‘Indomitable’ was one of the words most often used to describe the character of Rosalind Savill (Fig.2), because it encapsulated well her energy, enthusiasm and very considerable achievements. She excelled as a museum director, a scholar and, perhaps above all, as a compelling advocate for the profound interest and pleasure to be gleaned from the serious study of the decorative arts – especially her beloved Sèvres porcelain. In addition to all of these attributes, she was renowned for her tremendous sense of fun and unrelenting curiosity about the machinations of the art world. 

She was born on 12th May 1951 in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, her father a consultant physician and her mother a physiotherapist. While she was still young the family moved to a village between Southampton and Portsmouth, where her love of the natural world was formed and encouraged; later in life she took great pleasure in breeding Chinese painted quail. Schooling at Wycombe Abbey and at Montreux in Switzerland was followed by reading English and Fine Art at Leeds University. It was there that she first acquired an enthusiasm for the decorative arts, which was nurtured further by a place on the course run by the Study Centre for the History of the Fine and Decorative Arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A). Displaying practical and aesthetic skills, she secured free lunches in exchange for working in the museum canteen while pursuing her studies. Her growing interest and knowledge were rewarded with a Leverhulme scholarship to attend the Attingham Summer School on the history of the English country house, and other scholarships facilitated study in France and research on Sèvres porcelain in American collections. 

A junior position in the ceramics department at the V&A was followed in 1974 by her appointment as a museum assistant at the Wallace Collection. Four years later she was promoted to become one of the two assistants to the director, with particular responsibility for the eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain and the goldsmiths’ work. In 1988 she published her outstanding three-volume catalogue of the Sèvres porcelain in the collection, using a wonderfully characterful highlight of the museum’s holdings on its cover (Fig.1). It was given the highest praise in this Magazine, where Geoffrey de Bellaigue described it as: 

without parallel. Paradoxically its appearance has created a serious imbalance in the published information on Sèvres porcelain. A shape not represented in the Wallace Collection, a painted or incised mark not recorded in the catalogue will be a cause of deep regret to the many Sèvres specialists and collectors who will turn to Savill on Sèvres for enlightenment.[1] 

Other plaudits followed; not least, it was the first book on the decorative arts to win the National Art Collections Fund (NACF) award for scholarship. Her later publications, which also garnered high praise, include Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain (2021), a monumental and engrossing study of her heroine Madame de Pompadour’s fascination with porcelain. Aileen Dawson considered it ‘object-based scholarship at the highest level’.[2] 

A successful museum career used to be dependent on scholarly authority and an ability to convey it with absorbing eloquence. This rare combination of qualities was possessed by Ros in abundance, and it was in part why she was such an inspired choice to succeed John Ingamells as director of the Wallace Collection in 1992, a role she fulfilled with aplomb for nineteen years. With its wonderful, but insufficiently known, collections – particularly of the art of eighteenth-century France – no museum could have been better suited to her interests and talents. She opened up a much-loved but quiet institution to the wider world through advocacy, exhibitions, innovative education programmes and an extraordinary series of capital projects. She passionately believed that the Wallace Collection should not be ‘London’s best-kept secret’, as it was often called, but, on the contrary, that it should be as famous as London’s other great museums. Above all, she wanted as many people as possible to love it as much as she did. 

She was brilliant at the art of persuasion, whether it was encouraging a colleague to complete a task, convincing a trustee to permit a glass roof over the courtyard or inducing a government agency, a charity or a rich individual to fund her often ambitious schemes of development and restoration. In a guide to the museum she suggested that it had been Madame de Pompadour’s wish to entice Louis XV ‘into a world of beauty and comfort that would relieve the burden of his royal duties’,[3] and she had a similar ambition for visitors to the Wallace Collection. Her first major refurbishment – the conversion of the front entrance and the Front State Room to an opulence recalling the time of Sir Richard Wallace – was completed three years after she became director; and thereafter, working in partnership with the architect John O’Connell, she similarly transformed all but a few of the other galleries to a comparable splendour using the most sumptuous materials, such as gorgeous silks from Lyon. 

On an even grander scale than these improvements was the ‘Centenary Project’, completed in June 2000, one hundred years to the day after the Wallace Collection had first opened to the public, for which Ros raised more than £10 million from private donors and the National Lottery. To the designs of the architect Rick Mather, the basement areas of the building were enlarged and converted to new spaces for the reserve collection, education facilities (including a seminar room and a lecture theatre), the library, archives and small-scale temporary exhibitions. A stylish restaurant was also opened in the central courtyard under the new roof. Unbelievably, the museum never closed during the three years of immensely disruptive building work. 

Completion of the Centenary Project enabled an intensification of the museum’s activities. In particular, the education department embarked on a comprehensive programme, including many imaginative projects with local schools and community groups. The lecture theatre became an established venue for academic conferences, and the library and archives became more accessible to many researchers. In 2001 a successful MA course in decorative arts and historic interiors, run jointly with the University of Buckingham, welcomed its first students. 

A remarkable series of exhibitions also took place in the new exhibition galleries on subjects as varied as French drawings, the maiolica painter Xanto, medieval Jewish treasures, Renaissance silver, the collector Jean de Jullienne and the writers Anthony Powell and Osbert Lancaster. The main galleries of the museum were also used for temporary displays, most notably in 2004 when an enormously popular presentation of paintings by Lucian Freud drew long queues of visitors though the galleries, succeeded the same year by a spectacular exhibition in the Great Gallery of the museum’s incomparable array of paintings by François Boucher. Many of these exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues of the highest academic standard. They complemented a wide range of new publications on the museum’s own collections, including catalogues of the European arms and armour, the glass and Limoges enamels and the gold boxes. 

Throughout her career Ros’s engagement with others was always marked by her essential kindness and her determination to make the best of any situation. Although her instinctive exuberance could make every step forward seem a triumph and every step back a disaster, her resolve to get things done swept all before her. She had an intense concern for museum housekeeping, never failing to spot a speck of dust or an object that was even slightly misaligned. She also took a close interest in conservation work, and was a staunch supporter of the museum’s conservation department, which specialises in furniture and arms and armour. 

All those who met Ros will remember her intelligence, her warmth and her ebullience. If they were fortunate enough to attend one of her lectures or seminars on Sèvres porcelain they will recall the fun, but also the astonishing depth of knowledge, that she brought to these occasions, effortlessly reeling off streams of names, dates and explanations of styles and functions to students who came away not only much better informed but also enthused by her passion for the subject. 

Fond of gossip and not slow to express her opinions, she was nevertheless much more likely to be effusively complimentary than to be critical. It was a rare event that was not punctuated at some point by laughter, although sometimes the flow of words could be startling. On one occasion she told the late Lord Rothschild that, thanks to his generous agreement to lend a painting by Chardin, she was ‘on a rollercoaster of pleasure’. 

One of the most memorable events of her directorship occurred when, at the end of the Freud exhibition, a scribbled card addressed to the director was delivered to the front desk of the museum, purporting to be an invitation from the artist to pose for him in the nude. Convinced at first that the card was a hoax, it was several days before she learnt that, in fact, the request was genuine. Probably wisely, although not without some amusement, she politely declined the offer, apparently to Freud’s intense disappointment. 

Ros’s wisdom and joie de vivre were appreciated far beyond Manchester Square. She lectured widely at universities and ceramics fairs and sat on numerous boards, including acting as a trustee of the Buccleuch collections, the Royal Collection Trust and the Rick Mather David Scrase Foundation, as well as serving on committees at the National Trust, the Royal Mint and the French Porcelain Society (of which she was a founder member and president from 1998 to 2023). She became a Fellow of the British Academy, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society of Arts and received many honours: in 2000 she was appointed CBE for services to the study of ceramics, followed nine years later by a promotion to DBE for services to the arts. In 2005 she won the European Woman of Achievement Award (Arts and Media) and in 2014 was appointed an Officier des Arts et des Lettres of France. 

Her final article appeared in this Magazine in August 2024. Typically, she was self-effacing when submitting it, writing that it was about an object ‘that is quite pretty-pretty which might put you off!’. The editors were not to be so easily dissuaded, and the result was an intriguing and positive reassessment of a table set with Sèvres porcelain trays, which had been dismissed forty years earlier by her as fakes.[4] When the article appeared, Ros expressed her delight that it had reconnected her with so many friends across the art world – from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to members of the French Porcelain Society and the Attingham Trust. That wide network will be able to remember her in many ways, but perhaps especially now, through the annual lectures that are being established in her honour at the Wallace Collection. 

Dame Rosalind Savill is survived by her brother, daughter and young grandson.

[1] R. Savill: The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sevres Porcelain, London 1988, reviewed by Geoffrey de Bellaigue in this Magazine, 132 (1990), pp.366–67. 

[2] R. Savill: Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain, London 2021, reviewed by Aileen Dawson in this Magazine, 164 (2022), pp.620–21. 

[3] S. Duffy et al.: The Wallace Collection, London 2006, p.158. 

[4] R. Savill: ‘From storeroom to stardom: the revelations of two Sèvres porcelain trays’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 166 (2024), pp.834–47.