Gilbert Collection

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The Gilbert Collection is a collection of objets d'art formed by the English-born businessman Sir Arthur Gilbert, who made most of his fortune in the property business in California. After initially becoming interested in silver, he assembled a large collection of decorative art, which he gifted to the British nation in 1996. The collection opened to the public in 2000 in a suite of galleries in Somerset House in London. They closed on 27 January 2008, and the collection is to be incorporated into the Victoria and Albert Museum.^[1]

For decades, this collection was on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Sir Arthur had promised eventually to make it a permanent gift. However, in a move that left Los Angeles museum goers stunned and disappointed, he decided to renege on that promise in favour of his country of birth. The reason given was a dispute with LACMA regarding the collection's placement and display.

The collection includes the following types of work:

Gold boxes: highly decorated and often jewel-encrusted 18th century snuff boxes.
Silver: a wide range of European decorative silver from the Renaissance to the Victorian era.
Gold and treasury: pieces from around the world, including an Anatolian gold ewer from the third millennium BC
Italian mosaics: pietre dure works from Renaissance Florence and enamel micromosaics made in Rome. The Gilbert collection claims to have the leading collection of these two types of art in the world.
Art in enamel: a collection of over 100 enamel miniature portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries.

In Somerset House, the collection occupied seventeen galleries facing the Thames Embankment, which were fitted out under the supervision of the silver expert Timothy Schroder. Actor Tony Clarkin was the voice over narrator for the Gilbert Collection, while on display at Somerset House. After the vacation of the Gilbert Collection these rooms will become the Embankment Galleries, an exhibition space for contemporary art.^[2]