ESU-SF Calendar

Once again the Branch will be welcoming summer with a cocktail party at the St. Francis Yacht Club! An evening by the bay is sure to be enjoyable and Consul General Julian Evans will be joining us as our guest of honor. Mark your calendars and click here to download an invitation.

The Silent Auction is always an exciting part of our summer event and the proceeds are important for our scholarship program. Please consider making a contribution to the auction. Dinner vouchers, spa treatments, tickets to musical, theatrical or sporting events and weekend getaways are always popular. Wine, objet d'art, pictures, etc. make for a varied and interesting selection.

Click here to download a donation form. And if you are able to help, please contact Laura Phelps at 415.271.1828 or lphelps@esusf.org.

Please help make this a very successful Silent Auction!

Kensington Palace has a rich history beyond two of its most famous residents, the late Diana, Princess of Wales and Princess Margaret. The palace was built in the 1690s by Christopher Wren for the asthmatic King William III, who preferred the clean and rural air of Kensington to his damp riverside palace of Whitehall. Nicholas Hawksmoor was appointed Clerk of the Works and the project was hurried forward, as the Queen was anxious to move in. However it was there that Mary II died of smallpox in 1694, at the age of only 32, and where William III died eight years later. But Wren's work was done too fast (indeed one workman was killed by a collapsing wall) and it had to be rebuilt when George I inherited the palace in 1714. Colen Campbell, the Deputy Surveyor, probably designed the three new state rooms but a little known painter, William Kent, won the job of decorating the state apartments. He decorated the principal state room, the Cupola room, with a faux coffered ceiling as well as painted an astonishing group portrait of George I's servants on the King's Grand Staircase. However, George I died before he could enjoy the refurbishing, and it was under George II and Queen Caroline that the palace became high society's beating heart. Here Queen Caroline created her wonderful collections of natural and historical curiosities (a humming bird, a unicorn's horn, antique medals). After her horrific death in 1737, Kensington's glory days were over, and when George II died (on the watercloset) at Kensington in 1760 the court moved elsewhere. The abandoned and by now ramshackle palace became the home to the penniless Duke and Duchess of Kent in the early 19th century because they had nowhere else to go. At that point no one predicted that their little insignificant little daughter, Victoria, who was born and grew up at Kensington, would one day inherit the throne. It was at Kensington that she learned, aged 18, that she had become Queen. The history of Kensington Palace has been the focus of much new research for the representation of the palace now in progress. Due to re-open in 2012 with a new entrance and four new visitor routes, Kensington Palace is undergoing dramatic and exciting change.

DR. LUCY WORSLEY (Oxford University, University of Sussex)
Dr. Lucy Worsley has a degree in history from Oxford and a doctorate in architectural history. Currently, she is Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and leads a team of 14 curators who cover the five Historic Royal Palaces. She was formerly an Inspector of Historic Buildings for English Heritage and has published guidebooks and articles on a range of English country houses. Previously she worked for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. She is the author of books on Hampton Court Palace and 17th-century country house life. Other books include Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses, published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007 and described by the Mail on Sunday as 'astonishing achievement by an immensely talented and innovative historian'. Her latest book is Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace, 2010. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is a frequent lecture in England and abroad. She regularly appears on the BBC presenting programs about historical figures, royal palaces, and courtly life in from the 16th through the 18th century.

This event is co-sponsored by the Royal Oak Foundation.

Sir John Soane is considered one of the greatest of all British architects and his idiosyncratic house-museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, attests to his innovative architectural ideas, mastery of space and light, and collecting prowess. Over his life, Sir John Soane amassed an extraordinary collections of paintings, sculpture and architectural elements so large that it fills nearly every corner of his home. However, Regency London was home to another great architectural collection, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham's "Museum of Medieval Art", in Waterloo Bridge Road. Cottinghams' collection, sold in 1851, was rich in specimens of gothic and early English architecture, and included perhaps the earliest sequence of 'period rooms' in any museum. In this lecture, Tim Knox, Director of Sir Jon Soane's Museum in London, will compare Soane's surviving collection with the lost one of Cottingham, touching upon other collections formed by architects of the Regency era. He will also consider the question as to why modern visitors can still enjoy the treasury of Soane, that tormented genius of British architecture, while Cottingham's antiquarian elysium has passed into almost complete oblivion.

TIM KNOX (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)
Tim Knox is the Director of Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, an appointment he received in 2005. After studying at the Courtauld, he was later Assistant Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection and in 1995 joined the National Trust as its Architectural Historian. He was appointed Head Curator of the National Trust in 2002, and was one of the major champions for the Trust's acquisition of Tyntesfield, Bristol and the acquisition of The Workhouse in Nottinghamshire. He was Chairman of the Mausolea and Monuments Trust between 2000 and 2004, and is a Trustee of the Spitalfields Trust. He is a member of the Government's Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and regularly writes and lectures on art, architecture and the history of collecting.

This event is co-sponsored by the Royal Oak Foundation and the Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation.

The 2009 ESU Annual Conference in New Orleans was a great success!

The 2010 Annual Conference of The English-Speaking Union of the United States will be held September 22 - 26, at The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Check the National ESU website for more!