As part of the Richmond Literature Festival, for the first time the stories of the historic houses and gardens of the Arcadian Thames have been brought together in one fine volume; the lost houses as well as those that have been saved.
In June 1834 King William IV and Queen Adelaide came for dinner at Boston Manor House. In this talk we look not just at that occasion but also at how the friendship between the House’s owners, James and Jane Clitherow, and the royals came about — a friendship that saw them become the first commoners to host this King and Queen.
Throughout his life, the great landscape painter J.M.W. Turner absorbed poetry, from the classics to the work of poets of his own time, and strove to write poetry himself.
William Hogarth has been described as the father of English painting but over the course of his career he came into conflict with many people.
In 1746 Horace Walpole published his poem, ’The Beauties: an Epistle to Mr Eckardt the Painter’. From that moment until the artist’s death some thirty years later, Walpole became the principal patron of the German born John Giles Eccardt, commissioning from him a series of small-scale portraits of himself and his coterie, which he hung in the intimate surroundings of his blue bed-chamber at Strawberry Hill.