Wednesday, December 16, 2009

A Tour of Strawberry Hill

Wednesday, December 16, 2009




Loretta reports:


A number of items in the Strawberry Hill exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art come from Yale’s collection at the Lewis Walpole Library.  As chock full of fabulous things as as the exhibit is (and I get dizzy trying to remember what all I saw), it doesn’t include every item from Walpole Library's collection.  They very graciously allowed the V&A and Bath Museum and others to participate.  Today I discovered that they also offer an online tour of Strawberry Hill.

Further exploration of the site yields a number of images of items in the collection.

Lady Diana Beauclerk’s cabinet
.
Some Rowlandson prints.
An assortment of works by Unknown.
The pair of Sevres vases I lusted for.
Check out the Grinling Gibbons frame on this Portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, and Catherine Shorter, Lady Walpole.


Though they don’t have every image online, there’s quite a bit to see here, so I’ll leave the rest of the browsing to you.

4 comments:

Isabella Bradford/Susan Holloway Scott said...

Loretta, you're seriously, seriously tempting me to brave Rte. 95 during the holiday madness to go see this exhibition....!

Out of curiosity (and ignorance): is there any connection between Horace Walpole and Lewis Walpole?

LorettaChase said...

I wondered, too. But it turns out a couple named Lewis gave the house to Yale. IOW it's the Lewis's Walpole Library. I would suspect that at least some of our CW interpreters would be familiar with it--and may have studied there.

LorettaChase said...

Oops, just found out more. Turns out William Sheldon Lewis collected the collector Walpole, so it's not just his house but his collection. The story is here:
http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxviii/1999.10.15/ae/p18bac.html

Vanessa Kelly said...

I want that cabinet. Boy, do I want it!

 
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