The Society for the History of Collecting
is pleased to invite you to its
Annual General Meeting and Annual Lecture
on Thursday, 10 September 2026
at the Society of Antiquaries of London
The AGM will start at 5:30pm and will be followed by the Annual Lecture at 6.30pm.
We are delighted to announce that Charles Sebag-Montefiore CBE
will deliver the Annual Lecture
"Collecting Catalogues of Private Collections: Confessions of a Bibliomaniac"
The event is run as a hybrid event, the AGM and lecture will also be streamed via Zoom.
Charles has spent over 55 years creating the definitive library devoted to the study of the British as art collectors and patrons, and to the provenance of paintings. The earliest manuscript is a catalogue of the collection of King Charles I, and the earliest auction catalogue is the posthumous sale in London in 1693 of Prosper Henry Lankrinck. There are privately printed catalogues of collections, early auction sale catalogues, related manuscript letters and inventories, association copies, annotated copies, private press books and fine bindings. In due course this library will pass to the National Gallery, London.
The first part of the lecture will focus on the 1970s, the first decade of the library, and describe some of the purchases, Charles's gratitude to the academics who gave him encouragement and to the antiquarian booksellers, many of whom became good friends. The study of provenance was then in its infancy, and the opportunities then available to a young book collector now seem extraordinary in retrospect. The first decade of Charles's collecting was certainly exciting, but is not representative of the library as it now is. The second and the principal part of the lecture is devoted to a chronological survey of the library as a whole, starting with the period of King Charles I, followed by the catalogues of (among others) the collections at Wilton House, Petworth House, Houghton Hall, Strawberry Hill, Grosvenor House, Marbury Hall, Raby Castle, Baron Mayer de Rothschild of Mentmore and Sir Francis Cook of Doughty House in Richmond.
Charles's current project forms the third part of the lecture: he is partly writing and partly editing a Dictionary of British & Irish Art Collectors 1600-1939. This huge project is only achievable with the collaboration of scholars, friends, descendants and curators who are contributing articles on collectors whom they have particularly studied. The Dictionary will be published as an illustrated, online publication, hosted by the National Gallery. This is now expected to go live in the Spring of 2028 and to contain c.750 articles.
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Charles Sebag-Montefiore is a Trustee of the National Gallery Trust, Honorary President of The Walpole Society, a member of the Academic Committee of Waddesdon Manor and the Treasurer of several charities devoted to fine and applied art, museums and art galleries, books, libraries and conservation. He has served as Joint Secretary of the Society of Dilettanti since 2002 and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Society for the History of Collecting.
He is the joint author of The British as Art Collectors: from the Tudors to the Present (Scala, 2012), a survey on collecting in Great Britain over 500 years. His book on A Dynasty of Dealers: John Smith and Successors 1801-1924 (Roxburghe Club, 2013), is a study of the art market in nineteenth century London for high-end Dutch and Flemish pictures, told through a collection of 564 unpublished letters between significant collectors and a leading dealer of the day. He is also the joint editor of Brooks’s 1764-2014: The Story of a Whig Club (2013), and is currently working on a Dictionary of British & Irish Art Collectors, 1600–1939.
Among previous trusteeships, he was a Trustee of the London Library (1991-2003), the Samuel Courtauld Trust (1992-2007), the Art Fund (2000-11), the National Gallery, London (2012-2021) and the Harewood House Trust (2014-2023).
