Lectures & Conferences
Lewis Walpole Library-Farmington Libraries Exhibition Talk
28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
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Lewis Walpole Library-Farmington Libraries Exhibition Talk, Farmington
Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs: Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Presented by Hugh Belsey, Guest curator and Independent scholar
Thursday, October 16
7 pm
space is limited and advance registration is required
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 154 Main Street, Farmington, CT 06032
Known primarily as a caricature artist, Thomas Patch (1725-1782) in fact engaged in a much wider array of activities. He was a landscape painter, experimental printmaker, and a dealer of antiquities and old master paintings. He was also among the first scholars of early Renaissance art. This exhibition will explore the many aspects of Patch’s art, life, and associations with the British community of diplomats, tourists, artists, and collectors in Italy.
Hugh Belsey, a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, has lectured to groups in Europe, America, Australia, and Britain. For twenty-three years he was the curator of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury (UK) where he formed one of the largest collections of the artist’s paintings and drawings. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE in recognition of his museum work. His long-awaited catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough was published by Yale University Press in February 2019 and was awarded the William W.B. Berger Prize for British Art History in 2020.
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28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Save the date: February 12, 2026
Speaker: Frédéric Ogée, Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité
Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium