Author talk: Dr Breeze Barrington
TICKETS AVAILABLE SOON
About the talk
Anne Killigrew, the artist who painted ‘Venus Attired by the Graces’ in the Falmouth Art Gallery collection, was a pioneering painter and poet of the Restoration Court. Killigrew was a great favourite of the future queen, Mary of Modena, who was a patron of her work and encouraged her talent. At a time when few women had access to education, Anne Killigrew began a promising career as one of the foremost artists of her generation.
She came from a family steeped in the court. Her uncle, Thomas, was a renowned playwright, a friend of Charles II and manager of the King’s Theatre, and was one of the key figures in licensing women actors. Her father, Henry, was the Protestant almoner to the Catholic James, Duke of York. Her aunt, Elizabeth, had been one of Charles II’s mistresses in exile and mother of one of his many illegitimate children. They were restoration courtiers in the truest sense of the phrase. Their origins, by contrast, were rather murky, for the Killigrews were an ancient Cornish family, who had ruled the south- western shores of Falmouth as pirates for two centuries.
In this talk, Dr Breeze Barrington will discuss the life and legacy, of this brilliant young woman who, though she died tragically young at just 25 during an outbreak of smallpox, achieved great things.
About the book
In 1673, fifteen-year-old Maria d’Este travelled from Italy to marry James, Duke of York, the future King of England and a man twenty-five years her senior. Thrust from a pious life on the path to become a nun, at the debauched court of Charles II she set about recreating the world she’d left behind – a world where women were highly educated, exercised power and celebrated art and artists with concentrated patronage.
The Graces resurrects the life of Maria, later Mary of Modena, and those of the extraordinary young women she surrounded herself with at the Restoration court. From Sarah Jennings, later Sarah Churchill, keen politician and ‘favourite’ of Queen Anne, to revered poet Anne Finch and founder of legendary literary salon Hortense Mancini, these were women who defied the conventions of their time and the forces of misogyny working against them. The era they lived through would be one of the most tumultuous England had seen: one where parliament would invite a foreign power in the form of William of Orange to invade England, depose its king, and risk thrusting the country back into civil war. What is much less well-known is that within this world existed another: a world of female friendship, learning and artistic endeavour. The Graces is that story.
About the author
Breeze Barrington is a cultural historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the 17th century, with particular focus on women’s history and female artists. Her PhD, on the artistic cultures of the early Stuart court, was awarded in 2021, from Queen Mary, University of London.
As an arts writer and critic, she has written for the Financial Times, the TLS, Apollo Magazine, The Art Newspaper, CNN Style, Art UK, and The Conversation, and has appeared on podcasts including Not Just the Tudors, the TLS Podcast, Talking Tudors, History Hack, and the Colnaghi Foundation. She has also worked as a consultant for Working Title and Monumental Pictures.
She teaches literature at the University of Cambridge and has previously taught courses in seventeenth century literature and culture at Queen Mary, University of London as well as Biography/Non-Fiction on the prestigious Creative Writing degree at the University of East Anglia.
Breeze is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her first book, The Graces, about Maria of Modena and the community of female learning she cultivated within the Jacobite court, was published by Bloomsbury in July 2025.