Charles Hercules Read
Henry Pegram | |
---|---|
Born | 6 July 1857 |
Died | 11 February 1929 Rapallo, Italy | (aged 71)
Nationality | British |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Edinburgh (honorary doctorate) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum) British Museum |
Sir Charles Hercules Read
Career
Read was privately educated, with no university degree before he received an honorary doctorate from the
As Keeper he was responsible for beginning the publication of catalogues, guides, books and booklets that brought awareness of the collections to a wider public. He employed the Oxford graduate
A rare excursion into archaeological excavation was his supervision of the excavation of the royal Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Highdown Hill in Sussex in the 1890s, which even by the standards of that date was not a model of best practice. One unfortunate episode was his advice to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to decline the loan of the Anglo-Saxon Fuller Brooch, which he wrongly believed to be a modern fake; after his day it was bought by the British Museum.[7]
Death
His health deteriorated after his retirement, and he spent the winters on the Riviera, dying in Rapallo, Italy on 11 February 1929.[8] He was buried in the Cimitero Urbano.
Publications
(selected)
- Read, Charles Hercules, & Dalton, Ormonde Maddock (1899). Antiquities from the city of Benin and from other parts of West Africa in the British Museum. London: British Museum.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - The Waddesdon Bequest: Catalogue of the Works of Art bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild, M.P., 1898, 1902, British Museum, Fully available on the Internet archive The catalogue numbers here are still used, and may be searched for on the BM website as "WB.1" etc.
- The Royal Gold Cup of the Kings of France and England, now preserved in the British Museum. Vetusta Monumenta Volume 7, part 3, 1904, the first publication of the Royal Gold Cup
Notes
- ^ Balfour, 61
- ^ Balfour, 61
- ^ Balfour, 61; Tonnochy, 84–85; Burlington, 153
- ^ Raymond John Howgego, 'Joyce, Thomas Athol (1878–1942)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2010 accessed 1 Dec 2013
- ^ Tonnochy, 83, 86
- ^ Balfour, 61; Tonnochy, 85; Burlington, 153–154
- OCLC 610435306,) is that it was bought from a London bric-à-brac dealer by an unnamed man who did not know its history, he passed it to Sir Charles Robinson who published it in 'The Antiquary'. A few years later Mr. E. Hockliffe, the son-in-law of Sir Charles Robinson, offered the brooch as a loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. E. T. Leeds, then an assistant at the museum, persuaded the then keeper D. G. Hogarth to accept the loan. On the advice of the then Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum (Sir Hercules Read, P.S.A.) and his assistant keeper (R. A. Smith) the brooch was pronounced a fake and withdrawn from exhibition with the approval of the Ashmolean Museum's technical specialist, W. H. Young. The brooch was eventually purchased by Capt. A. W. F. Fuller and, apart from occasional mentions (e.g. by Sir Alfred Clapham), was not thought of seriously until the Strickland brooch (registration no. 1949,0702.1) was brought to the British Museum. On the advice of Sir Thomas Kendrick the Fuller brooch was traced by Mr. Bruce-Mitford and after laboratory examination it was acquired by the British Museum.
The brooch's history (as recounted by Bruce-Mitford
- ^ Tonnochy, 86
References
- "Burlington": Sir Hercules Read, The Burlington Magazine (no author given), Vol. 54, No. 312 (Mar. 1929), pp. 153–154, JSTOR
- Balfour, Henry, Obituary Sir Charles Hercules Read, 6 July 1857 – 11 February 1929, Man (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland), Vol. 29, (Apr. 1929), pp. 61–62, JSTOR
- Tonnochy, A. B., Four Keepers of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities, The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep. 1953), pp. 83–88, JSTOR