‘Now you can gasp’, said the Chairman of the Trustees of the British Museum to guests at a recent fundraising dinner. He had just revealed the valuation of £1 billion for the magnificent collection of Chinese ceramics that has been given to the museum by the Sir Percival David Foundation.[1] Munificence on this scale is normally only associated with the richest of American museums, so a new record seems to have been set in the European context by this extraordinary gesture. The headline-grabbing figure is certainly impressive and testament to the unbounded enthusiasm among collectors for the very finest historic ceramics from China and its inflationary consequences. As broader context for this it is worth noting that recent estimates suggest China now accounts for over 20 per cent of the global art market – being second only to the United States in its share of such trade. 

For many who read about this gift and its stratospheric value in newspapers and on news websites it will perhaps have been the first time they have heard about the Sir Percival David collection. It has, however, long formed part of the cultural riches of Bloomsbury in central London and bridged the worlds of scholarly research and public display. 

Percival David (1892–1964) was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) into a wealthy mercantile and banking family. His enthusiasm for Chinese ceramics began in the 1920s, inspired at first by British collections. Extensive business trips included visits to China, which resulted in his great passion for and growing connoisseurship of the country’s finest ceramics. A unique opportunity arose in 1927–28, when he was able to acquire over fifty works directly from the Imperial Collection in Beijing, which had been put up as collateral for a bank loan to fund the costs of the Dowager Empress moving out of the capital. The collection he eventually formed, which has this purchase at its heart, remains unrivalled outside of China, and is renowned for reflecting Chinese court taste from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries CE.[2] Within these parameters individual works are admired for their exquisite beauty and important documentary value. They include Ru wares made for the Northern Song Dynasty court around 1086, along with the so-called ‘David Vases’, temple vases which date from 1361 – the discovery of which proved fundamental for the accurate dating of blue and white Chinese ceramics. The collection also includes a celebrated ‘Chicken cup’, which was used to serve wine for the Chenghua Emperor (1465–87). Such objects are a testament to the taste of a collector who was said to display ‘percipience, visual memory, ingenuity and tirelessness in pursuit of the quarry’.[3] 

In addition to David’s role as a collector, other aspects of his early philanthropy are especially noteworthy; these included the establishment in 1930 of a degree course in Chinese art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. As the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, was not founded until 1932, this Chinese BA was the first art-history degree in any aspect of the discipline to be offered in Britain. It is pleasing to put this pioneering development in the wider context of higher education today as Chinese art may now, for example, be studied at universities in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh and St Andrews. 

David also pursued research himself, publishing his Asian art discoveries from 1929 onward. In 1930 he was admitted as a member to the Oriental Ceramic Society and on a number of occasions his studies featured in the society’s transactions.[4] He also contributed to the catalogue of his own collection (1934) and was instrumental in publishing a new edition of the ‘Travels of Marco Polo’ – a project that was inspired by his discovery of a Latin manustript of the Polo narrative in a library in Toledo. 

His private enthusiasms soon resulted in a very public and highly successful project that heightened awareness of the splendour of the art of the Chinese court: he acted as the Director of the International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1935, which was seen by over 400,000 visitors and described by the Illustrated London News as a ‘superb and exhilerating show’. The exhibition included treasures from the Peking Palace Museum, and transport of the loans to London was arranged courtesy of the British Government on HMS Suffolk. David lectured on the exhibition at the Royal Society and his ‘zeal and energy’ – a key component in this remarkable endeavour – was complimented in the catalogue, which had to be reprinted a number of times to meet demand. 

In 1946 David started negotiating with the University of London to provide a home for his collection, specifying that it had to be displayed together and access to it would be free. Possible sites included a new building near the British Museum, although this scenario did not develop further. A museum dedicated to the study of the collection was eventually opened in 1952 inside a nineteenth-century townhouse at 53 Gordon Square. Some may recall visiting its often blissfully quiet galleries, where the 1,700 works that David had acquired were displayed and used as a resource for teaching. Reviews, chiefly concerned with its catalogues, appeared intermittently in this Magazine from the mid- 1950s to 1970. 

The next most significant stage in the history of the collection occurred in 2009, when it was moved to a dedicated space within the British Museum. It was installed in Gallery 95, which forms part of the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies. Collections within collections can become uneasy cuckoos in their nests and prove testing to accommodate. It seems certain, however, that this will not be the case in this instance, chiefly because of the quality and rarity of the works that David acquired and the various fruitful ways in which they complement the British Museum’s already stellar holdings in this area. These include a porcelain Ming shrine – which is currently on display in Gallery 33 – that David presented to the Museum in 1929 at the outset of his inspring engagement with the wonders of Chinese art. 

[1] ‘British Museum to receive £1bn collection gift from The Sir Percival David Foundation – the largest in UK museum history’, available at www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/press/press-releases, accessed 12th December 2024. 

[2] For the collection, see R. Krahl and J. Harrison-Hall: Chinese Ceramics: Highlights from the Sir Percival David Collection, London 2009. 

[3] The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition marking the Society’s centenary was reviewed by Peter Y.K. Lam in this Magazine, 164 (2022), pp.402–03. 

[4] S.H. Hansford: ‘Obituary: Sir Percival David’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 28, no.2 (1965), pp.472–75.