Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/02/2019
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
Market Lavington Community Hall
Categories
The Friends of Wiltshire Churches activities in 2019 start with a lecture by Christopher Rogers entitled: Horace Walpole and the ‘Gothick’ Revival.
During the 18th century there was a fashion for the ‘Gothic’. First came a range of ‘gothic’ poetry and novels, melancholic and sinister in mood in mood, ‘ruins and ravens’ as it was described. The best-known and most influential exponent was Horace Walpole whose novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ is a synthesis of the gothic mood. Walpole then rebuilt his humble house at Twickenham as a paradigm of the new mood, a house gothic in both interior and exterior; an asymmetrical mass of towers and turrets on the outside and riotous gothic ornamentation within. Walpole was a man of huge influence and his house, Strawberry Hill was much visited and admired by ‘society’.
This lecture explores the half a century or so when ‘Strawberry Hill Gothick’ became an architectural fashion, suitable for ‘pittoresque’ houses, for follies and churches; an antidote to the fashionable austere Palladianism. There remain some fine examples of this period, not least in this county, where once stood the grandest of all ‘gothick’ monuments, Fonthill Abbey.
Christopher Rogers is well known for his entertaining and inspiring lectures both for NADFAS and the Marlborough Summer School amongst many others.
Date: Saturday 9 February at 3.00pm. Tea will be available from 2.45pm.
Venue: Community Hall, St Mary’s Road, Market Lavington, SN10 4DG.
Fee: £20 payable on the day.
Please register with Martin Knight by email.
With best wishes for 2019.
Martin Knight
Chairman
Friends of Wiltshire Churches