The event is part of LAW’s spring and autumn Art History in Focus programme of online events and articles.
Strawberry Hill House, the Gothic Revival villa in Twickenham built by Horace Walpole (1717-97), will host the webinar online on March 16.
The event ‘The Female Artists, Actresses, and Playwrights of Strawberry Hill Theatricals’ will explore the role of female artists, actresses, and playwrights involved with theatre at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.
Judith Hawley, professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, will discuss Walpole's activity as a playwright and the custom of private theatrical events of the period. Cynthia Roman, curator prints, drawings, and paintings at The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, will present illustrations of Walpole’s scandalous gothic play The Mysterious Mother by the artist Diana Beauclerk and the closet built to house them at Strawberry Hill.
Laura Engel, professor of English, Duquesne University, will consider Walpole’s literary executor Mary Berry’s play Fashionable Friends, which was performed at Strawberry Hill with sets designed by her sister Agnes and starred herself and the sculptor Anne Damer in the leading roles.
A ceremonial and tonary manuscript c. 1503-1526 at Sam Fogg, part of ‘Medieval Women: Subjects and Makers of Art’.
On March 23, also part of LAW’s Art History in Focus, dealer Sam Fogg will host ‘Medieval Women: Subjects and Makers of Art’ in conjunction with Fogg’s online exhibition.
It includes a tour of the exhibition in its gallery setting, accompanied by commentary and an in-depth look at select individual works and discussion with specialists including Dr Jana Gajdošová of Sam Fogg, curator of the Medieval Women exhibition, and Dr Alexandra Gajewski, reviews editor at The Burlington Magazine.
Albrecht Dürer's Saint Jerome c.1496 © The National Gallery, London.
LAW’s Art History in Focus launched last autumn. Other events during March include ‘Dürer’s Journeys’, an in-depth discussion of the National Gallery exhibition Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist and a discussion with author Amina Wright on her new book about Thomas Lawrence’s first 25 years.
Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), a Self-portrait, c. 1787. Image credit: Private Collection.
Find out more about Art History in Focus at London Art Week.
