The power of taste

In 1921, a collection of around 800 Chinese ceramics was offered on loan to Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum by Stanley Berkeley Smith (1878–1955), a British banker based in Karachi, who had spent the previous twenty-one years acquiring the objects in India. A Chinese Porcelain Room was duly opened at the museum in 1923. Tastes in Chinese ceramics, however, were changing. From the 1920s, Cheltenham’s curator invited London specialists to inspect Berkeley Smith’s ceramics: one influential dealer went so far as to recommend that some of the pieces were not ‘museum worthy’ and should be disposed of. So it was that between 1946 and 1960 almost 500 of Berkeley Smith’s ceramics were sold at auction in Cheltenham and London. This paper examines the relationship between Berkeley Smith and Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum from the 1920s to 1950s, exploring how his collection became entangled within shifting landscapes of taste in Chinese art during this time.

Art · Art history · Business · Loan · Power (physics) · Taste · Visual arts · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Finance · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Japanese History and Culture · Psychology

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