The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection is a collection of objets d'art formed by the English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

-born businessman Sir Arthur Gilbert, who made most of his fortune in the property business in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. After initially becoming interested in silver, he assembled a large collection of decorative art, which he gifted to the British nation in 1996. It now has a permanent home in the Victoria and Albert Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

.

History

For decades, the collection was on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....

, and Sir Arthur had promised eventually to make it a permanent gift. However he decided to gift the collection to his native country, after a dispute with LACMA regarding the collection's placement and display. In 2000 it went on public display as "The Gilbert Collection" in a suite of seventeen galleries in Somerset House

Somerset House

Somerset House is a large building situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, England, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The central block of the Neoclassical building, the outstanding project of the architect Sir William Chambers, dates from 1776–96. It...

 in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. The exhibition was fitted out under the supervision of the silver expert Timothy Schroder, and continued until 27 January 2008. The space became the Embankment Galleries, an exhibition space for contemporary art. Meanwhile the collection was incorporated into the Victoria and Albert Museum, where a new display in rooms 70-72 opened on 30 June 2009.

Artifacts

The collection includes the following types of work:

• Gold boxes: highly decorated and often jewel-encrusted 18th century snuff boxes.
• Silver: a wide range of European decorative silver from the Renaissance
  Renaissance
  The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
  
   to the Victorian era
  Victorian era
  The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
  
  .
• Gold and treasury: pieces from around the world, including an Anatolian gold ewer from the third millennium BC and a solid gold tea service made in the 19th century for Russian imperial family.
• Italian mosaics: pietre dure works from Renaissance
  Renaissance
  The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
  
   Florence
  Florence
  Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
  
   and enamel micromosaics made in Rome. The Gilbert collection claims to have the leading collection of these two types of art in the world.
• Art in enamel: a collection of over 100 enamel
  Vitreous enamel
  Vitreous enamel, also porcelain enamel in U.S. English, is a material made by fusing powdered glass to a substrate by firing, usually between 750 and 850 °C...
  
   miniature portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries.

External links

• The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection - official page on the V&A website