About this program
Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance; many more are hidden treasures; and all were beloved homes that bore witness to the achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
Authors Juliet Carey and Abigail Green will discuss their new book, Jewish Country Houses (Brandeis University Press, 2024), which explores these remarkable houses, their architecture and collections, and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created and transformed them. Moderated by Laurel O. Peterson, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art.
About the authors
Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust / Rothschild Foundation) in Buckinghamshire. She previously worked at the National Gallery, the National Museum Cardiff, and the Royal Collection. She has curated exhibitions and published research on subjects including the artists Jean-Siméon Chardin, Thomas Gainsborough, Guercino, Nicholas Hilliard, and Gustave Moreau, as well as French drawings, Sèvres porcelain, contemporary ceramics, and the history of collecting.
Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. Her first book, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001), explored the tensions between state-building and nationhood in Germany through a comparative analysis of Hanover, Saxony, and Württemberg. Her more recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She won the Sami Rohr Choice Award in 2012 for her biography Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (2010). Her current book project, tentatively titled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights, is supported by a three-year Senior Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.
About the moderator
Laurel O. Peterson is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Her research projects have engaged deeply with the art and architecture of the British country house. She explored these themes in her doctoral dissertation at Yale, “Making Spaces: Art and Politics in the Whig Country House, 1688–1745.” In addition, she contributed research to the “Enlightenment for All” project at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, as the YCBA World Monuments Fund Fellow.
This event is cosponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and Yale Jewish Studies Program.
Top image
Eugène Lami, The Salon des Familles at the Château de Ferrières, ca. 1865, watercolor on paper, courtesy of Pauline Prévost Marcilhacy
