Petyt library project

Posted on 26 August 2020

Hannah Jeans shares her experience of working with the Petyt library collection this summer.

I started working on the Petyt library project in July this year, investigating a section of the manuscript catalogue that lists ‘Pictures in Cutts and black Frames’. This lists eighteen pictures, largely engravings (‘Cutts’), which were donated to Skipton School by Sylvester Petyt as part of the library. They are all portraits, representing figures from the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century political, ecclesiastical and legal worlds. The collection provides an intriguing snapshot of the Petyts’ collecting practices, and gives us an insight into their world.

I began by identifying all the people listed in the catalogue and compiling their biographies. There are figures from the Petyts’ professional and personal lives, with contemporaries from the Middle and Inner Temples as well as important figures from Yorkshire, and specifically Skipton. Lady Anne Clifford will be familiar to many historians, and is to this day an important figure in Skipton’s history. Many of the sitters may have been colleagues of friends of Sylvester and William, and as a whole the collection reflects the political situation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Researching the individuals revealed political feuds and conflicts between Whigs and Tories, stories of patronage, and attempts to court royal favour.

This picture collection allows us to consider the importance of visual culture in seventeenth-century libraries, which were often accompanied by paintings and pictures, and even sculptures. It also offers a way of approaching the Petyt library as a whole, centring the personal experiences of the brothers throughout their lives. Despite its small size, this picture list is an excellent way into the world of the Petyt brothers, one embedded in London’s legal circles but retaining strong ties to Yorkshire.

Further details about the Petyt Collection can be found at:
https://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/named-collections/petyt-collection/
https://www.york.ac.uk/research/themes/petyt/