Afternoon Tea & Lecture | Bittersweet: Chocolate, Tea and Coffee in the Early Modern World

The consumption of the caffeinated beverages chocolate, tea and coffee is such an integral part of modern Western food culture that it is hard to imagine our lives without them. But all three drinks are non-European in origin and have long histories of consumption practices in their native cultural contexts – Mesoamerica, China and the Middle East respectively. When each of these beverages was first brought to Europe, they were viewed with curiosity, but also suspicion. This lecture explores the complex global history behind the wide-spread adoption of these drinks and their impact on Western visual and material culture in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.

Dr Matthew Martin is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the University of Melbourne. From 2006 to the beginning of 2019 he was Curator of International Decorative Arts and Antiquities in the National Gallery of Victoria where he curated a number of significant exhibitions exploring early modern European material culture including Chinoiserie: Asia in Europe 1620 – 1840 (2010), Kings over the Water (2013), Eighteenth-century Porcelain Sculpture (2016) and Liquid Light: 500 Years of Venetian Glass (2019). His research interests include the cultural aesthetics of European porcelain in the eighteenth century, patronage and collecting amongst early modern English recusant elites, material cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia in the early modern period, and the historiography of the decorative arts and their display in Western museums. 

Matthew recently curated the exhibition Bittersweet: Chocolate, tea, coffee (2025) for Hamilton Gallery in Western Victoria.

Join The Friends for another interesting and stimulating presentation. Afternoon tea, to include an array of delicious petit fours and biscuits, will be served on arrival. 

NOTE: Tickets for this event do not include access to our exhibition-house, Fairhall. Guided tours of the current exhibition can be booked separately. 

This event is supported by The Colin Holden Charitable Trust.