Online Lecture, 6pm - 7pm

Hamilton Palace

Dr Godfrey Evans

Hamilton Palace, situated ten miles south of Glasgow, was Scotland’s grandest private residence and most important treasure house. It was a tragedy that thousands of its preeminent items were sold off in the 1880s and in 1919, and the huge building itself demolished in the 1920s.

In its heyday, Hamilton Palace was two combined palaces: a south-facing Baroque palace, built by the 3rd Duke of Hamilton and his wife, Duchess Anne, in the 1690s; and an enormous northern extension erected by Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton, between 1824 and 1830. This richly illustrated lecture will show how the 10th Duke developed and transformed Hamilton Palace. It will reveal how he added magnificent old items made of exotic and expensive materials from Russia, Italy, France and Britain, and also commissioned spectacular furniture incorporating porphyry and pietre dure parts he had acquired in Italy. It will focus attention on how the Duke concentrated on acquiring important works associated with Charlemagne, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Marie-Antoinette and other major figures of the past in order to underline his own exceptional status as Duke of Hamilton, Duke of Brandon, Duke of Chatelherault and the Premier Peer of Scotland.

The lecture will also include unpublished information about the Duke’s large purchase of London-made furniture owned by Ranald George Macdonald, the 20th Chief of Clanranald, at an auction in Glasgow in 1830, which was urgently needed to furnish parts of the newly completed northern extension, and current research about his extensive employment of the Glasgow carver and gilder William Murray.

Dr Godfrey Evans is Principal Curator of European Decorative Arts at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh. Over the past forty years, he has acquired many important items from Hamiton Palace for NMS. His eighteen-chapter, two-volume book on Hamilton Palace, the Dukes of Hamilton and their outstanding collections was published last September.

A Zoom link will be sent to members about a week in advance.

Non-members are welcome; tickets cost £9.

To book, contact events@furniturehistorysociety.org

Fall-front secretaire with seventeenth-century Japanese lacquer panels, made by Jean-Henri Riesener for Queen Marie Antoinette, 1783. Bought by the 10th Duke at the Erlestoke Park sale in 1832. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York