• Front of library
    • Thomas Patch, The Golden Asses

Welcome

As of May 15, 2023 Special Collections units at Yale University are open to Yale-affiliated faculty, students, and staff and to non-Yale researchers who comply with the Yale Covid Visitor’s Policy.

The Lewis Walpole Library does not require a reservation, but we appreciate being informed in advance of any planned research visit since space in the Reading Room is limited. 


The Lewis Walpole Library is a research center for eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill. Its collections include important holdings of eighteenth-century British prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, paintings, and decorative arts. Given to Yale by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895-1979) and Annie Burr Lewis (1902-1959), the Lewis Walpole Library is located in Farmington, Connecticut, in several eighteenth-century buildings on a fourteen-acre campus. The Lewis Walpole Library is a department of Yale University Library and open to researchers.


At the library....

Fellowships and Travel Grants
 
 l is an interior of a wood-paneled library with a woman speaking with an electronic screen behind her; center is a view of the reading room with large table with three researchers seated looking at library materials; r shows a terrace with tables at which adults sit in conversation in front of a white clapboard house
 
The library offers a variety of fellowships and travel grants to support research focused in the library’s rich collections of eighteenth-century materials.
 
Residential Visiting Fellowships bring scholars from across the globe to Farmington for two or four weeks to undertake research in library collections on a wide variety of topics related to Britain in the eighteenth-century world. Applications for 2024-25 Visiting Fellowships and Travel Grants are under review.
 
Summer Fellowships for Yale Graduate Students afford students whose topic of research is supported by the library’s collections the opportunity to spend two, four, or eight weeks during June through August in residence at the library. APPLICATIONS NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR SUMMER 2024. 
 

The Charles A. Ryskamp Travel Grant is awarded on a competitive basis to a Yale College senior whose senior essay project would benefit from extended use of the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. The grant provides funds for regular travel during the academic year to Farmington and more. APPLICATIONS NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR SPRING 2024

 

News

January 25, 2024
Music on the Dark Side of 1800: Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis Thursday, March 28, 2024 5:30 pm Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr....
January 22, 2024
Curating the Caricature Collection at the Lewis Walpole Library February 4, 2024 2:00 pm The Lewis Walpole Library, 154 Main Street, Farmington, CT 06032 Cynthia Roman,...
Full-length portrait of a woman, likely to be Mary Anne Clarke, wearing a white neoclassical dress and standing on a balcony with a curtain drapped from the left corner.
December 12, 2023
Laura Engel,  Professor of English, Duquesne University, considers the dichotomy of how Mary Anne Clarke, mistress of the Duke of York in the first decade of the nineteenth...