Stephen Duffy – The Discovery of Paris
Tickets still available on the door.
Paris, before it became the city we think we know.
In the early nineteenth century, British artists and travellers encountered a capital that could delight, surprise and sometimes disturb.
At this year’s Wooburn Festival, Stephen Duffy invites audiences to step into a Paris that feels at once familiar and utterly strange. In “The Discovery of Paris,” he explores how early nineteenth-century British artists were among the first to capture the city in images that still shape how we imagine it today.
Through a rich selection of drawings, prints and watercolours, Duffy brings to life the work of Turner, Girtin, Bonington and Thomas Shotter Boys, artists who found beauty, drama and curiosity in a city very different from the modern capital we know. Their Paris is not just elegant boulevards and grand monuments, but a place of movement, industry and vivid everyday detail.
Alongside these images, the talk reveals the often surprising reactions of British visitors encountering Paris for the first time. This was a city where machinery stood in the Seine pumping water into homes, where laundresses worked along the riverbanks near Notre-Dame, and where even the bridges bustled with unexpected trades. Some visitors were enchanted; others were unsettled, even shocked.
Drawing on his experience as former Senior Curator of the Wallace Collection and his extensive work on nineteenth-century art, Duffy offers both expert insight and engaging storytelling. The result is a talk that uncovers not just how Paris looked, but how it was experienced—and how it was, in many ways, “discovered” by those seeing it through fresh eyes.
This promises to be a vivid and illuminating journey into a lost Paris, seen through the brushstrokes and impressions of those British artists who were among the first to try to capture its spirit.
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