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ItemLives and Afterlives: The print collection of Elizabeth Seymour Percy, 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776)( 2020)Prints formed a sizeable part of the diverse collections assembled by English collector, Elizabeth Seymour Percy, the 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776). Her print collection was dispersed at auction in 1951 and nine of her print albums — containing engravings predominantly by Flemish sixteenth-century printmaker/publishers, the Sadeler family — are now housed at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The duchess’s journals, notebooks, and her hand-written collection inventories also survive in the Archives of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, England. These documents record the duchess’s acquisition, arrangement, and cataloguing of her print collection, and refer to the albums now in Melbourne. Remarkably, there have been no previous in-depth studies of the duchess’s print collecting based on these rich archival records, and few analyses that focus on extant prints and albums from her collection. This research is about the intersection of two sources of evidence — textual and material — and what these sources reveal about the actions and intentions of the duchess as a print collector: how she identified, acquired, assembled, and catalogued her collection. Early chapters examine archival records to investigate the duchess’s engagement with the eighteenth-century print market and her print acquisition activities. Next, her methods and motivations for the assembly and categorisation of her print albums are examined through physical analysis of two print albums in Melbourne, and through tracing the development of her print categorisation schema in notebooks and her print inventories. Drawing on auction catalogues and dealer records, her prints and albums are then studied as objects of cultural commerce in the twentieth century. The final chapter considers the complex meanings evoked when some of the duchess’s prints were transformed into statuary. The trajectory of the duchess’s prints and albums over time — their ‘lives’ and ‘afterlives’ — is the framework of this study. This study asks: what does archival evidence reveal about the duchess’s acquisition and categorisation of prints in the eighteenth century? How do the material features of the duchess’s albums in Melbourne help us understand the acquisition, assembly, and categorisation of her print collection? Why were some of the duchess’s prints translated into other creative forms?