Our speaker of the evening, will be Ms. Pat Anne Halfpenny. Ms. Halfpenny has twenty-eight years experience in Museums including fourteen as Keeper of Ceramics at the City Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England and now Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum which houses an unrivalled collection of American decorative arts from 1640-1860. She is recognized internationally as a leading authority on English ceramics with unrivaled expertise in post-medieval Staffordshire wares. She has also made numerous public presentations and taught at many levels within the Museum, within Universities, and at venues through Great Britain and the USA. She presented many papers on the results of primary research to various forums within Great Britain and the USA including archaeology, ceramic and design history courses at Universities, specialist collector's societies and professional curator's seminars. She also has published an extensive body of material on ceramics from popular articles for collectors, specialist papers for academic journals, exhibition catalogs and books.
Ms. Halfpenny's subject for this evenings lecture will be "English Ceramics at Winterthur." The collection at the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum ia known as one of the foremost collections of American Decorative Arts and in ceramics this causes some confusion. In the context of Winterthur, "American Decorative Arts" means decorative arts used in America from 1740-1860 and of course this includes English Pottery. For those fortunate enough to be familiar with the collections, Pat Halfpenny hopes to give some personal insight which will add to your knowledge. For those with no idea what they hold, you are in for a feast of tinglaze, tortoiseshell, saltglaze and may even porcelain if time permits. From maned and dated punch bowls to cauliflower tea services and from gilded saltglaze to tiles fireplaces we shall see the collected ceramic masterpieces of Winterthur Museum.