The Female Artists, Actresses, & Playwrights of Strawberry Hill Theatricals

17.00 - 18.00, 16 March 2021

This webinar, introduced and moderated by Emanuela Tarizzo (Gallery Director of Tomasso Brothers Fine Art) will explore the role of female artists, actresses, and playwrights involved with theatre at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill.

Judith Hawley (Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London) will discuss Walpole's activity as a playwright and the custom of private theatrical events of the period. Cynthia Roman (Curator, Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) will present illustrations of Walpole's scandalous gothic play The Mysterious Mother by the artist Diana Beauclerk and the closet built to house them at Strawberry Hill. Laura Engel (Professor of English, Duquesne University) will consider Walpole's literary executor Mary Berry's play Fashionable Friends performed at Strawberry Hill with sets designed by her sister Agnes and starring herself and the sculptress Anne Damer in the leading roles. She will also discuss Damer's close relationship with the famous actress Eliza Farren, re-imagined in Emma Donoghue's historical novel Life Mask.

R E G I S T E R

 

Emanuela is Gallery Director at Tomasso Brothers Fine Art and a member of the board of London Art Week. Since joining Tomasso Brothers in 2014, she has organised exhibitions, including joint shows with fellow art dealers and contemporary artists, authored catalogues and regularly hosted gallery talks. The gallery is renowned for its specialisation in Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, but successful rediscoveries and sales have also included Old Master Paintings. Tomasso Brothers has long collaborated with museums internationally, through loans, donations and acquisitions. Emanuela received her Bachelor's and Masters degrees in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

 

 

 

 

Laura Engel is a Professor in the English department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature, material culture, and theatre. She is the author of several books on women and celebrity including: Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making, and Austen, Actresses and Accessories. She recently co-curated the exhibition 'Artful Nature: Fashion and the Theater 1770-1830,' at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and is currently working on a new digital project entitled, The Art of the Eighteenth-Century Actress.

 

 

 

 

Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London and frequently appears on BBC radio and tv. She works on a range of subjects from gin to Grub street and has a particular interest in the history of the amateur performance. As well as publishing essays on private theatricals, she has edited various eighteenth-century texts, including Jane Collier, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting; Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela; Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, and works by the Bluestocking, Elizabeth Carter. With Mary Isbell, she co-directs RAPPT: Researchers in Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals, a research network which aims to increase understanding and raise the profile of non-professional performance.

 

 

 

 

Cynthia Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research interests include the production, circulation and collecting history of prints in eighteenth-century Britain. She has published many articles and chapter essays on British graphic satire, including pieces on William Hogarth and James Gillray. She was co-curator for the exhibition Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill at the Yale Center for British Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2009-2010, and assisted in editing the accompanying publication. She is editor and contributor to Hogarth's Legacy, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (2016). She is co-editor with Cristina Martinez of Female Printmakers, Publishers, and Printsellers in the Eighteenth Century forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (2022), and Staging The Mysterious Mother, co-edited with Jill Campbell and Jonathan Kramnick forthcoming from Yale University Press.