Book Review: The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury. H. L. Meakin. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013. 328 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6397-3.

In this volume, H. L. Meakin discusses Lady Anne Bacon Drury’s complex visual and textual production of painted panels originally designed for her closet in Hawstead Place and later moved to line the walls of her closet in Hardwick House, both in Suffolk (c. 1609). This room was constructed of wainscoted walls of forty painted panels, with six Latin sentences inscribed above the panels in gold letters. The book provides lavish color prints of the panels as they appear today in Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, where they were moved in the early twentieth century. There are also illustrations of the panels as arranged in Hardwick House (now demolished), as they were described by Rev. Sir John Cullum in 1813. In addition, each individual panel appears in a full-page color illustration. The high quality of the illustrations provides scholars with opportunities for further research, greatly enhances the value of the book as a whole, and supports Meakin’s discussion.