Journal of the History of Collections ( ) pp. –
doi:10.1093/jhc/fhn017
© The Author . Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
FROM to , the London Museum and the
Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A) made unprece-
dented efforts to acquire collections of historical dress
from private donors. Both museums had previously
collected the decorative and applied arts,
2
including
textiles, needlework and lace, but this was the first
time they sought out items of anonymous, fashionable
dress.
3
Items in the collections represented a chrono-
logical, rather than biographical history – provenance
ended at the collector, rather than tracing the dress of
multiple generations of a (prominent) family. In both
instances, the acquisitions were widely publicized,
even though they marked a major and shift in the atti-
tude of museum directors as to what constituted his-
torically valid aspects of material culture. Significantly,
the donors, John Seymour Lucas, Edwin Austin
Abbey, Ernest Crofts and Talbot Hughes, acknowl-
edged the historical importance of dress much earlier
than did the institutions they patronized, and as this
study will argue, this was due to their professional
training as painters.
These four genre painters all collected dress, and
within a space of four years were able radically to
transform museum attitudes to dress with the acces-
sion of their collections. It is posited that the painters’
class, gender and artistic affiliations made dress an
acceptable artefact; in addition, the museal presenta-
tion of dress was carefully manipulated to appeal to
existing values, such as empire and pageantry. The
history of museums, the theory of artistic practice and
the rise of private collecting all had a role to play in
the changing interpretation of dress. The investiga-
tion of these collections illuminates not only the his-
tory of the formation of a part of the collections of two
important English museums but also the changing
attitudes towards dress as a historical artefact, the
shifting meanings, significances, representations and
interpretations afforded to it, as well as the collectors’
personal tastes and motivations that guided what has
since become cultural canon.
Sources
A book entitled Old English Costumes,
4
published to
commemorate the gift of the Talbot Hughes
collection of English historical dress by Harrods to
the V & A, began the explorations that follow. It is a
slim volume, beginning with a preface by the then-
Director of the museum, Sir Cecil Harcourt Smith,
and general descriptive notes reprinted from the
‘The habit of their age’
English genre painters, dress collecting, and museums, 1910–1914
Julia Petrov
In her recent books, Lou Taylor has highlighted the connection between the collecting of dress by
late-Victorian and Edwardian genre painters and the later inclusion of their collections in museums
of decorative arts such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A) and the London Museum in the
early-twentieth century. Drawing on this preliminary work, and using contemporary periodicals and
archival sources, the histories of four specific collections are highlighted: at the London Museum the
John Seymour Lucas, Edwin Austin Abbey and Ernest Crofts collections and at the V & A the Talbot Hughes
collection, all acquired in the period 1910–14. The investigation aims to explain why dress, so often at that
period derided as ephemeral and frivolous, was finally accepted as a legitimate subject for museum collections
and focuses on the changing meanings of the dress object as it moved from the private to the public sphere.
If we would bring back to the imagination the spirits of the
past, we must clothe them in the habit of their age, and
neglect no detail, however slight, which would help to
complete the picture.
1
Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access published August 13, 2008