“Courtly Magnificence - Gender, Dynasty & Politics”
Haughton International Lecture Series Held At The British Academy, 10 - 11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH on Wednesday, 24th and Thursday, 25th June 2026
Madame de Pompadour: Love, Friendship and the Arts
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.
A family network of collectors: Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, Christina of Sweden and Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp
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?
Service a la Francaise
Dr Timothy Schroder & Ivan Day
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'.
The earliest royal maiolica commission: the service for Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and his wife Beatrice of Aragon
Professor Timothy Wilson
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.
Collecting Intaglios: Princes as Scholars
Dr Claudia Wagner
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.
Staging the Past: The Thorne Miniature Rooms and the Theatre of Historic Interiors
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.
Collections of the Forbidden City
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.
China Queens – twentieth-century royal collectors of porcelain
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.
Virtuous circulations? Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette’s family portraits
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?
An Imperial « Gluttony »: Art Collecting and the Self-Fashioning of Catherine II’s Court
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.
“Thinking outside the Court": Horace Walpole, Prince of Strawberry Hill
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.
Our Ceramic Chasse': The Exceptional Legacy of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
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.