In collaboration with the project ‘Dramatizing Penshurst’, Victoria Wainwright’s class will visit Penshurst Place in April with their sketchbooks and take inspiration from the plants mentioned in the script of Lady Mary Wroth’s play Love’s Victory and those visible in the gardens and landscape on site.

Penshurst Place has a range of different garden spaces, from enclosed formal gardens to more open orchards, walks and landscapes.

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Sketching in the grounds, with views of the hybrid architecture of Penshurst Place, will help artists to respond to the organic and historical resonances of Love’s Victory, whose script is which is full of natural landscapes and details of flowers. In the opening scene, for example, the romantic hero, Philisses, sings to the meadows:

‘You pleasant flowery mead
Which once I well did love
Your paths no more I’ll tread
Your pleasure no more prove
Your beauty more admire,
Your colours more adore
Nor grass with daintiest store
Of sweets to breed desire…’

 

 

 

 

 

Through the seasons, the range of different garden spaces at Penshurst offer on-site models for illustrating these scenes.

 

The course is officially held at Kent Adult Education Centre in Sevenoaks and the students and tutors will periodically visit Penshurst Place.Victoria Wainwright will be visiting Penshurst Place with her students on:

Tuesday 17th 10:00am-12:00pm
Tuesday 17th 13:00pm-15:00pm
Wednesday 18th 10:00am-12:00pm
Thursday 19th 13:00pm-15:00pm

Thanks to Paul Salzman who has published an excellent online edition of the Huntington manuscript of Love’s Victory via the Early Modern Women’s Research Network, which gives an erudite introduction and allows readers to view professionally photographed images of the Huntington manuscript, taken by the Huntington Library, alongside transcriptions of the text for the first time. See Early Modern Women’s Research Network – Love’s Victory

If you are interested in the two different manuscript versions of Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, see Professor Alison Findlay’s post on The manuscripts of Love’s Victory

About Victoria Wainwright

Victoria Wainwright is a professional Artist and Illustrator specialising in pen and ink and printmaking but with a varied background in illustration techniques and briefs. She regularly undertakes commission work where illustration is a feature, and has illustrated a number of published books. Victoria’s main interest is in drawing people, capturing their movement and character.