num_pages: 175
description: The seeds for this publication were sown when Swiss tycoon and prominent Tribal art collector, Jean Paul Barbier, asked author Hermione Waterfield for the background to some names that kept appearing in the sale catalogues of Christie's and Sotheby's--names such as Harry Beasley, General Pitt Rivers and John Hewett. Slowly, what was meant to be no more than an informal collection of notes turned into a in-depth and ambitious essay aiming to introduce a dozen influential dealers and collectors of ethnography active between 1770 and 1990 in Britain. The accounts here concern those collectors who left documentary records and created and developed a taste for ethnographica in others. These men were rarely field collectors, and only occasional travellers. While they worked from home they were not armchair collectors: instead they were very vigorous hunters, devoted to the constant, even obsessive, search for ethnographic objects.
language: English
title: Provenance: Twelve Collectors of Ethnographic Art in England, 1760-1990
titlecomplete: Provenance: Twelve Collectors of Ethnographic Art in England, 1760-1990
publisher: Somogy Editions D'Art