From Russia with Love: The Return of the Houghton Masters

A school party being shown around Houghton Hall, Norfolk
A school party being shown around Houghton Hall, Norfolk

Your Heritage

Date awarded
Location
Bircham with Rudhams
Local Authority
King's Lynn and West Norfolk
Applicant
The Sybil Charitable Trust
Award Given
£95100
From Russia with Love was a learning programme about the Walpole Collection of masterpiece paintings at Houghton Hall, based on the highly successful exhibition, Houghton Revisited.

1,440 pupils and their teachers visited the exhibition with free entry. Six volunteers and an Artist in Residence ran workshops and other creative learning activities.

Houghton Hall dates from the 1720s and is the former home of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Now the family seat of Sir Robert Walpole’s direct descendant the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Houghton is considered one of the country’s finest Palladian buildings. By 1736, it housed masterpieces by Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck, but in 1779 the family sold many of these important paintings to Empress Catherine the Great, where they became part of the founding collection of St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum in Russia.

In 2013, the collection was returned to Houghton Hall for the first time in over 200 years for a special exhibition that attracted 115,000 visitors.

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