Call for Articles | Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums
From ArtHist.net:
History Dis-placed: Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums
Volume edited by Karen Shelby and Emily Stokes-Rees
Proposals due by 31 October 2025
History Dis-placed: Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums concentrates on the unique histories and challenges of house museums through a time of unprecedented crisis and change. In addition to being historic landmarks, house museums can be sites of civic engagement and reflection, centers for activism and cultural discourse, and places for public events and gatherings. In the digital age, house-museums have had to renegotiate these identities and interactions with contemporary audiences through innovative practices. Together, the chapters in this volume collectively assert that HHMs can survive as important sources of local history, building support in the local community. These are museums that are challenging us to think differently, overturning conventional paradigms, and taking risks.
Historic house museums are becoming spaces not just of memory, but of activism, dialogue, and cultural regeneration. These changes reflect a growing awareness among museum professionals that the ‘living history’ techniques once popularized in the field may reinforce romanticized or incomplete narratives. Today, interpretive strategies must look beyond static domestic tableaux to explore how the house—as both a physical and symbolic space—contains multiple, often contested, histories. As Vagnone and Ryan assert, “The breath of a house is the living that takes place within it, not the structure or its contents” (2016, 21).
This volume addresses the evolving interpretive practices within historic house museums through four interrelated thematic sections: Visionary Programming, Beyond These Walls, Virtual Vitality, and Sites of Social Justice. Together, these sections reflect a growing movement within the field to reimagine not only what stories are told, but how, where, and for whom they are told. Each section explores a facet of this interpretive shift, offering case studies, theoretical insights, and practical approaches to reframing the work of house museums in the twenty-first century.
Visionary Programming
The first section, Visionary Programming, explores how historic house museums are implementing bold and innovative approaches to interpretation. Moving beyond traditional period rooms and didactic tours, these programs often prioritize collaboration with artists, scholars, descendant communities, and local stakeholders. Through immersive installations, performance-based experiences, and participatory storytelling, such programming seeks to foster emotional engagement, critical reflection, and a deeper sense of connection between past and present. The case studies in this section examine how curators and educators are reconfiguring house museums as sites of inquiry, experimentation, and shared authority.
Beyond These Walls
While the historic house itself remains a central interpretive anchor, many institutions are increasingly working to contextualize their narratives within broader spatial, social, and historical frameworks. The second section, Beyond These Walls, highlights efforts to extend interpretation beyond the physical boundaries of the house. Contributors consider how museums are addressing issues such as land dispossession, enslavement, migration, and community memory—often through partnerships, neighborhood-based initiatives, or landscape interpretation. By reframing the house as part of a larger network of historical and contemporary relationships, these approaches challenge insular narratives and reinforce the museum’s role within the public sphere.
Virtual Vitality
The third section, Virtual Vitality, addresses the increasing use of digital technologies to enhance access, engagement, and interpretation. As early as 1994, John Driscoll asked questions that remain salient today: what can we do with a digital museum? Is it possible to create a pro-active and creatively engaged audience? How can museums present a digital image of an object that functions as an artifact? And, for the purposes of the volume, how can house museums, despite digital and virtual programs, retain the intimacy and aura that differentiates them from other museums? While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual tools across the museum world, many institutions have since embraced the digital realm not as a substitute for physical visitation, but as a space for new forms of storytelling, education, and collaboration. From virtual tours and online exhibitions to digital archives and interactive platforms, this section explores how house museums are leveraging technology to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Contributors also reflect on the epistemological implications of digitization: what is gained, what is transformed, and what is lost when interpretation moves beyond material culture and embodied experience.
Sites of Social Justice
The fourth section will provide case studies that expand upon the research of Marianna Clair. Clair, in 2016, began to look into the connection among the appreciation of local heritage, the creation of activists in local communities, and how to educate citizens about social issues. An example is The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of New York City. The museum presents and interprets a variety of immigrant experiences on the Lower East Side, but also draws on connections between the past and the present to underscore national conversations about immigration. But, as outlined in “House or Home? Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm,” the creation of new house museum over a century ago was to “protect and enshrine American virtue” that was guided by assimilation politics and beliefs. Thus, this chapter will address all types of historicized political activism (Potvin, 2010).
Together, these four sections articulate a vision of the historic house museum as a dynamic, inclusive, and socially engaged institution. Rather than serving solely as vessels of preservation, house museums are increasingly positioned as active participants in contemporary cultural and political discourse. This volume demonstrates how reimagined interpretive practices can make these sites more relevant, equitable, and responsive to the complexities of the histories they are entrusted to tell.
In this Call for Papers, we ask for contributions that examine how historic house museums are navigating decolonial practices, confronting difficult pasts, and opening space for marginalized voices in innovative new ways. The book explores a variety of themes, as they relate to the four thematic sections noted above. Contributors may address the following:
• The role of descendant communities in shaping interpretive direction
• New exhibition models for underrepresented histories
• House museums as civic spaces for protest, reflection, and healing
• Digital storytelling and participatory interpretation
• Theoretical frameworks for understanding domestic space as contested ground
Please submit abstracts of 250–500 words and a two-page CV to co-editors: Karen Shelby, karen.shelby@baruch.cuny.edu, and Emily Stokes-Rees, ewstokes@syr.edu.
AHRC Studentship | Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818)
From the British Library:
Rediscovering a Woman Collector at the British Library:
New Sources and Perspectives on Sarah Sophia Banks
Supervised by Felicity Myrone, Maddy Smith, and Alice Marples
Applications due by 28 November 2025
Extensive materials collected by Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), one of the most important antiquarian collectors of her time, were divided at her death and are held across the British Library, Royal Mint, and Prints & Drawings and Coins & Medals departments at the British Museum. Varying institutional interests and practicalities have impacted their visibility, and the focus of scholarship to date has been on the holdings at the Museum and only her prints and ephemera in nine albums in the Library (L.R.301.h.3-11). This studentship will explore the significant holdings that are yet to be explored at the British Library, revealing Banks’s own cross-format interdisciplinary knowledge taxonomy in detail for the first time.
Banks wrote catalogues of her own collections and kept notes regarding provenance, many of which have been overlooked to date. This project will use these sources to rediscover the full extent and original arrangement, purpose and source of Banks’s prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts, focusing on those at the British Library. The student will explore Banks’ networks of knowledge, methods of collecting, network of contacts, and her strategies and systems for categorising her visual and textual materials. The project asks larger questions around the role of women collectors, knowledge practices, collecting history and scholarship, the emergence of (male) expertise, disciplinary norms and museological frameworks in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relative status of visual and textual knowledge. While Joseph Banks’s collections as a whole and Sarah Sophia Banks’s collections beyond the Library have had sustained academic attention, her holdings at the Library remain largely underexplored. This project matches the recent full cataloguing of her collections at the Royal Mint and British Museum, facilitating cross-institutional research, and impacting practically upon reader access to and understanding of these materials and their provenance.
Banks organises her collections by subject and chronologically, notes the date and often the source of each item, quotes and cross-references other texts and authorities in inserted notes, and writes catalogues of her own collections. Research questions on these rich sources could include:
• How and when did Sarah Sophia Banks acquire her collections? What do her annotations reveal about her network and collecting practices in the 18th century? How do these names connect with the Banks collections beyond the Library?
• What knowledge systems and material ordering practices did she employ? How did she order and construct her unique assemblages? What does this tell us about gendered ways of structuring collections?
• How did her collecting constitute a form of ‘worldmaking’, particularly given her and her family’s social and global networks and perspectives?
• What is the evidence for Banks’s knowledge of other collections (in Britain or abroad)? How did this impact on her own practices?
• How did the nascent professionalism of male collecting and museology in her lifetime affect her collecting?
• Is she quoting from her own (or her brother’s) copies of works in her notes and cross-references? Can we reconstruct her library as a whole? How much survives?
• Can we reconstruct how the collection was physically placed, and what does this reveal about its history, value, visibility and use?
Banks’s social networks and intellectual enterprise have received scholarly attention from literary and art historical scholars. The project would complement existing scholarship by, for example, Edward Besly, 2023; Jan Bondeson, 2001; R.J. Eaglen, 2008; Catherine Eagleton, 2013, 2014; Arlene Leis, 2013, 2014; Anthony Pincott, 2004; Gillian Russell, 2015, 2018, 2020; and Kacie L. Wills and Frica Y. Hayes, 2020, 2024. But these and other scholars have focussed on the few ‘known’ print albums at the Library, mentioning in passing, or ignoring our wider holdings altogether. The project would extend this research to our wider Banks collections, connecting their collecting histories to broader social themes, issues of gender and historical knowledge and, specifically for the Library, our efforts to improve the visibility of our works on paper.
The student’s cataloguing will reveal Banks’s collections to all, with meaningful impact at the British Library and beyond. The history of collections has come to the fore of decolonial debates and activism in recent years and these issues are of important consideration in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Academic sector. There is now a rich scholarly and critical literature which the student will be encouraged to engage with, contributing to conversations both within and beyond the Library. Work on Joseph Banks is well developed and demonstrates the global connections of the family. His links to the slave trade are acknowledged by recent work at the British Library and at other institutions (including, for example, the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). Following guidelines recently established by IDCoP, the Inclusive Description Community of Practice at the Library, the student will investigate Sarah Sophia Banks’s provenance network, recuperating a female collector’s collecting against the wider context of empire and social privilege which she inhabits. Overall, the project offers varied and hands-on, practical experience of identifying, securing, describing and researching prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts.
More information is available here. Pleae direct questions to the British Library Research Development Office – Postgraduate inbox, pgr@bl.uk, and Felicity Myrone, Lead Curator Western Prints and Drawings, Felicity.myrone@bl.uk.
British Library Co-Supervisors
Felicity Myrone (Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings)
Maddy Smith (Lead Curator, Printed Heritage 1600–1900)
Alice Marples (Research and Postgraduate Development Manager)
New Book | Shakespearean Objects in the Royal Collection, 1714–1939
So satisfying to see publications emerge from the AHRC-funded project Shakespeare in the Royal Collection. –CH
From Oxford UP:
Kirsten Tambling, Shakespearean Objects in the Royal Collection, 1714–1939: From National Treasure to Family Heirloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0198964483, $100.
The British royal collection includes nearly 2,000 objects with a connection to Shakespeare. What stories do these objects tell of the relationship between the man often described as Britain’s ‘national poet’ and Britain’s royal family? Royal collecting of Shakespeare did not really begin until 1714, and has therefore broadly tracked the development, and entrenchment, of the Hanoverian—and latterly the Saxe-Coburg Gotha—royal family. Not entirely coincidentally, this period also saw a general increase in public interest in objects associated with Shakespeare’s life and biography, often to the detriment of Shakespeare’s works—a development partially spearheaded by the ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ masterminded by the actor David Garrick at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. The histories of specific works of art in the royal collection, from Thomas Gainsborough’s painting of Mary Robinson to a collection of relic objects relating to ‘Herne’s Oak’ and Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, reveal how royal engagement with Shakespearean objects between 1714 and 1939 contributed to the development of a new constitutional settlement between the monarchy and its subjects under George IV, Queen Victoria, and George V and Queen Mary. During this period, objects relating to Shakespeare—increasingly regarded (by the royal family) as nostalgic souvenirs from a fantastical national past—were useful tools in shoring up these ideas, and in yoking the fortunes of the British monarchy to a new vision of shared national history.
Kirsten Tambling completed her PhD in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London on the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth. She was a postdoctoral research associate for ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’ and subsequently Associate Lecturer on the Curating the Art Museum programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has worked in various museums and collections, including the Royal Collection Trust and Watts Gallery, where she was co-curator of the exhibition James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius (2018). She has published articles on eighteenth-century art, the intersection of art and psychiatry, and the history of collections.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Remembering Perdita
2 A Present from Stratford
3 Old Wives’ Tales
4 Sweet Anne Page and the Family Settlement
Coda: Queen Mary Arranges the Collection
Conclusion: Serried Accumulations
New Book | Shakespeare’s Afterlife in the Royal Collection
From Oxford UP:
Sally Barnden, Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, and Kirsten Tambling, eds., Shakespeare’s Afterlife in the Royal Collection: Dynasty, Ideology, and National Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0198923152, $40.
This collection of essays and images explores a series of objects in the Royal Collection as a means of assessing the interrelated histories of the British royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife across four centuries. Between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the late twentieth, Shakespeare became entrenched as the English national poet. Over the same period, the monarchy sought repeatedly to demonstrate its centrality to British nationhood. By way of close analysis of a selection of objects from the Royal Collection, this volume argues that the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife were far more closely interwoven than has previously been realized.
The chapters map the mutual development over time of the relationship between members of the British royal family and Shakespeare, demonstrating the extent to which each has gained sustained value from association with the other and showing how members of the royal family have individually and collectively constructed their identities and performed their roles by way of Shakespearean models. Each chapter is inspired by an object in (or formerly in) the Royal Collection and explores two interconnected questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? The chapters range across the fields of art, theatre history, literary criticism, literary history, court studies and cultural history, showing how the shared history of Shakespeare and the royal family has been cultivated across media and across disciplines.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction — Sally Barnden, Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, and Kirsten Tambling
1616
1 The ‘Disappointment’ of Charles I’s Shakespeare Second Folio — Gordon McMullan
1700
2 Henry V and Early Hanoverian Self-Fashioning — Emrys Jones
3 ‘A Wild and Unruly Youth’ — Kate Retford
4 Moral Painting — Shormishtha Panja
5 David Garrick and the President’s Chair — Anna Myers
6 Queen Charlotte and the Royal Narratives of Boydell’s Shakespeare Prints — Rosie Dias
7 George III and the Other ‘Mad King’ — Arthur Burns
8 Disability and Mutable Spectatorship — Essaka Joshua
9 Fake and Authentic Shakespeare — Fiona Ritchie
1800
10 ‘Well-Authenticated Blocks’ — Mark Westgarth
11 Why Did George IV Own a Shakespeare First Folio? — Emma Stuart
12 From Performance to Portfolio — Kate Heard
13 Hamlet Disowned — Michael Dobson
14 Princess Victoria and the Cult of Celebrity — Lynne Vallone
15 Shakespeare in the Rubens Room — Eilís Smyth
16 Monument and Montage — Sally Barnden
17 Puck and the Prince of Wales — Gail Marshall
18 Much Ado about Tapestry — Morna O’Neill
19 Disappearances and The Durbar — Vijeta Saini
1900
20 ‘All England in Warm Sepia’: Queen Mary and the Church of the Holy Trinity — Kirsten Tambling
21 Shakespeare in Miniature — Elizabeth Clark Ashby
22 Shashibiya — Eleine Ng-Gagneux
23 Cultural (Dis)inheritance and the Decline of Empire in The Prince’s Choice — Kathryn Vomero Santos
Bibliography
New Book | Shakespeare and the Royal Actor: Performing Monarchy
From Oxford UP:
Sally Barnden, Shakespeare and the Royal Actor: Performing Monarchy, 1760–1952 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0198894971, $110.
Shakespeare and the Royal Actor argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. It provides an account of the relationship between the Shakespearean afterlife and the royal family through the lens of a broadly conceived theatre history suggesting that these two hegemonic institutions had a mutually sustaining relationship from the accession of George III in 1760 to that of Elizabeth II in 1952. Identifications with Shakespearean figures have been deployed to assert the Englishness of a dynasty with strong familial links to Germany and to cultivate a sense of continuity from the more autocratic Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart monarchs informing Shakespeare’s drama to the increasingly ceremonial monarchs of the modern period. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.
Sally Barnden is a Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea. She has taught Shakespeare and early modern literature at King’s College London, the University of Oxford, Queen Mary University, Brunel, and Central School of Speech and Drama. Her first book, Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, and her scholarship has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Theatre Journal, and in the collection Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis. As part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection,’ she co-created a database and virtual exhibition, which are available online at http://www.sharc.kcl.ac.uk.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Player Queens
2 Libertines
3 Warlike Effigies
4 Domestic Virtues
5 Royal Bodies
Epilogue
New Book | Napoleonic Objects and Their Afterlives
From Bloomsbury:
Matilda Greig and Nicole Cochrane, eds., Napoleonic Objects and Their Afterlives: Art, Culture, and Heritage, 1821–Present (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1350415072, $80.
Two centuries after Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, this edited volume brings together a diverse group of historians, art historians, and museum professionals to critically examine the enduring power of visual and material culture in the making of Napoleonic memory. While most discussions surrounding the legendary figure explore his impact on legislative, political, or military reform, this innovative volume explores the global dimensions of the trade in Napoleonic collectibles, art, and relics over time.
Representing new avenues of research and scholarship, Napoleonic Objects and Their Afterlives investigates the material objects and cultural forms that Napoleon inspired through a range of themes. These include art collecting, the circulation and display of objects, political and imperial symbolism, and the flexibility and ambiguity of Napoleon’s enduring legacy. The essays examine how and why, despite his contentious role in contemporary memory, Napoleon continues to escape much historical and popular censure. They explore the ways people have connected with the idea of him: on stage and screen; in museums and galleries; and most intimately of all, by gathering items said to have belonged to him, right down to his toothbrush and locks of his hair.
Napoleonic items can be official or personal, serious or comical, luxury or disposable, yet little work has been done to bring together these diverse cultural histories into conversation with one another. With its broad, multi-disciplinary approach, including perspectives from art history, film studies, cultural history, and museum curation, the book provides a deep critical insight into the cult of personality surrounding Napoleon and its effect on our understanding of celebrity culture today and in the future.
Matilda Greig is a Historian at the National Army Museum in London, specialising in the cultural history of warfare in the 19th century. She is the author of Dead Men Telling Tales (2021).
Nicole Cochrane is Assistant Curator in Historic British Art (1790–1850) at Tate Britain.
c o n t e n t s
List of Plates
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword — Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)
Introduction — Matilda Greig (National Army Museum) and Nicole Cochrane (Tate Britain)
Part One | Collections
1 The Mysteries of Napoleon’s Toothbrush — Harriet Wheelock (Royal College of Physicians of Ireland)
2 Making Napoleonic Memory in Australia: The Dame Mabel Brookes Collection — Emma Gleadhill (Independent scholar) and Ekaterina Heath (Independent scholar)
Part Two | Relics
3 ‘The management wisely refrains from guaranteeing the absolute authenticity of all the exhibits’: Napoleon, Wellington, and the 1890 London Waterloo Panorama — Luke Reynolds (University of Connecticut)
4 Dominique-Vivant Denon’s Reliquary and the Cult of Napoleonic Relics — David O’Brien (University of Illinois)
Part Three | Images
5 The Emperor’s No Clothes: Canova, Citation, and Commemoration in Napoleon as Mars Peacemaker — Melissa L. Gustin (National Museums Liverpool)
6 Icon? Napoleon in Art since 1900 — Nicole Cochrane (Tate Britain)
Part Four | Embodiment
7 I, Napoleon: Blurred Boundaries in Napoleonic Performance — Laura O’Brien (Northumbria University)
8 The Emperor’s New Clothes: Napoleon’s Enduring Impact on Contemporary Media as an Iconic Historical Brand — Aidan Moir (University of Windsor)
Afterword: A One-Trick Pony? Napoleon’s Horse at the National Army Museum — Matilda Greig
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
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
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.
Conference | Bertoli (1677–1743)
From ArtHist.net:
Bertoli (1677–1743): Zeichnerische Eleganz in den Diensten des Kaiserhofes
Italian Embassy, Vienna, 25 September 2025
Organized by Rudi Risatti
Registration due by 19 September 2025
Ab 1707 ‘Dissegnatore di camera’ (Kammerzeichner) seiner Majestät Kaiser Karls VI., jahrzehntelang Kostümbildner des Hoftheaters, früh Zeichenlehrer der jungen Erzherzogin Maria Theresia und ab 1731 sogar Galerie- und Kunstkammerinspektor des Hofes … Antonio Daniele Bertoli, geboren in San Daniele del Friuli und in Venedig künstlerisch ausgebildet, war ein Mann mit weitreichenden Ansichten. Ein Gemälde von Martin van Meytens zeigt ihn während eines Aufenthalts in Rom in Begleitung seines Windhundes Pattatocco, der damals vielleicht ebenso berühmt war wie sein Herrchen. Ziel dieser internationalen Konferenz ist es, die Persönlichkeit Bertolis in ihren verschiedenen Facetten wiederzuentdecken. Dabei soll der Schwerpunkt auf seinem grafischen Werk liegen, das über Sammlungen in aller Welt verstreut ist und zu lange unbeachtet blieb. Ein Großteil seiner exquisiten Zeichnungen, etwa rund 280 Kostümfigurinen von beispielloser Eleganz, werden im Theatermuseum in Wien verwahrt und stehen im Mittelpunkt der Tagung. Die Konferenz ist öffentlich, Anmeldung bis zum 19.9.2025 an vienna.eventi@esteri.it.
Kuratiert von Rudi Risatti, Theatermuseum Wien. Eine Kooperation zwischen dem Theatermuseum und der italienischen Botschaft in Wien.
p r o g r a m m
9.15 Eröffnung der Tagung — S.E. Giovanni Pugliese (Ambasciatore d’Italia in Austria) und Franz Pichorner (Direktor des Theatermuseums)
9.30. Einführung
Rudi Risatti (Wien, Theatermuseum) — Die Eleganz zeichnen: Bertolis Kostümentwürfe im Theatermuseum
9.50 Artist Statement
Monika von Zallinger (Wien) — Bertolis Kostümkunst: Apotheose des Floralen
10.00 Enrico Lucchese (Trieste/Napoli) — I disegni di Daniele Antonio Bertoli a Dresda
10.30 Kaffeepause
11.00 Andrea Sommer-Mathis (Wien) — Bertoli und der kaiserliche Kostümfundus
11.30 Jean-Philippe Huys — Bertoli, disegnatore cortigiano: Grafica e fortuna critica
12.30 Caterina Pagnini (Firenze) — La danza teatrale sulle scene del Settecento
1.00 Pause
14.00 Çiğdem Özel (Wien) — Bertoli als kaiserlicher Gallerie- und Kunst-Cammer Inspector, 1731–1743
14.30 Nadja Pohn (Theatermuseum), Martina Griesser, Nikoletta Sárfi, Katharina Uhlir (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Naturwissenschaftliches Labor) — Bertoli’s Drawing Art: Scientific Investigations with a Focus on Photographic and Other Non-Destructive Techniques
15.00 Paolo Pastres (Udine) — Le Antichità di Aquileja: Un’allegoria di Carlo VI protettore delle arti
15.30 Kaffeepause
16.00 Alexander McCargar (Vienna/Boston) — From Scottish Kings to Chinese Emperors: On Bertoli’s Exoticism
16.30 Juergen Hagler, Nils Gallist, Kurt Korbatits (FH Oberösterreich) — Bertoli Goes Digital: New Horizons
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»
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