Dr Silvia Davoli is Senior Curator at Strawberry Hill House & Garden, London, a position supported by the Rothschild Foundation, and Research Associate at the University of Oxford. She specialises in the history of collecting and taste, eighteenth and ninteenth- centuries material culture, and the Gothic Revival. She has curated exhibitions including ‘Henry VIII’s Lost Dagger: From the Tudor Court to the Victorian Stage’ (Strawberry Hill, 2025–26) and has published widely on antiquarian networks and collecting practices in Britain, Italy and France.

Dr Lisa Skogh de Zoete is an art historian who has worked and pursused research at many various institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and more recently at the V&A museum. She has been a a founding trustee of theThe Society for the History of Collecting (2016-2024)and is currently a member of the Campaign Board of the Courtauld. She is based in London and she specialises in early modern collecting especially on Kunstkammer collections but also portraiture and female patronage. Lisa has published extensively. Her MA is from the Bard Graduate Centre in NYC and her PhD from Stockholm University. She is the main editor the volume Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663). Early Modern Polypragmatism for Amsterdam University Press (to be published 2026) and she is based in London.

Dr Mia Jackson is Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at Waddesdon Manor, where she has worked since 2017, where she curated an exhibition Flights of Fancy: The Birds of Louis Denis Armand in 2024. She has also co-curated exhibitions on Rothschild Aviaries, Alice de Rothschild,  Rothschild Collecting, and of contemporary artists inspired by Waddesdon. She studied French and Philosophy at the University of Oxford then completed an MA in eighteenth-century French decorative arts at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her doctoral thesis entitled “André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) and Paper: Prints and Drawings in the Workshop of an Ébéniste du Roi” was completed at Queen Mary, University of London in 2016. She previously worked in the Prints and Drawings Department at the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, and English Heritage. Eighteenth-century France is her area of expertise, in particular the links between works on paper and the decorative arts.

Rose Kerr is a specialist in Chinese art, especially Chinese ceramics, and is the author of numerous books on Chinese art. She was Keeper of the Far Eastern Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is honorary associate of the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University, and an honorary fellow at the University of Glasgow. She is a former Chairman, and Trustee, of the Great Britain-China Education Trust; a Trustee of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art; and Museum Expert Advisor for the Hong Kong Government. In 2015 she was made an honorary citizen of Jingdezhen, the historic centre of Chinese porcelain production and in 2025 she was appointed a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Ancient Ceramics Research at the Palace Museum, Beijing.

Tim Knox was appointed Director of the Royal Collection by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018. Previous to that he was Director and Marlay Curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge 2013-2018. Between 2005 and 2013, he was Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and from 2002-2005 he was Head Curator of the National Trust.

He regularly lectures and writes on country houses, architecture, sculpture and the history of collecting. Publications include Sir John Soane’s Museum London (2010), and The British Ambassador’s Residence Paris (2011).

Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is a historian and curator. She is Director of Global Premodern Art and Senior Lecturer in French and British History of Art, c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the V&A Museum and Curator of The Chitra Collection. Her first book Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector was published by Lund Humphries in 2025. She is also writing two other books, the first entitled Sèvres-Mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship with Bloomsbury Academic (2026) and her first trade book with Chatto & Windus for Penguin. She is a proud Trustee of the English Ceramics Circle and a Panel Member for ArtUK and the Arts Council England’s Acceptance in Lieu Board.

Lara Virginie Pitteloud is a Doctoral Research and Teaching Assistant in Art History and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). She holds a BA in Art History and English Literature from the University of Lausanne and an MA from the École du Louvre, Paris. Her doctoral research examines the use of painting collections in the social performance of an ‘enlightened’ identity between Paris and St Petersburg in the 1780s, with a particular focus on the acquisition of the Baudouin collection by Catherine II. In 2024-25, she was a Guest Researcher at the Centre Dominique-Vivant Denon (Musée du Louvre) and a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge (Pembroke College). She is also co-preparing a monograph on the Russian trajectory of the Crozat family’s Parisian art collections.

Ivan Day is well known in the museum world for his recreations of period table settings.

His work has been widely exhibited in Britain, the US and Europe. Recent installations have been the Edible Monument at the Getty Research Institute (2015), Detroit Institute of Arts (2016) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (2019-20). He also worked with Meredith Chilton on an English dessert table at the Gardiner Museum. He is the Chair of the Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions.

Dr. Timothy Schroder is a lecturer and writer. Most of his career has been focused on silver, at Christie’s, as a dealer, and in the museum sector in the USA and the UK. He is a trustee of the Wallace Collection, president of the Silver Society and a member of the Fabric Commission of Westminster Abbey; he served two terms as Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company. His book on gold and silver at the court of Henry VIII was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2020.

Christopher "Kit" Maxwell is the Chair and Eloise W. Martin Curator in the department of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he joined in 2022. Prior to the Art Institute, Kit served as curator of early modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass where he was responsible for collections from about 1250 to 1820, and researched innovations of 18th-century British glass. His 2021 exhibition at Corning, In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s shed new light on the significance of glass in domestic, court, commercial, scientific, and colonial settings. Before the Corning Museum of Glass, Kit worked in several different capacities at the Royal Collection Trust, and from 2005 through 2010 he held the position of assistant curator in the Ceramics and Glass Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Kit received his BA in the History of Art from University of Cambridge, his MA in Decorative Arts from University of London, and his PhD from University of Glasgow. His recent post-doctoral work includes a research degree in Nazi-era Provenance at the University of Glasgow, and another in Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick.

Tim Wilson retired in 2017 as Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum and Oxford University Professor of the Arts of the Renaissance, after more than 25 years. He is a specialist in European Renaissance pottery and decorative arts, especially Italian maiolica. His book Italian Maiolica and Europe was published in 2017; it is both a catalogue of the Ashmolean’s Italian pottery and a study of the spread of the tin-glaze tradition through Europe and beyond. The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-painting was published by Allemandi in 2018. His catalogue of the maiolica exhibition at the MAK, Vienna, Tin-glaze and Image culture, was published in November 2022.

Catriona Seth FBA MAE, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, has published widely (mainly in French) on the literature and cultural history of the Enlightenment. With Marie-Eve Celio, she is currently curating an exhibition on Liotard and Marie Antoinette which will open at the MAH in Geneva in October 2026.

Claudia Wagner is the Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology at Lady Margaret Hall (University of Oxford) and the Senior Research Associate, Gems, at the British Museum. Before that she was directing the gem research at the Beazley Archive (the Classical Art Research Centre) of the University of Oxford for 20 years. She is joint author, with John Boardman, of seven books devoted to the study and publication of ancient gems, including The Guy Ladrière Collection of Gems and Rings (2015) and The Beverley Collection of Gems at Alnwick Castle (2016), both written with Diana Scarisbrick.

Dr. Silvia Davoli

Horace Walpole was emphatically not royal, yet his self-fashioning as 'Prince of Strawberry Hill' was anything but accidental. This lecture explores how Walpole,  the son of a Whig prime minister with no claim to aristocratic lineage, constructed an alternative pedigree rooted in the arts and patronage. His collection deliberately spanned the courts of the Tudors, the Valois and the Medici, the last of whom, having risen to power through commerce and political acumen rather than hereditary privilege, offered the most compelling mirror to his own family's trajectory. Strawberry Hill, this lecture argues, was Walpole's answer to the problem of dynasty: a house that manufactured its own lineage through carefully assembled networks of objects boasting royal provenance, building a powerful narrative around the very concept of courtly inheritance. In doing so, Walpole became one of the first to shape a lasting historical and aesthetic understanding of the court and its art.

Image: Portrait of Catherine de Medici and her Children. Studio François Clouet (c.1515-1572), 1561. Strawberry Hill Collection Trust]

Dr Lisa Skogh de Zoete

Queen Christina of Sweden’s (1626 - 1689) place at the centre of a family network of northern European royal collectors and patrons has been little studied. But her relationship with her mother, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg (1599 - 1655), was fundamental to her personal development. Drawing on the exempla of the Kunstkammer in Stockholm, this paper will explore how Christina’s passion for collecting – and the wider cultural milieu that informed it – was inherited from her mother and later echoed in her successor, Hedwig Eleonora’s (1636 - 1715), vast collecting activities. This is a politico-cultural platform that Christina has often been portrayed as abandoning in later life. But did she really?

Image: Pierre Signac, Watch case in gold, precious stones (now missing) and enamelled paintings, with a symbolic portrait of Queen Christina and a celebration of the Swedish army’s lootings. Stockholm, Royal Collections, c. 1648, Courtesy of Royal Collections/ Kungl. Husgerådskammaren. (HGK SS 244)

Dr Mia Jackson

Madame de Pompadour’s image was closely linked with her relationship to Louis XV and she carefully curated allegorical depictions of herself in porcelain, marble and paintings. This lecture will provide an overview of Madame de Pompadour’s patronage of artists, artisans and manufactories with a particular reference to the importance of friendship, in tribute to the speaker’s great friend and mentor, Dame Rosalind Savill (1951-2024). As well as an exploration of Pompadour and friendship, Mia will particularly focus on a recent discovery and its afterlife with the Rothschilds in the nineteenth century.

Image: Madame de Pompadour en déesse de l’Amitie, Vincennes Manufactory, Private Collection

Rose Kerr

The Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing was home to the Emperor and his entourage from the early Ming dynasty, the 15th century. Each emperor commissioned works of art and household accoutrements during his reign, as well as receiving numerous gifts, leading to an accumulation of fine objects in the Palace storerooms. The assemblage of objects by the Qing imperial household, particularly during the Qianlong reign (1736–1795), is one of the most impressive cultural activities in Chinese history. The Qing imperial collection consists of three parts: objects used in daily life, objects reserved in the inner palace that were enjoyed by the emperor and which served as models for his artisans, and objects that were given away as gifts. This lecture will discuss the Forbidden City and its collections.

Image: 18th century imperial gold wine cups, Wallace Collection

Tim Knox, CVO

Tim Knox explores the acquisitions of porcelain by successive Queens Consort – Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, as well as gifts received and purchases made for the Royal Collection during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

From Queen Alexandra’s modest tea set decorated with transfer prints of her own photographs, to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s passion for Chelsea botanical pieces, collecting porcelain has been a hobby of successive Royal consorts. Queen Mary was a particularly avid and discriminating collector, while Queen Elizabeth II’s rare but well-informed purchases of Sèvres were encouraged by expert advisers. The Royal Collection has also been greatly enriched by important gifts of porcelain, while, unusually, at least some of these pieces are still in regular use.

Image: RCIN 405848. Richard Jack, The Chinese Chippendale Drawing Room, Buckingham Palace, 1926 © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2026 | Royal Collection Trust

Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth

A headstrong scholar and collector who contributed hugely to the study of medieval literature and the history of ceramics, Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895) is an unsung heroine of Victorian Britain. This talk celebrates Charlotte's fascinating long life, which included two marriages, ten children, scandalous affairs, thirty collecting trips around the world, and a celebrated translation of the Welsh medieval Mabinogion. A self-taught artist, Charlotte sought out works by Holbein and Velázquez in the 1840s and soon developed a specialist eye for European ceramics, even excavating factory sites and rediscovering lost archival sources. From 1885 onwards, she donated a treasure trove of 5,000 objects to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum- unprecedented bequests for a woman collector at this time. Drawing on her recently published book, Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth traces the adventures of this inspirational figure.

Image: Joseph Willems, The Music Lesson, c.1765, porcelain, Chelsea porcelain factory, 38.9 × 33.9 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Lara Virginie Pitteloud

Art collecting constituted a deliberate strategy through which Catherine II positioned Russia within the community of nations described by Denis Diderot as “polite nations” (nations policées), claiming parity with rulers such as Louis XV and Frederick II of Prussia. This lecture unfolds in three steps. It explores how the empress projected the image of a poweful ruler through the acquisition of paintings in France and in England, focusing on key cases such as the purchase of the Walpole collection (1779). These acquisitions, when circulated as gifts and undertaken within the context of her romantic relationships, also functioned to shape intimates according to Catherine’s civilizing ideals. This strategy culminated in the development of the Hermitage between the late 1770s and 1787, a performative space where the empress enacted European cultural and social ideals for herself, her intimates, and privileged diplomatic guests through gallery visits, theatre, and entertainments inspired by the Parisian Salons.

Image: After Alexander Roslin, Empress Catherine the Great, before 1780, Oil on canvas, 339 x 142 cm, The Marquess of Cholmondeley, Houghton Hall © Houghton Hall, Norfolk

Ivan Day

Dr Timothy Schroder, DLITT, FSA

Like food itself, the way in which it was served has constantly evolved, no less in the realm of great stately banquets than in more domestic dining.  These changes were reflected in the composition of dinner services. Eating later in the day created a need for more lighting equipment and changing menus resulted in silversmiths and ceramicists having to provide new kinds of wares. This lecture looks at France and England in the eighteenth century, as innovations in the kitchen led to dramatic changes in the appearance and performance of state banquets, changes that came to be known as 'service à la Francaise'.

Image: A plate from The Modern Cook, by Vincent la Chapelle, 1733

Dr. Christopher (Kit) Maxwell

This talk will examine the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago as a landmark intersection of art, history, and imagination. Installed beneath the museum’s Michigan Avenue staircase, the sixty-eight rooms—crafted at a precise 1:12 scale—were conceived by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, a wealthy Chicagoan, and her workshop. Drawing on extensive travel, archival research, and collaboration with skilled architects, craftspeople, and modern artists, Thorne created immersive interiors inspired by European, American, and Asian traditions. Neither toys nor strict historical reconstructions, the rooms blend rigorous study with theatrical license, echoing the period-room installations popular in American museums. Seen by figures such as Walt Disney, and admired by Queen Mary, they reveal how miniatures function as tools of education, nostalgia, and taste-making. Ultimately, the rooms preserve not just imagined pasts, but the values and aesthetics of elite American culture between the wars.

Image: E-25: French Bathroom and Boudoir of the Revolutionary Period, 1793-1804. Date: c. 1937. Artist:: Designed by Narcissa Niblack ThorneAmerican, 1882-1966

Professor Timothy Wlson

Four plates survive from an extraordinary set with shields of the arms of the humanist King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, and his wife, the Neapolitan princess, Beatrice of Aragon. Though long attributed to Faenza and dated around the time of Matthias and Beatrice's wedding in 1476, it will here be argued that the set was made in Pesaro, one of most dynamic centres of early Renaissance artistic maiolica, about 1486-8, perhaps commissioned as a gift to Beatrice from her cousin Camilla, ruler of Pesaro.

Conjoined arms, which are often described as those of husband and wife, may often be more accurately described as the arms of the wife. Other examples of Renaissance armorial maiolica commissioned by women for women will be discussed.

Professor Catriona Seth

Maria Theresa used family portraits for personal and political ends and patronised a wide variety of painters, from those she employed at court like Bencini and Meytens, to visiting artists like the Genevan-born ‘peintre turc’ Liotard. Some of their portraits were put on view in public spaces—at times as part of a specific decorative scheme—whilst others were reserved for more intimate uses. Though less interested in the graphic arts than her Mother, Marie Antoinette, whose aesthetic interests lay more in the field of interior decoration, took joy in possessing family portraits both of her own children and of her Habsburg relatives—including miniatures transformed into jewels she might wear. What can the collection and circulation of the portraits the Empress and her daughter commissioned or owned tell us about their attitude towards family likenesses and the uses of art in general?

Image: Jean Etienne Liotard, Archduchess Maria Anna wearing a portrait bracelet

© MAH, Genève. Photo B. Jacot-Descombes

Dr Claudia Wagner, FSA

This lecture will explore the intellectual, political, and dynastic dimensions of gem collecting in the courts of Europe. Focusing on engraved gems (intaglios and cameos) as markers of erudition and taste, I will examine how princes (and princesses) fashioned themselves not merely as rulers, but as learned connoisseurs engaged with classical antiquity. Collecting became a form of courtly magnificence that intertwined scholarship, lineage, and authority. Intaglios functioned as portable antiquities, symbols of dynastic continuity, and tools of diplomatic exchange. Within the framework of Courtly Magnificence – Gender, Dynasty and Politics, the lecture will question whether collecting practices reinforced masculine ideals of rulership while shaping political identity and cultural legitimacy.

Image: The 'Felix Gem' (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum 1966.1808): dark red-brown agate 35 x 26 x 3 mm    (photo: C.Wagner)