To be in the presence of Rosalind Savill was to be caught up in a whirlwind of energy, merriment, scholarship and generosity. Dressed in rich colours and arrayed in arresting jewellery, with flowing blond hair and a bewitching smile, she radiated confidence in her role as the director of the Wallace Collection, London, from 1992 to 2011. She transformed that rather staid national museum into a vibrant tribute to the culture and artefacts of 18th-century France.
Assembled by three successive marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the collection was bequeathed to the British nation in 1897, by Wallace’s widow, with clear instructions to keep it intact, without enlargement or reduction. This might have inhibited a less imaginative director, but Savill saw the most important side of her work to be, in her own words, “the safeguarding of the collection, and its dissemination and display to as wide an audience as possible”. She viewed her leadership and innovation of scholarship, curatorship, conservation, education, library and archives at the Wallace Collection as her “most fundamental responsibility”.
Expansion
To achieve this, she embarked on a gallery refurbishment and a £12m Centenary Project—backed by a £7.75m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund—completed in 2000, which created 30% more public space: new exhibition areas, conservation studios, reserve collection galleries, lecture theatre, visitors’ library, education studio and seminar room as well as a lucrative restaurant in the newly-glazed central courtyard of Hertford House, in Manchester Square.
As a result, the Wallace attracted new audiences. Visitor numbers increased from around 160,000 to almost 400,000 per year, with stimulating temporary exhibitions (including the work of Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst), a collaboration with the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, new partnerships with regional museums in Britain, Europe and the US, and wonderful Sunday morning concerts in the Great Gallery, overlooked by Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier. The Wallace Collection hummed.
Renowned porcelain expert
Savill was not only the director, but also the Wallace’s internationally regarded curator of 18th-century French porcelain and goldsmiths’ work, a role she relished and never neglected, despite managerial pressures. Her reputation in the field was established with a three-volume The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain (1998) and reached fruition in her magisterial last book, Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour & Sèvres Porcelain. Written during Covid-induced lockdowns and published in two volumes in 2021, this won the American Ceramic Circle Book Award. Her enormous output of scholarly articles underscores her achievement.
Ros Savill, known as Lyn to her family and early friends, grew up in east Hampshire, where her parents Guy Savill and Lorna Williams inculcated in her a lasting, intense, interest in and observation of nature, later apparent in her skilful analysis of minute decoration on 18th-century gold boxes and the tiny, perfect, individual Vincennes porcelain flowers in the Bouquet de la Dauphine of 1749 (now in the Zwinger Palace, Dresden). The Savills’ house and garden were full of rescued and safeguarded creatures, infant dormice, hibernating slow-worms, birds of every variety.
Later, nature was ever present in the little house in Camden, north London, which Ros first shared with her brother Hugh, then a medical student, and with Yana, the free-range dove, little Chinese quails bred in the tiny courtyard, and the beautiful camellias outside the front door. Even a tousled, wounded pigeon was rescued from a London street and restored to life on the window-sill of the ceramics department offices at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Caring for her fellow human beings, too, was innate.
Mental health nurse
As a student she worked in an Auxiliary Mental Nursing Unit in Fareham Hospital, and her concern for her friends’ children was boundless. She liked to sleep with curtains, blinds and windows thrown open so she could hear birdsong or hooting owls; she relished holidays by the wild sea in northern Brittany or beside the river Dart or Exe in Devon; her wish was to be buried in that beautiful county, near her parents and close to her brother’s home.
After formal education at Wycombe Abbey, a year at Le Châtelard School in Montreux, Switzerland, and studying English and fine art at Leeds University, in 1972 she procured a place on the Study Centre for the History of Fine and Decorative Arts, founded in 1964 by Erica O’Donnell (a former Special Operations Executive officer, Courtauld Scholar and assistant to Anthony Blunt) and run at that time in various nooks and crannies in the V&A. Many of the tutors were V&A curators, thus she was introduced to the ceramics experts John Cushion, Michael Archer, John Mallet, Robert Charleston and Timothy Clifford, who gave Savill her first detailed education in the design and manufacture of soft and hard-paste porcelains. I became a lifelong friend of Ros’s during the year-long course, as did Giles Waterfield, Paul Spencer-Longhurstand David Scrase. Loyalty to her friends and family was as vital to Savill as was her loyalty to the organisations, and their staff, that she served.
Finding employment in the art world was as difficult in the mid-1970s as it is now, and particularly in the then somewhat disregarded field of decorative art. Temporary jobs were essential for survival in London, so Savill and her friends found menial occupations in South Kensington, including managing the till in the V&A restaurant (more of a basic canteen in those days) in return for a free lunch, giving evening classes for the Inner London Education Authority in north London schools, travelling home alone afterwards on the Northern Line. Together we created a memorable course for a group of 40 London black cab taxi drivers studying for Blue Badge status, in a room over a pub in Mount Pleasant (£10 in cash per evening): the 1980 Mastermind TV quiz winner Fred Housego was one of the students. For years afterwards, we never had trouble finding a taxi on a wet London evening.
An essential Attingham teacher
Teaching became and remained an integral part of Savill’s career. In 1975, shortly after she had joined the staff of the Wallace Collection as a museum assistant, she was awarded a coveted scholarship on the Attingham Summer School for the Study of English Country Houses and Collections. Founded in 1952 by the formidable Helen Lowenthal and Helena Hayward, the course introduced young American scholars to the then little-known art collections in English country houses. Savill became an essential member of the administration, leadership and teaching of “Attingham”, renowned to this day for its worldwide network of scholars, art historians, curators and conservators. Few Attingham alumni can forget her high-speed seminars on French porcelain conducted in country house bedrooms, boudoirs, pantries and attics, merrily handing round precious teacups, jugs and vases while her little daughter turned somersaults on the carpet beside her. She taught fluently and persuasively, whether in the grandest auditoria or simplest studios, rarely, if ever, using notes but recording facts and dates with perfect accuracy.
Her association with the Attingham Trust brought her into contact with leading figures in the National Trust, whose ceramics collections she knew well, and in return she offered invaluable advice on the wider significance and presentation of National Trust historic properties as a member of the Arts Advisory Panel (until its demise in 2015).She also served as a highly valued trustee of the Royal Collection Trust from 2012 to 2018. Of equal significance was her generous, scholarly interaction with private collectors and dealers: enthusiasm for the subject overcame any barriers that existed between “museum” and “trade”.
Retirement did not lessen her activity as a teacher, lecturer, consultant, TV presenter, fund-raiser, writer and trustee. She also enjoyed more time with her beloved daughter Isabella (Izzi), but all too short a time with her first grandson, born in August 2024. Courage pervaded her professional and private life, never more than when facing a diagnosis of terminal cancer. “Life is full of surprises,” she said to me. “Some nicer than others.”
• Rosalind Joy Savill, born Lyndhurst, Hampshire 12 May 1951; museum assistant, department of ceramics, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1973-74; museum assistant, Wallace Collection, London 1974-78, assistant to the director 1978-92, director and curator of 18th-century French porcelain and goldsmiths’ work 1992-2011, curator emeritus 2011-24; CBE 2000, DBE 2009; one daughter; died Stoodleigh, Devon, 27 December 2024.
