Oliver Watson gave many people their first opportunities.[1] When the Middle East Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), was formed in 2002, it was Oliver who offered me the position of Assistant Curator – for some time afterwards he used to joke that I was his latest acquisition. It was thanks to Oliver that I came to specialise in the study of ivory objects. I vividly remember a visit from Kjeld von Folsach – then Director of the David Collection, Copenhagen, and one of Oliver’s great international network of friends – about a month after my arrival at the V&A, when we decanted the entirety of the museum’s highly important collection of medieval Cordoban ivories and brought them to our office to study together. Kjeld was in the process of buying a significant Cordoban ivory for the David Collection, and in the early stages of planning the related landmark conference that took place in Copenhagen in 2003, which would reunite me with Oliver, by then seconded to the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, as its Chief Curator. In that capacity, he invited me on my first trip to Qatar, to study the ivory objects that had been acquired by Sheikh Saud for his nascent Islamic art museum and to write the catalogue of a small exhibition held in one of Doha’s hotels. I consider myself lucky to have benefitted from this support at the start of my career, and then to have learned so much from him over the next twenty years. 

Oliver was one of four sons of William Watson CBE FBA, an expert in Chinese and Japanese art and antiquities at the British Museum and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and of Kay (née Armfield), a specialist in Spanish Romanesque church architecture. His father’s specialism in Chinese ceramics was certainly something that Oliver carried with him throughout his career, and one of the main strands of his research in the field of Islamic ceramics was the relationship of Middle Eastern ceramic techniques to Chinese imports, and the extent to which he considered this to have been overplayed in past scholarship. 

Oliver read a BA in Classical Arabic Studies at Durham University. He then moved to SOAS to research his doctorate, ‘Persian Lustre Tiles of the 13th and 14th Centuries’, which was awarded in August 1977. He subsequently broadened this account of the development of the lustre technique in Iran to include vessels, publishing Persian Lustre Ware in 1985. This remains the standard text on the subject, and Oliver was delighted in recent years to discover that it had been translated into Farsi as Sofāl-e zarrīn-fām-e īrānī. His students say that when they meet colleagues from Iran, everyone knows Oliver. Over the course of his career, he expanded his reach across the field of Islamic ceramics to cover many aspects of the subject, publishing numerous groundbreaking articles. 

His first foot on the curatorial ladder was working on the Arts of Islam exhibition, which took place at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1976. After a teaching stint at Farnham School of Art, Oliver joined the Ceramics and Glass Department of the V&A in 1979, as a specialist in the Middle East, following in the footsteps of Arthur Lane (1909–63). He remained a member of the museum’s curatorial staff until 2005. He came to specialise in both the Middle East, becoming the world’s leading authority on the ceramics of the Islamic period, and twentiethcentury and contemporary studio ceramics. Strangely, these two different interests rarely seemed to intersect – whenever I asked him about contemporary ceramic work being made in the Middle East, he was dismissive. But he came to admire the work of the Iranian lustre ceramic artist Abbas Akbari (b.1971), and the respect was mutual. The Persian translation of Oliver’s work on Iranian lustreware had helped Abbas with his own research, and it was a privilege for me to facilitate the meeting between them in Oxford in March 2023. 

Oliver made many notable acquisitions of Islamic ceramics for the V&A, filling gaps in the collection with significant works, such as an entirely undecorated ninth-century tin-glazed bowl from Iraq and a blue-and-white bowl from the Timurid period. However, the acquisition of which he was justifiably most proud is a sixteenth-century table topped with a large twelve-sided tile, now displayed in the Jameel Gallery (Fig.2): it is a rare example of Ottoman court furniture outside Istanbul collections, and the largest tile in existence of those produced by the Iznik kilns.[2] 

Concurrently Oliver became the museum’s acknowledged expert in British studio pottery. This collection had largely been formed by the V&A’s Circulation Department; when it closed in 1977, responsibility for this area passed to the Ceramics Department. John Mallet, the Department’s Keeper, delegated the area to Oliver. He supplemented the collection with acquisitions of work by significant ceramicists such as Richard Slee, Alison Britton, Philip Eglin and Walter Keeler. He curated the pottery component of the 1985 Tate Britain exhibition St. Ives 1936–64 and contributed an essay on ceramics to the 1989 catalogue of the first major exhibition outside Britain to celebrate the work of St. Ives artists and potters: St. Ives toured three art museums in Japan. Even today, Oliver is remembered in Japan for his exhibition Bernard Leach: Potter and Artist, which opened at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo, in 1997 and toured to five further venues in Japan before being shown at the Crafts Council Gallery, London. Oliver also turned his attention to American studio ceramics for the exhibition and publication American Potters Today, co-authored with Garth Clark in 1986. 

In 1990 he published his groundbreaking book, British Studio Ceramics: a catalogue of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was reprinted in 1993 as Studio Pottery: Twentieth-Century British Ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection. In 2023 this work was augmented by a further V&A publication on the subject, Studio Ceramics: British Studio Pottery 1900 to Now. This was written by Alun Graves, another colleague whose career owes much to Oliver’s early support and encouragement. Graves credits Oliver’s words as ‘resounding’ in the volume’s catalogue entries, and notes ‘this book will always in part be his’. In his moving eulogy at Oliver’s funeral, Craig Clunas noted that Oliver had worked with living artists right from the beginning – Alan Caiger-Smith (1930– 2020) is thanked in Persian Lustre Ware for his advice and input. Oliver’s warm relationships with so many contemporary potters underpinned the building of the collection as it is today, and he wrote about their work with great empathy. 

Oliver was appointed head of the Ceramics and Glass Department in 1989. From 1992 he masterminded the radical redevelopment of the Glass Gallery, mastering a third area of scholarly expertise. This was one of the first major gallery redevelopments at the V&A after the post-war reinstallations and was groundbreaking in that he involved a contemporary glass artist – Danny Lane (b.1955) – in the creation of the gallery’s signature balustrade. The reopening was followed by the publication in 1997 of the book Glass, edited by Reino Liefkes, for which Oliver wrote the chapter on Islamic glass. 

Oliver had long advocated the separation of the museum’s collections of Islamic art from the materials-based departments, and when the Middle East Section of the Asia Department was formed in 2002, Oliver moved there to lead it. In October of that same year he was seconded to Qatar to advise on the development of the planned new Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (MIA), whose building was designed by I.M. Pei (1917–2019). Oliver served as the embryonic museum’s Chief Curator until 2005, when he formally left the V&A to become Keeper of the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, during a time of total transformation. In 2008 he returned to the MIA as its first Director (Fig.1) – moving from one of the oldest great museums in the world to one of the newest – overseeing its public opening in December of that year. In a 2018 interview he identified the opening of the MIA as the greatest moment of his career.[3] 

It was surely in recognition of Oliver’s contribution that Qatar created the new chair of Islamic art at Oxford University. Oliver returned to Oxford as the inaugural I.M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture. Teaching presented him with a new generation to support and mentor. His students describe him as inspiring and enthusiastic, giving them confidence in what was for some a new field. A steady flow of Oxford graduate students came with him to visit the V&A’s sherd collections, then housed at Blythe House. One of the best things about these visits were the Persian lunches in the local café, Shandeez. 

Oliver retired in 2016 but he did not stop working. As emeritus professor, he retained an association with the University’s Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East. During this period, he focused his research on the history and origins of Islamic ceramic production, benefitting from collaborations with other Oxford colleagues. He was always keenly alert to the possibilities of new forms of scientific investigation – as curator of the V&A’s ceramics collection, he was happy to make objects available to researchers. In some of his final scholarly works, he collaborated with Mike Tite and Moujan Matin to put analytical methods into practice himself, changing the nature of how we think about the origins and development of tin glaze in ninth-century Iraq, for example.[4] Oliver always made you see objects in a different way – he prioritised questions of production and technique. Above all, his work on ‘fakes and forgeries’ in Islamic ceramics, a topic with which some might say he was obsessed, opened up perspectives on how much forgers and dealers had intervened with supposedly ‘antique’ objects to find a better market price. 

Two of his most important contributions to the study of Islamic ceramics were in the form of catalogues of large and significant private collections, but he saw them as more than simple catalogues raisonnés. In 2004 he published Ceramics from Islamic Lands: a Catalogue of the al-Sabah Collection, with the Kuwait National Museum. He hoped this would bring up to date the work of his predecessor Arthur Lane, whose books Early Islamic Pottery (1947) and Later Islamic Pottery (1957) encapsulated the state of the field at the time. Oliver’s last major publication was Ceramics of Iran: Islamic pottery from the Sarikhani Collection (2020). For this he collaborated with his doctoral student Moujan Matin to publish a new translation of the 1301 treatise by Abu’l-Qasim of Kashan, one of very few primary sources on the production of ceramics decorated with lustre and mina’i (overglaze enamel). He was also indebted to the Uzbek scholar Jangar Ilyasov, whose publications of recently excavated material, especially from Tashkent, reshaped Oliver’s thinking about a whole class of early ceramics. 

He was working to the end, and happily there are publications of his yet to come. A posthumous article in the Festschrift volume in honour of Linda Komaroff, longstanding curator of Islamic art at the LA County Museum, is typical Oliver. It focuses on a little-known group of fragments of mina’i wares made as well as found at Fustat in Egypt rather than in Iran, where this technique is universally believed to have been made.[5] How like Oliver to keep challenging us to see familiar material in a new way. 

Oliver was not just a great scholar and curator and wonderful mentor. He had many other talents. Colleagues recall him sketching the speaker during lectures. He was an amateur violinist, and proud to lead a string quartet named OSCA, after the initials of its members. The remaining three played movingly at his funeral. With his author’s fee from the Sarikhani catalogue he bought himself a violin bow made by Eugène Sartory, one of the finest bow makers of the twentieth century. He loved poetry, particularly the work of Philip Larkin, birds, walking, especially at the family home in Wales, and cooking. The culinary achievement of which he was justifiably most proud was receiving ‘Silver’ in the World’s Original Marmalade Awards in 2021 in the Clear Seville category. 

Fittingly, his memorial service – which was held at Wolfson College, Oxford, in December 2023 – was packed, with family, friends from all his walks of life, potters, patrons, former museum and university colleagues, and students. Oliver is survived by his second wife, Fi Gunn, his first wife, Susan McCormack, and their three daughters, Maisie, Lilian and Isobel.

[1] I am indebted to Judith Crouch, Craig Clunas and several of Oliver’s former students and collaborators. With Yui Kanda and Moujan Matin, I am preparing an article about Oliver’s enormous contribution to the field of Islamic ceramics for the new Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture. 

[2] O. Watson: ‘The case of the Ottoman table’, The Journal of the David Collection 3 (2010), pp.22–53. 

[3] ‘The Arts Society Lecturer Oliver Watson: My Life in Art’, 22nd October 2018, available at theartssociety.org/arts-news-features/arts-society-lecturer-oliverwatson- my-life-art, accessed 2nd August 2024. 

[4] M. Matin, M. Tite and O. Watson: ‘On the origins of tin-opacified ceramic glazes: new evidence from early Islamic Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia’, Journal of Archaeological Science 97 (2018), pp.42–66, doi.org/10.1016/j jas.2018.06.011. 

[5] O. Watson: ‘“Minaʾi” from Fustat: an Iranian spoke in a Fatimid ceramic wheel’, in S.S. Blair, J.M. Bloom and S.S. Williams, eds: Iranian Art from the Sasanians to the Islamic Republic: Essays in Honour of Linda Komaroff, Edinburgh 2024, pp.239–48.