Monday 14th April 2025

Making Sense of Portraits in Country Houses

Dr Amy Lim
 

Country houses are often full of historic portraits, but for today’s visitor it is not always clear who the sitters are, why they are there, or why they mattered. Visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, would have immediately known how to ‘read’ the portraits and understand their visual clues. Focusing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits, in this lecture we will look closely at clothes, poses and accessories, and learn how to decode them. Through this, we can understand how they were used to communicate status, networks and identities.

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Dr Amy Lim

Dr Amy Lim delivered a wonderful lecture for us last year on Women Artists in Britain. She is an art historian and curator, specialising in British fine and decorative arts from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. She is curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and of the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. Amy has degrees in History and Literature & Arts from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She runs an online art dealership, and has published articles and essays on a variety of art-related topics from gothic garden monuments to female patronage.