The ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies is pleased to welcome Matthew
Winterbottom, Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, as our special guest for the final CEMS event for 2022. Matthew has extensive expertise in early modern European decorative arts across diverse media and in the history of cabinets of curiosity.

Join CEMS for an evening in conversation with Matthew followed by drinks, in-person on the ANU campus. This is the first in-person seminar held by CEMS and promises to be a wonderful evening for our members and wider audience to meet and mingle before the end of year.

Matthew Winterbottom is Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum. His research interests cover a wide range of European decorative arts from the late medieval to the early twentieth centuries, and he has expertise in furniture, ceramics, glass and textiles and sculpture, with a particular interest in 17th- and 18th-century British and European silver and goldsmiths’ work. He is actively researching the Michael Wellby bequest – a collection of 500 pieces of Continental goldsmiths’ work and Kunstkammer objects – that was bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum in 2012. Matthew has extensive knowledge of the history of Kunstkammern, Schatzkammern and cabinets of curiosities of the early modern period and of the revival of interest in such collections in the 19th and 20th centuries that led to the extensive faking and reproduction of precious objects.

Matthew has over 25 years’ experience working with and researching European decorative arts and is committed to exploring ways of making this material engaging and accessible to museum visitors. He has held curatorial roles at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection and the Holburne Museum in Bath. He joined the Department of Western Art in the Ashmolean Museum in March 2014 as Curator of Nineteenth-Century Decorative Arts where he was tasked with building a new collection of Nineteenth-Century decorative arts and redisplaying the Nineteenth-Century Art Galleries. Since January 2017, he has been responsible for the entire Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts Collections.

Matthew is at ANU in November as an international visitor at the ANU School of Art and Design funded by the ANU Research School of Humanities and the Arts.

This event is presented by the Centre for Early Modern Studies

For further information and to register please see: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/anu-centre-for-early-modern-studies-end-of-year-reception-tickets-459403597527