Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

Cover, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

Edited by Michael Snodin with the assistance of Cynthia Roman

With contributions by Peter Sabor, Eleanor Hughes, Ruth Mack, Michael Snodin, Stephen Clarke, Bet McLeod, Lisa Ford, Kevin Rogers, Michael Peover, George E. Haggerty, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Stephen Lloyd, Julia Marciari Alexander, Nigel Llewellyn, Timothy Clayton, Irene Aghion, Katherine Coombs, Timothy Wilson, Robin Emmerson, Margaret K. Powell, Stephen Clarke, Hope Saska, John Riely, Emily Lanza, and Susan Odell Walker

Published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press

356 pages, 12 x 10 inches, 300 illustrations, cloth, ISBN 978-0300125740

Publication date: December 15, 2009

Description

Horace Walpole (1717–1797), as the youngest son of the powerful Whig minister Robert Walpole, grew up at the center of Georgian society and politics and circulated among the elite literary, aesthetic, and intellectual circles of his day. His brilliant letters and writings have made him the best-known commentator on the rich cultural life of eighteenth-century England. In his own day, he was most famous for his extraordinary collections of rare books and manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, prints and drawings, furniture, ceramics, arms and armor, and curiosities, all displayed at his pioneering Gothic Revival house at Strawberry Hill, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham. This timely and groundbreaking study of the history and reception of Walpole’s collection as it was formed and arranged at Strawberry Hill coincides with the restoration of this endangered house. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill assembles an international team of distinguished scholars to explore the ways in which Strawberry Hill and its collections engaged with the creation of various and interconnected political, national, dynastic, cultural, and imagined histories.

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