Tapestries at Doddington Hall: Collecting, Conservation and Display

This study examines tapestries as part of the collecting and display strategies of the Delaval family at Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire. The Doddington tapestries are the focus of the author’s doctoral research within the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. The work centres on the alteration and deployment of seventeenth-century tapestries in two bedchambers at Doddington during the eighteenth century. A summary is given here of selected material evidence for the tapestries’ cycle of display, repair and re-display, in order to illustrate some of the research questions provoked by the study. The key theme is: as material evidence, not subordinate to the documentary archive, what new narratives of the historic decorative interior, and of identity and taste, do the Doddington tapestries have the capacity to relate? As well as contributing to discourse on Doddington Hall, the Delavals and tapestry in the domestic interior, the research thus aims to push forward appreciation of the added value that conservation – or any direct study of material culture – may contribute to dialogues on the past.