The Annual General Meeting for the year ending 30 June 2019 will be held in the East India Club. Tickets for a sandwich lunch with a glass of wine, at the price of £20 per head, should be booked with the Events Secretary at least 7 days in advance

Talks 

The Geffrye Museum of the Home is entering a new era. Currently closed for a huge £18million re-development, the ‘Unlocking the Geffrye’ project. Lucy Littlewood, Director of Development, will be giving us a sneaky peak of what we can expect to see when the doors reopen in spring next year. While the period rooms will remain, new spaces and galleries will be asking us to reveal and rethink the ways in which we live in order to live better together.

English Heritage is engaged in a major project to conserve and re-present the 18th-century Palladian villa, Marble Hill House in Twickenham. Dr Esmé Whittaker, Curator of Collections & Interiors will focus on the conservation of a marble-topped pier table with peacock carving placing it in the context of the wider re-display plans. The table, which was rediscovered in Australia in 1987, was one of four side tables made for Marble Hill's Great Room in c.1730. English Heritage has also commissioned a newly carved replica table to be displayed alongside the historic example.

Leela Meinertas, Curator, V&A, will give an update from the V&A including the Harewood tables and pier glasses acceptance in lieu, the refresh of the 20th century gallery and 20th century acquisitions of a Lubetkin chair and the Mae West lips sofa.

Yannick Chastang and Dr Mia Jackson, Curator of Decorative Arts, Waddesdon Manor (Rothschild Collections) National Trust will talk about the study and conservation of the large lacquer cabinet by R. Dubois and J. Goyer, c.1770, Waddesdon Manor, National Trust that took place 2012-2018. In 2012, the 4 meters tall lacquer cabinet was studied and analysed with a view to conserving the degraded lacquer and gilt bronzes. Following an extensive report and discussions, the cabinet was fully dismantled and taken to Kent for conservation between 2014 and 2017. The project proved to be a logistical and technical challenge, resulting in many discoveries about one of the most unusual cabinets ever made.