The English Baroque – A study day with Dr Amy Lin

This study day will explore the Baroque age in Britain (c.1660-1720) through a series of three lectures.

Lecture 1: Royal Baroque
From its origins in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Baroque style was closely associated with power and spectacle. At the Restoration court, Charles II drew on continental precedent to fill his palaces with luxurious paintings and furnishings. This lecture will explore the artists and craftsmen who helped the Stuart monarchs to re-establish a magnificent monarchy, following the austerity and uncertainty of the Civil Wars and Interregnum.

Lecture 2: The Baroque country house
While the court set artistic fashion, many nobles were also keen to establish their own status as patrons of the arts, and many of Britain’s best-loved country houses were created in the ‘Baroque’ period. Visiting some of the most iconic houses of the age, including Chatsworth, Petworth, Castle Howard, and Blenheim, we will meet the patrons who created them, and look at some of the highlights of their sumptuous interiors, gardens and art collections.

Lecture 3: Queens, consorts and courtiers: female art patrons in Baroque Britain
What was the role of women in British Baroque art? In an era when married women’s property automatically belonged to their husbands, could women still be patrons? Female patronage has often been hidden within the historical record, but new research has shown that the patronage of these women has been considerably underestimated. From Queen Catherine of Braganza’s patronage of Catholic artists, to the Duchess of Marlborough’s politically-charged London mansion, we will look at some of the most important works of art and architecture commissioned by women, and consider how they used art to carve out their position in society.

Dr Amy Lim is an art historian and curator, specialising in British fine and decorative arts from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. She is curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and of the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. She is also an exhibition researcher at Tate, contributing to British Baroque: Power and Illusion (2020) and the forthcoming Women Artists in Britain. Amy has degrees in History and Literature & Arts from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She runs an online art dealership, and has published articles and essays on a variety of art-related topics from gothic garden monuments to female patronage.

Image and source: Castle Howard – By Pwojdacz (talk).Original uploader was Pwojdacz at en.wikipedia – Taken by Pwojdacz, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8542526nage.