The Pre-Raphaelite Society Founder’s Day Lecture - “Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: Peter Rose and Douglas Schoenherr” Presented by Donato Esposito

Online / Sat 23rd October 2021

Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: Peter Rose (1927-2020) and Douglas Schoenherr (1945-2020).
2020 was a year that shook the world with a major pandemic; it was also the one that took two collector friends in Brighton and Ottawa. United in their dual love of the Pre-Raphaelite and anything Victorian, Peter and Douglas exemplified a type of collecting and way of life that is very unusual now. Formed without great financial resources, nonetheless each amassed several hundred artworks from the period 1850-1900, which for the most part each left to their favourite public collections, both in Canada and Britain. This lecture, studded with personal anecdotes, compares and contrasts these two very different collectors.
Donato Esposito is an academic and curator who specialises in 18th and 19th-century art, collecting and taste. From 1999 to 2004 he worked as Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and he was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2012-13. His monograph Frederick Walker and the Idyllists was published in 2017.

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