Dame Rosalind Savill Memorial Lecture 2026

The Dame Rosalind Savill Memorial Lecture 2026 is an annual talk at the museum, held in its Theatre and broadcast live online via Zoom, followed by a drinks reception. This year's speaker is Wolf Burchard, Curator in Charge of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the lecture 'The World's Largest Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing together Louis XIV's Grande Galerie Savonnerie carpets'. He tells how, in 1668, Louis XIV commissioned 92 enormous Savonnerie carpets for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, woven over 25 years and never laid out there; after the French Revolution many were stripped of royal emblems, segmented, sold and dispersed, and curators from the Mobilier national and The Met are now piecing them together. In February 2026 the Mobilier national showed 32 of these carpets together at the Grand Palais in Paris, and from September 2026 The Met will stage the first ever exhibition devoted to the Savonnerie in the United States. The lecture honours Dame Rosalind Savill, Director of the Wallace Collection from 1992 to 2011, who transformed the under-visited institution into a cultural landmark.