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

Dr Maialen Maugars’ PhD, 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 300 objects, mainly purchased in Italy by John Charles Robinson and Whitworth Wallis between 1883 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, which is composed of furniture, metalwork, textile, glass, and ceramic objects, was intended to educate and inspire Birmingham’s artisans, industrial designers, and art students. 

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.
• The role of the collection in public education, industrial design, and artistic training in late nineteenth-century Birmingham.