The Material Culture of Tea at Marble Hill

When Marble Hill was built in the late 1720s, tea was the most fashionable refreshment in England. For Marble Hill’s first owner, Henrietta Howard, taking tea was not only an important part of her daily routine, it also provided opportunities for socialising, and for indulging her great passion for porcelain. This talk will explore Henrietta’s collecting habits, as well as the ways in which tea making permeated polite portraiture, particularly eighteenth-century ‘conservation pieces’ of families at the tea table.

Dr Tessa Kilgarriff is Curator of Collections and Interiors at English Heritage with responsibility for two 18th-century villas, Chiswick House and Marble Hill House. A specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British art, she received her PhD from the University of Bristol. Prior to joining English Heritage, she was Assistant Curator at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village in Compton, Surrey and has previously completed curatorial projects at the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.