The Paston Treasure, a spectacular painting from the 1660s now held at Norwich Castle Museum, depicts a wealth of objects from the collection of a local landed family. This deeply researched volume uses the painting as a portal to the history of the collection, exploring the objects, their context, and the wider world they occupied. Drawing on an impressive range of fields, including history of art and collections, technical art history, musicology, history of science, and the social and cultural history of the 17th century, the book weaves together narratives of the family and their possessions, as well as the institutions that eventually acquired them. Essays, vignettes, and catalogue entries comprise this multidisciplinary exposition, uniting objects depicted in the painting for the first time in nearly 300 years.
Andrew Moore is former keeper of art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery. Nathan Flis is head of exhibitions and publications, and assistant curator of seventeenth-century paintings at the Yale Center for British Art. Francesca Vanke is keeper of art and a curator of decorative art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery.