The Pink Album: Artistic and Zoological Puzzles in Clare College Fellows’ Library

Tim Chesters will be talking about an unidentified album of prints, paintings and natural historical curiosities in Clare Fellows’ Library. This object brings together Eastern art and Enlightenment science in a combination as enigmatic as it is beautiful. To understand its contents, and how it ended up at Clare, we must journey from Throgmorton Street in early eighteenth-century London via the forests of Bengal to the Forbidden City in Beijing. Along the way lie encounters with a dazzling array of creatures and characters, foremost among which a mysterious merchant and collector, known to some as ‘The Don’.

Tim Chesters is a University Associate Professor in Modern and Medieval Languages and Fellow in French at Clare. His research and teaching specialism is in French Renaissance literature and thought. For the last four years he has also been uncovering secrets from Clare Fellows’ Library. This latest instalment follows a previous talk at the 2020 Gala Day, on the newly-discovered alchemical books of William Butler (1535-1618).