Supervisors: Prof. Louise Bourdua and Prof. Rosie Dias (University of Warwick); Dr. Rebecca Bridgman (formerly Birmingham Museums) and Victoria Osborne (formerly Birmingham Museums) with support from Dr Rebecca Unsworth (Curator, Decorative Art, Birmingham Museums).

Dr Maialen Maugars’ PhD thesis, funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, focused on the early modern Italian decorative art collection at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The collection is constituted of approximately 378 objects, mainly purchased in Italy by John Charles Robinson (1824-1913) and Whitworth Wallis (1855-1927) between 1881 and 1889. It was one of the first collections to be acquired for Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which opened in 1885, and was displayed in a dedicated gallery. The collection includes furniture, metalwork, textiles, glass, and ceramics and was intended to educate and inspire Birmingham’s artisans, industrial designers, and art students in the late nineteenth century. 

You can read Dr Maugars’ thesis to find out more about:

• Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s collecting strategy.
• Robinson’s and Wallis’s acquisition practices.
• The provenance of the collection.
• The export of the objects from Italy to Britain.
• The collection’s reception in the late nineteenth century.
• The role of the collection in public education, industrial design, and artistic training in late nineteenth-century Birmingham.

You can read and hear more about Maialen’s research here:

• Maialen Maugars, ‘A treasure house of examples for reference and for instruction’: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s impact on late nineteenth-century Artistic Training and Industrial Design in the Midlands in Midlands Art Papers 9 (2026),
• ‘140 Years in a 140 objects: treasures from the Italian decorative arts collection’
• ‘Let there be light: Re-Opening Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’
• Museums Exploration Podcast: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery with Andrea Bonnell and Maialen Maugars