Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2018)
The colourful career of Sir. John Charles Robinson: collecting and curating at the early South Kensington Museum
Abstract
John Charles Robinson was a ‘Renaissance man’ of the Victorian art world: a curator, collector, critic, connoisseur, design teacher and even a practicing artist. As the first curator of the South Kensington Museum collections, between 1853 and 1867, he desired to teach ‘good taste’ and educate the visitor in the art of connoisseurship. The collecting networks he created and the influential scholarship he produced were vital to the Museum’s popularity in the early years and ensured its firm establishment as an internationally significant institution. At the Museum, Robinson’s carefully arranged display schemes aimed to teach good aesthetic judgment and raise the status of the decorative arts. This article explores Robinson’s pivotal public role as the curator of the South Kensington collections and the crossovers found in his methods for collecting, curating and connoisseurship in the public and private sphere.
