Tessa Murdoch presents an online lecture about Huguenot artistic production in early modern London. Focusing on the museum’s collections, Murdoch examines an array of paintings, prints, drawings, maps, and sculpture with notable examples including François Gasselin’s 1692 drawing View of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and William Hogarth and Charles Grignion’s 1746 engraving Mr. Garrick in the Character of Richard III. This talk is based on research completed for her recent book, Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture (V&A publishing, 2021), which traces the international networks and artistic products created by French Protestant artists and craftsman in the wake of the Huguenot diaspora in the late seventeenth century.
Tessa Murdoch PhD FSA worked at the Museum of London (1981–1990) and at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1990–2021) where she was the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Research Curator from 2019. She is an adviser for the National Trust and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, a board member of the Idlewild Trust, and chair of trustees of the Huguenot Museum, Rochester. Murdoch’s most recent book, Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture, was published by the V&A in 2021. She is currently consulting on the forthcoming publication Great Irish Households: Inventories from the Long Eighteenth Century (2022), and is co-editing, with Heike Zech, A Cultural History of Craft in the Age of Enlightenment (expected 2024).
The lecture includes opportunities to ask questions with the Q&A feature.