The Georgian period gave us many of Britain’s most beautiful buildings – in cities, towns and villages. Yet much of our Georgian inheritance remains in danger...

£15

Drawing on the book on the Georgian London Town House which she has recently co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Kate Retford will explore the world of the Georgian London Town House. Whilst we know much about their counterparts in the country, the town houses of this period have been substantially neglected – not least because so many of these buildings have been destroyed, their collections dispersed. Chatsworth, for example, has been officially recognised as one of the country’s greatest national treasures, but, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this was of lesser importance to the Cavendish family than their town house on Piccadilly, reduced to rubble in 1925. Professor Retford will discuss the various sources from which the authors in the Georgian London Town House book were able to reconstruct key Georgian town houses and, crucially, their collections: from those residual material fragments, through plans and designs, inventories and catalogues, to visual material and descriptions in correspondence and diaries.

Professor Kate Retford is a professor of History of Art at Birkbeck University. She researches eighteenth-century British art, particularly the portraiture of the period, issues of gender, and the country house art collection, and has published a number of books on these topics.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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London-based Cowtan & Sons originated as a high-class wallpaper manufacturer in 1791 and decorated hundreds of buildings including royal palaces, country houses, vicarages and public institutions, in the United Kingdom and overseas, for over a century until the business closed in 1938. Cowtan’s order books (1824-1938), held in the Prints & Drawings Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, contain thousands of samples of hand- and machine-printed wallpapers, wallcoverings and furnishing textiles alongside customers’ names, addresses and order dates. They often identify rooms to be decorated, from drawing rooms, libraries and boudoirs to butlers’ pantries, housemaids’ bedrooms and gardeners’ cottages.

In this talk, Dr Wendy Andrews will examine how the Cowtan orders illustrate changing, as well as enduring, tastes in wallpaper colours, patterns and materials, and will also consider how patterns popular in the late Georgian period continued to be requested by customers into the early twentieth century.

Wendy Andrews was awarded a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge in 2017. Her doctoral thesis on the Cowtan & Sons’ archive was supported by the Cambridge Arts & Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership. She also holds a Master of Studies (MSt) in Building History from the University of Cambridge and a BA Hons in English & History of Art from the University of Leicester. Wendy is part-time Research Associate at Queens’ College Cambridge and part-time Course Tutor for the MSt in Building History at the University of Cambridge. She also undertakes research projects on historic interiors.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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Wanstead House was built by Colen Campbell between 1713-20 for Richard Child, later Viscount Castlemaine and 1st Earl Tylney. The house, furnished by leading designer of the Georgian period, William Kent, was recognized as one of the ‘noblest houses in Europe’ and its gardens were associated with leading landscape designers including George London and Henry Wise, Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and Humphry Repton. In June 1822 the entire contents of Wanstead was sold in order to settle significant debts. Two years later, the house was demolished.

This paper charts the rise and fall of this influential Georgian estate and considers how we can reconstruct histories of lost sites. It raises important issues surrounding the complexities of material evidence and questions how the study of a lost house can contribute to our understanding of eighteenth-century estates more broadly. Most importantly, it draws attention to the fact that houses that are lost in actuality should by no means be as lost to studies of the English country house.

Dr. Hannah Armstrong graduated from Birkbeck College, University of London in 2016 with her PhD: ‘The Lost Landscapes and Interiorscapes of Wanstead House: Reconstructing the eighteenth-century estate’. Hannah is currently in the process of writing ‘Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace’, due to be published in 2022.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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In the bicentenary year of George Augustus Selwyn’s birth, this talk will explore the extraordinary life of the polymath collector, politician and socialite known as George the Wit. A lifelong friend of Horace Walpole, he was notorious as a member of the Hell Fire Club and teased for his regular attendance at public executions, but on account of his well-known wit delivered in deadpan he often had the last word. A long-term MP for Gloucester, he also controlled two pocket boroughs of Ludgershall and Whitchurch but never made a speech in the House of Commons, and he is considered to be the founding father of Charlotte, North Carolina, as he sold 100 acres there to two Americans who started building the city.

His art collection forms part of the nucleus of the Wallace Collection having passed into the Seymour family via his adopted daughter Maria Fagnani, Marchioness of Hertford, natural daughter of his friend “Old Q”, the Duke of Queensberry. His close friendship with Frederick Fifth Earl of Carlisle, who became his executor on his death, resulted in many of his  personal papers and letters being preserved at Castle Howard. These include a wealth of financial records which illustrate his collecting habits. He was a patron of Reynolds (painted by him four times), collected pictures and objects with historical provenance, commissioned engravings and amassed an extensive library. A frequent visitor to the salon of Madame du Deffand in Paris, where he also purchased French and Sevre porcelain for both himself and his friends. His artistic and heraldic abilities combined to design with two friends the mock arms of Whites Club which now adorn their everyday china.

A descendant of George’s uncle Henry Selwyn, Richard Selwyn Sharpe has spent over 40 years researching his life. Particular fields of research include tracing items from George’s collection now in the Wallace Collection, and George’s papers in the Castle Howard archives. He is a practising Barrister , and a regular contributor to historical journals.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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Martin Myrone joins us for this lecture which will explore the life and work of the painter, printmaker and poet William Blake. Considered a seminal figure of the Romantic Age, Blake was known for his radical and revolutionary views as well as his technical innovation as an artist. From September 2019 to February 2020, he will be the subject of a Tate Britain exhibition ‘William Blake: The Artist’ which will be the largest show of his work in almost 20 years. Martin will touch upon some of the works displayed in this exhibition and will show how Blake can be rediscovered as a visual artist for the 21^st century.

Martin Myrone is an art historian specialising in British art of the 18th and 19th centuries and Lead Curator of British Art to 1800 at the Tate.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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This lecture will explore the life of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Close confidante to Queen Anne, she was an influential and powerful figure at Court, both glamorous and controversial. Her spectacular arguments with the Queen, the architects and workmen at Blenheim Palace and her own family made her infamous for her temper. Sarah hoped to wield power equal to that of a government minister and when her relationship with the Queen soured she blackmailed Anne with the threat of revealing secrets which, if known, would have been greatly damaging. This lecture will bring to life the fascinating life of a complex character.

Ophelia Field is an author who has written for The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Review and others. Her book on Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, was published in 2002 and in 2008 she published a book on the Kit Kat Club. She currently teaches MA Biography at the University of Buckingham.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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£15

Osterley Park is inextricably linked to the name of Robert Adam. Little of what the public sees at the house today is untouched in some way by his invention. Yet none of this would have been possible without the banking and trade fortune that his clients, the Child family, had begun to establish over a century before Adam completed his works at Osterley. This lecture explores the works of European and Asian fine and decorative arts which the Childs collected as they worked their way to the forefront of the banking business during the throes of England’s Financial Revolution and its aftermath. Many of these works eventually came to Osterley where a proportion of them have remained to the present, or have recently returned. Focussing in particular on the Childs’ paintings, this lecture describes the networks by which they secured their prized items. It also considers what those treasures said about their possessors in a period of significant transformation, both for the Childs and for the nation in whose financial affairs they were intricately involved

John Chu is Assistant Curator of Picture and Sculpture for the National Trust.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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£15

Dr Thomas Almeroth-Williams (University of York) offers a panoramic new perspective on Georgian London by following in the hoof and paw prints of the city’s horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs. By placing these animals centre stage, he will challenge long-held assumptions about Georgian London. Was the capital really only a bit player in the Industrial Revolution? Was the city agriculturally unproductive? Did sociability drive recreation unchallenged? Tom will answer these questions as part of a whistle-stop tour ranging from West End mews to East End industrial yards. Copies of Tom’s book, City of Beasts, will be available to purchase at a special reduced rate on the evening.

Thomas Almeroth-Williams is a Research Associate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, as well as a Communications Manager for the University of Cambridge. He has previously worked for The National Gallery, Historic Royal Palaces and SAVE Britain’s Heritage

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

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(Photo credit Yale Center for British Art)