Sunday, December 16, 2018

Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill


 
 Strawberry Hill house
20 October 2018 through 24 February 2019.


 

 Good review with images


For the first time in 176 years, pieces from Horace Walpole’s collection return to Strawberry Hill house in Twickenham, along the banks of the Thames west of London, England.
The Lewis Walpole Library, 154 Main Street Farmington, Connecticut 06032 has hosted curators from Strawberry Hill as Fellows in Farmington to research Walpole’s collection and pick up where Lewis and LWL curators have left off on tracking down the lost and not-so-lost treasures with which Walpole filled his “little gothic villa” and which were dispersed at auction in 1842.

Horace Walpole acquired Strawberry Hill in 1747 and over the next 40 years he transformed it into one of the most famous examples of Gothic Revival, filling it with an impressive collection of artworks – ranging from pictures, by artists such as Van Dyck and Holbein, to objets d’art of every period and style. By the late 1750s the villa had become one of the most popular destinations for the fashionable, who were eager to see the eclectic interiors created by a man who was not only one of the most prolific writers of the time, but also one of the fathers of modern British art history.
The Gallery at Strawberry Hill, Edward Edwards
The Gallery at Strawberry Hill (c. 1781), Edward Edwards. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University


Nearly 30 pieces of the LWL’s Walpoliana are now on loan to Strawberry Hill for four months.








For more details see https://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/losttreasures/