Dorich House Museum

11:30 Thursday 21 March | Saints, Sashes, and Ciphers: Porcelain Easter Eggs at Dorich House |£5 | BOOK HERE

Easter Egg with Virgin and Child in Deep Blue and Gold. Image credit: Ellie Laycock

Saints, Sashes, and Ciphers: Porcelain Easter Eggs at Dorich House.

This tour begins by looking closely at a set of five porcelain Easter eggs on display at Dorich House Museum. Dr Louise Hardiman will share some findings from the museum’s recent decorative arts cataloguing projects funded by Art Fund and the Decorative Arts Society. She will then link the history of decorative eggs with other objects in the collection and the more well known “Fabergé eggs” to illustrate the taste and cultural policies of the Romanov rulers in late imperial Russia. Lastly, the talk considers the importance of Easter as the principal religious festival in the Orthodox faith and how this was reflected in art.

Dr Louise Hardiman MA (London) PhD (Cantab) is an art historian, writer, and lecturer specialising in Russian and Ukrainian art and the history of British-Russian cultural relations. Her current research focuses on Imperial Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the history of Russian Art in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Her recent publications include Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives (2017), The Story of Synko-Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales (2019), and Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture, and British-Russian Relations (2023).