Exhibitions
The exhibition gallery is a public space within The Lewis Walpole Library that is open Wednesdays 2 to 4:30 pm when an exhibition is on view.
The Lewis Walpole Library usually develops and presents two to three exhibitions that draw from its collections each year, most with associated programming. In addition to the exhibitions on view at the Library in Farmington, the Library collaborates on and contributes to exhibitions held on Yale’s campus in New Haven and at other institutions.
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Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs: Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Curated by Hugh Belsey, Independent Scholar
On view September 10 to December 15, 2025
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.