Thursday 11th October 2018
Speaker: Dr Zara Anishanslin
Venue: Hanbury Hall, 22 Hanbury Street, London E1 6QR
6.30pm
Admission: £5.00 plus booking fee
Enigmatic Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763) was one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers. She also was one of its most prolific. A clergyman’s daughter with family connections to the Royal Society of London and Chelsea Physic Garden and a large number of Huguenot clients and friends, she had intimate ties to global natural history networks that found aesthetic expression in her design work. Her popular designs both mirrored the larger cultural fascination with things botanical and helped foster a craze for wearing botanical fashion in silk not only in London, but around the British Empire. This talk explores the life, labors, and designs of one of Spitalfields’ most fascinating eighteenth-century women.
Speaker Biography:
Dr Zara Anishanslin is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World was released by Yale University Press in 2016 (and in a paperback edition in 2017), and was a Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize.
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