British Museum receives £1 billion donation of Chinese ceramics

A collection of Chinese ceramics worth around £1 billion, considered to be the most significant of its type outside China, has been donated to the British Museum. It’s also likely the largest donation ever made to the museum.

The collection won’t have to move far though as it’s already on display inside the museum, having been on long-term loan since 2009.

The Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art is a collection started by the banking heir, Sir Percival David, around 1913. It expanded considerably in the 1920s and 30s, based on his visits to China and later auction sales.

The collection first went on display in London in 1931, and after WWII evacuation, was moved to Bloomsbury in 1952, where Sir David also funded the Chair in Chinese Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Towards the end of his life, he donated his entire collection of around 1,700 objects, many of them the best of their kind outside China, to a charitable trust with a remit to keep the collection intact and support education in Chinese art.

Highlight examples from the Sir Percival David collection include the ‘David vases’ from 1351. Their discovery revolutionised the dating of blue and white ceramics. The collection also includes a “Chicken cup” used to serve wine for the Chenghua emperor (1465-87) and Ru wares made for the Northern Song dynasty court around 1086.

However, a funding crisis in 2006, when the government cut the annual grant given to SOAS, saw the collection close at the end of 2007 and moved to the British Museum, going back on public display in 2009.

When it opened, the public gallery featured a selection of 200 of the most outstanding ceramics on a single level in cases in the centre of the room, designed to encourage visitors to walk around them. The remaining 1,500 exhibits were arranged more densely in rows of glass shelves in tall, narrow wall cases to create a “library” of ceramics.

The public gallery in Room 95 of the British Museum is part of the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies, which includes facilities to use the collection for teaching.

The director of the British Museum, Dr Nicholas Cullinan, said: “I am humbled by the generosity of the Trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation in permanently entrusting their incomparable private collection to the British Museum.”

With this donation, the British Museum now owns one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics of any public institution outside the Chinese-speaking world, numbering 10,000 objects.

Chair of The Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art and The Sir Percival David Foundation Academic and Research Fund Colin Sheaf FSA said: “It’s exactly 100 years since Sir Percival David made his first visit to China. His inaugural trip engendered a lifelong love of its art and culture, especially the Imperial porcelains made for the use of the Emperor and his Court, which inspired him to assemble his unparalleled private collection. It’s entirely fitting therefore that, in this Centenary year, the Trustees of his Foundation should resolve that the most suitable permanent home for his Collection is the British Museum, where – on loan for fifteen years – it has attracted millions of visitors every year, accomplishing all the charitable purposes of the Foundation.”

“In every respect, this gift achieves the three objectives which most preoccupied Sir Percival as he planned for the Collection’s future: to preserve intact his unique Collection; to keep every single piece on public display together in perpetuity in a dedicated Gallery; and to ensure that the Collection would remain not only a visual display of surpassing beauty, but also an inspiration and education for future generations of academics, students and non-specialists alike, attracted to the Imperial arts of Asia’s greatest and longest civilisation.”

Ceramics from The Sir Percival David collection will be lent to the Shanghai Museum in China and Metropolitan Museum in New York as part of the British Museum’s support of exhibitions worldwide.