Tico Seifert will share new insights on how Van Dyck’s famous Portrait of the Lomellini Family came to Scotland. Letters by the Scottish painter and agent Andrew Wilson, who purchased the group portrait on behalf of the Royal Institution, the predecessor of the National Galleries, in 1830, reveal fascinating details of the transaction, including bribes and the shipping arrangements from Genoa to Edinburgh. The talk will finish with a note on a lost Lamentation by Van Dyck, a copy of which is in the octagon of St Mary’s Cathedral.

Tico Seifert is a parishioner here at St Mary’s Cathedral and has been Senior Curator of Northern European Art at the National Galleries of Scotland since 2008. He received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin, where he taught art history from 2003. Tico has published and lectured widely on German, Dutch and Flemish art from the 1500s to about 1900 and has organised exhibitions on themes ranging from Dürer’s Fame to Vermeer and from Rembrandt to nineteenth-century Norwegian and Swiss landscape paintings.

This event is free for Friends of St Mary’s Cathedral. Friends should email this address to attend the event.