiles will be on display at the Library Company during November and December and in the Peale Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The program is sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History and the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Registration for this free virtual event is available here»
p r e s e n t a t i o n s
1.00 Welcome — Sarah Weatherwax (Senior Curator of Graphic Arts, The Library Company of Philadelphia)
1.05 Introduction to LCP’s Program in African American History — Wynn Eakins (Reference Librarian and African American History Subject Specialist, The Library Company of Philadelphia)
1.10 Finding Moses in the Peale-Sellers Family Album — Carol Soltis (Project Associate Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
1.35 Presenting Moses at The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum — Nancy Proctor (Re-founding Director of The Peale)
2.00 ‘Not Yet Completely Free,’ Moses and His Family in the Context of the Gradual Manumission Act — Ellen Fernandez Sacco (Genealogist and Independent Scholar)
2.25 Locating Moses William in Philadelphia: New Information about Moses Williams’s Life and Death Based on a Re-examination of Philadelphia’s Primary Sources — Dean Krimmel (Creative Museum Services, Research Consultant to The Peale)
2.50 Moses Williams, A Technical View — Lauren Muney (Silhouette Artist and Researcher)
3.15 Final Q&A
Online Talks | European Prints in Museums in the American South
From ArtHist.net:
Paper Backstories: European Prints in Southern Museums
Online, hosted by Vanderbilt University, 16 October 2025
Staged in conjunction with the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art’s Fall 2025 exhibition Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from the VUMA Collection, this virtual symposium will bring together curators who oversee collections of European prints at museums spread across the South. Each curator will give a lightning-style, 10-minute presentation about their museum’s pre-1915 European print holdings, with the goal of making these collections better-known amongst local, regional, and global audiences of both amateurs and professionals. The symposium also seeks to initiate a collective discussion about how and why European prints often served as catalysts for the formation of institutional art collections in a region with limited public art infrastructure before the turn of the twentieth century. How did old master and early modernist European prints in particular support various progressive and post-World War I- era agendas? What challenges and opportunities face the study and promotion of such objects in the South today? Attendance is free and open to all.
Please register to receive the Zoom link.
s c h e d u l e
12pm (Central Standard Time) Courtney Wilder, The Vanderbilt University Museum of Art, Nashville
12.15 Sarah Cartwright, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Florida State University, Sarasota
12.25 Dana E. Cowen, The Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill
12.35 Maggie Crosland, The Birmingham Museum of Art
12.45 Nelda Damiano, The Georgia Museum, University of Georgia, Athens
1.00 Alyssa M. Hughes, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
1.10 Q&A
1.30 Event concludes
Cambridge Material Culture Workshop Fall 2025
This fall’s Material Culture Pre-1850 Workshop schedule:
Cambridge Material Culture Workshop
Michaelmas 2025
We’re excited to announce the term card for Michaelmas 2025. Each of the four sessions will meet online and in-person at St. John’s, Cambridge, starting at 5pm. For more information, please contact Tomas Brown (tbnb2@cam.ac.uk) or Sophia Feist (stcf2@cam.ac.uk).
27 October
• Corryn Kosik (Edinburgh), The Influence of European Courts at Regent Arran’s Kinneil House
• Matthew Wood (Curator, Castle Howard), Weighing Scales of Power: The State Apartments at Castle Howard
3 November
• David Martin (Cambridge), Feeding the Body to Save the Soul: Love Feasts in Colonial South India, 1830–1842
• Lis Riveros (Cambridge), The Social Architecture of the Interwar English Pub
17 November
• Alice Goldsney (University of East Anglia), Work in Progress: Breaking Bread in Reformation England
• Robert Hewis (Bard Graduate Center), ‘With Sower Sawce their Sweete do Taste’: Sweetness and Morality at the English Banquet
1 December
• Carlo Scapecchi (Arden University), Making and Repairing Luxurious Carriages and Coaches in the Medici Court in Florence, 1591–1650
• Jamie Ostmann (Durham), From the Court to the Coffeehouse: London Chocolate Culture, 1650–1720
Conversations | Regarding History: American Art in Perspective
From The Met:
Regarding History: American Art in Perspective
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 November 2025
Join curators, academics, and artists to mark the end of the American Wing’s 100th anniversary with dynamic conversations and presentations that explore multilayered interpretations of American art and history. Discover how diverse institutions and individuals are bringing history to life for audiences through a variety of engaging approaches that activate digital technologies, showcase innovations in visual and material object-based displays, and center the power of place and the potential for contemporary artistic interventions. Presentations will be recorded and posted soon after the event on The Met’s YouTube channel.
Registration for in-person attendance is available here»
s c h e d u l e
11.00 Introduction — Sylvia Yount (Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, The Met)
11.15 Keynote Conversation
• Edward Ayers (Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus, University of Richmond)
• Christy Coleman (Executive Director, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation)
12.15 Break
1.30 Curatorial Roundtable
Moderated by Sylvia Yount
• Layla Bermeo (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• Kathleen Foster (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
• Sarah Kelly Oehler (Art Institute of Chicago)
2.30 Artist Presentation — Titus Kaphar
3.00 Closing Remarks
New Book | Protestant Relics in Early America
From Oxford UP (use code AAFLYG6 for a 30% discount) . . .
Jamie Brummitt, Protestant Relics in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-0197669709, $149.
In Protestant Relics in Early America, Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.
As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life—including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people—sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.
In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.
Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. In 2017, Brummitt was the recipient of the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Research Fellowship in American Material Culture at The Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also a past fellow of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The History and Presence of Protestant Relics
1 From ‘Memorials and Signs’ to ‘Art That Can Immortalize’: The Evangelical Enlightenment’s Influence on Real Presence in Protestant Relic Culture
2 The ‘Precious Relict[s]’ of George Whitefield: Collecting the Supernatural Memory Objects of a Dead Minister and the Spread of Masculine Mourning in Late Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism
3 The ‘Invaluable Relique[s]’ of George Washington: Sensing the Heavenly Presence of America’s Savior and the Politics of Protestant Relics in the Early Republic
4 ‘The Reign of Embroidered Mourning Pieces: The Rise and Decline of Handmade Relics in Young Protestant Women’s Education and the ‘Feminization’ of Mourning
5 ‘A Sacred Relic Kept’: The Evangelical ‘Good Death’ Experience and Protestant Relics in the Marketplace
6 ‘Protestant Evidence on the Subject of Relics: Catholic Encounters with Protestant Relic Practices and the Christian Roots of American Civil Religion
7 ‘I Was Not a Slave with These Pictured Memorials’: Supernatural Deathbed Experiences as Justifications for Slavery and the Work of Protestant Relics in Black Liberation
8 The Deaths and Afterlives of Protestant Relics: Or, Why Enlightened People Forgot the History and Presence of Protestant Relics
Notes
Bibliography
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Online Talk | Protestant Relics in Early America with Jamie Brummitt
The Library Company of Philadelphia, Thursday, 20 November 2025, 7pm (ET)
Virtual Event | Free
Registration is available here»
Exhibition | Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour
Opening this week at the Lewis Walpole Library:
Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs:
Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 10 September — 15 December 2025
Curated by Hugh Belsey
Known primarily as a caricature artist, Thomas Patch (1725–1782) in fact engaged in a much wider array of activities. He was a landscape painter, experimental printmaker, and a dealer of antiquities and old master paintings. He was also among the first scholars of early Renaissance art. This exhibition will explore the many aspects of Patch’s art, life, and associations with the British community of diplomats, tourists, artists, and collectors in Italy.
Hugh Belsey, a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, has lectured to groups in Europe, America, Australia, and Britain. For twenty-three years he was the curator of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury (UK) where he formed one of the largest collections of the artist’s paintings and drawings. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE in recognition of his museum work. His long-awaited catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough was published by Yale University Press in February 2019, and was awarded the William W.B. Berger Prize for British Art History in 2020.
The exhibition brochure is available at the Library’s website»
Exhibition Lecture | Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs
Presented by Hugh Belsey, guest curator and independent scholar
Thursday, October 16, 7pm
Space is limited and advance registration is required.
New Book | Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector
Coming soon from Lund Humphries (with a related online talk scheduled for October 21) . . .
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 2025), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226814, £40.
This book emphasises Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895)—also known as Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie—as one of the most significant women in the history of collecting. An extraordinary collector, historian, and philanthropist, Charlotte subverted gendered norms and challenged Victorian conventions. This new study establishes Charlotte’s contribution to ceramic history and cultural education, and demonstrates her influential role in transnational artistic networks. Charting Charlotte’s eventful life, McCaffrey-Howarth focuses on her identity as a renowned connoisseur, whose donation of thousands of objects to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum marked a pioneering move for a female benefactor. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector presents unique insight into the social and cultural world of Victorian England and the role of women within this.
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Curator of The Chitra Collection.
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: China-Hunting with Charlotte
1 ‘A Man’s Education’
2 A Welsh Heiress
3 Becoming a Collector
4 ‘Our Ceramic Chasse’
5 English Ceramic Art
6 Collecting World History
7 ‘My Adieux to the Collection’
Conclusion: ‘Old Life Reminiscences’
Bibliography
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Online Talk | Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth on Lady Charlotte Schreiber
Tuesday, 21 October 2025, 14.00–15.30 GMT-4
Part of the series Victorians in the Bookshops, organized by The Victorian Society
Registration is available here»
Lecture | Restoration of the Chancellerie d’Orléans in Paris
Grand salon de la Chancellerie d’Orléans remonté à l’hôtel de Rohan, 2021 (© Archives nationales de France / Nicolas Dion and Nicolas Cantin).
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In November at BGC:
Bénédicte de Montlaur and Cinzia Pasquali
Reconstructing and Restoring an 18th-Century Parisian Landmark
A Selz Lecture in 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 5 November 2025
For over twenty years, World Monuments Fund undertook the remarkable task of restoring the historic Chancellerie d’Orléans. Built in Paris in the early eighteenth century, the Chancellerie displays a decorative program consisting of paintings, stucco, and wood carving by some of the leading artists of the time. In the early twentieth century, the interior was dismantled and put into storage. These treasures were forgotten for nearly a century, until World Monuments Fund began work to reconstruct and restore the spaces. In this presentation, World Monuments Fund president and CEO Bénédicte de Montlaur is joined by the project’s conservator, Cinzia Pasquali. Together, they will narrate the history of the Chancellerie and the conservation work that brought this important example of Rococo interiors back to public view.
Bénédicte de Montlaur is the president and CEO of World Monuments Fund (WMF), leading its mission to safeguard irreplaceable heritage working with local communities worldwide. She is responsible for defining and implementing WMF’s strategic vision in more than thirty countries and leading an international team of seventy employees, as well as an additional four hundred cultural conservation professionals around the world. Under her tenure, WMF has developed the programs Crisis Response Fund and the Climate Heritage Initiative, has opened offices in France and China, and has expanded the International Council of World Monuments Fund, which currently boasts nine chapters globally. De Montlaur’s background mixes culture and the arts, politics, international diplomacy, and human rights. Prior to joining WMF, de Montlaur spent two decades as a senior diplomat with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She served as Cultural Counselor at the French Embassy in the United States, where she led France’s largest international cultural advocacy network and its two partner foundations—Albertine and FACE—directing a team of ninety people in ten US offices. Previously, she was deputy assistant secretary in charge of North Africa at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, United Nations Security Council negotiator on Africa and the Middle East in New York, and French Embassy first secretary in Damascus, Syria. De Montlaur studied sociology and Arabic at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and public affairs at Sciences Po, Paris. She was a Marshall Memorial Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. She has served on the boards of several cultural and educational institutions and is currently a board member of the Maison Francaise at Columbia University. In 2011 she curated an original photographic exhibition entitled Islam and the City. Beyond her professional accomplishments, de Montlaur is a polyglot—speaking French, English, Arabic, and Spanish—and completed the New York City Marathon in 2011 and 2024.
Cinzia Pasquali is a conservator-restorer specializing in painting and sculpture, trained at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (ISCR) in Rome and holding a master’s degree in conservation-restoration from Université Paris III. She has led major restoration projects in Italy and France, including the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the Grande Singerie at Chantilly. Cinzia led the restoration of the interior decors of the Chancellerie d’Orléans. Collaborating with the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France (C2RMF), she has restored key masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Bronzino, and Piero di Cosimo. Internationally recognized for her expertise in painting diagnostics, she frequently works with museums and contributes to academic conferences and publications. She also helped establish a conservation training program in the Maghreb and Middle East through the European TEMPUS project.
Wednesday, 5 November 2025, 6pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members. Book tickets here.
Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.
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