Room for Experiment: The Countess of Arundel’s "Site of Medication"

The so-called Dutch Pranketing Room of Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel, at Tart Hall was a site of domestic experiments, courtly splendour and global ambition. Lady Arundel, the probable author of a famous recipe book, would have used Tart Hall for cooking and experiments as well as for impressive dinner parties, and she would have used large amounts of sugar to create intricate imitations of meat and vegetables to astonish, entertain and delight her guests. Linking household practice with global trade as well as artistic creation, Lady Arundel’s banquets are situated not only between a national tradition of cooking, as it appears in Markham’s manuals, and the new possibilities the arising global trade provided, but also played with a mismatch between taste and sight. This mediating role could be compared to that played by the artists the Countess employed. Within this context it is worth noting that a series of paintings displayed in the building’s gallery showed still lifes, markets, and a cook. The inventory of Tart Hall gives an insight into the world of the widely travelled collector and patron of Van Dyck and Rubens, but raises also a number of questions. In my talk I would like to explore the Countess’ Pranketing Room as a site of mediation between alimentary and painterly experiments, considering the use of recipes, experience, invention and transformatio