SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF COLLECTING
ANNUAL LECTURE & AGM
5.30PM AT THE ART WORKERS GUILD
6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
The AGM will take place at 5.30 pm.
It will be followed by a Lecture on ‘Charles I: King and Collector’ by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures
Charles I’s collection is the most important formed by any British monarch; inventories drawn up by Abraham van der Doort in 1639 and the trustees of the Commonwealth Sales in 1649-51 make it the most comprehensively documented. The collection is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy (February 2018). The lecture will introduce the range of the collection and try to reconstruct its display in some of the more important spaces. This will provide insight into where the King’s taste lay and how it might have different from that of his Queen, Henrietta Maria. Though sold by Cromwell, Charles’s collection was not (relatively speaking) a political issue. The lecture will ask what sort of visual culture Britain might have developed had the Civil War not intervened.
OUR SPEAKER: Desmond Shawe-Taylor
Desmond Shawe-Taylor has been Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures since 2005, before which he was Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery. He has curated exhibitions at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh and London: Bruegel to Rubens (2008); The Conversation Piece; Scenes of Fashionable Life (2009); Dutch Landscapes (2010) The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714-60 (2014) and Masters of the Everyday; Dutch artists in the Age of Vermeer (2015). He is co-curating the Royal Academy exhibition Charles I; King and Collector.
After the lecture there will be a reception to which all members of the Society are invited. Members are kindly asked to let us know if they will be coming to the evening and staying for the reception for catering purposes at: sochistcoll@gmail.com
Anyone wishing to join the Society between now and 1 October should email membership.sochistcoll@gmail.com