William Burrell by Martin Bellamy & Isobel MacDonald

Author:Martin Bellamy & Isobel MacDonald [MacDonald, Martin Bellamy and Isobel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

The Queen’s reference to Hutton as ‘a real museum’ would have greatly appealed to Burrell as it highlighted the status of his collection, now suitably housed in a country estate.

Whether as a result of his falling out with Marion and the failure to secure a line of succession, Burrell had decided in the early 1930s that he was going to leave his collection to the nation. With this in mind he welcomed another important guest to Hutton Castle in 1931, Harold Clifford Smith, a furniture historian and curator of furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London who had written the first two volumes of the 1930 Catalogue of English Furniture & Woodwork for the museum.52 In his account he wrote,

I had heard various reports concerning the tapestries, carpets, needlework, stained glass, sculpture, armour, furniture, and other works of art which Sir William Burrell had for many years been gathering together; but what I saw far exceeded my expectations.

Some of the stained glass and a number of the tapestries are already known to the Museum; but I found not only quantities of these objects, but a great deal of English Gothic and Tudor oak furniture of the highest quality and importance – comprising Gothic cupboards, chairs, panelling, and carvings, Elizabethan ‘refectory’ tables, buffets and sideboards, and elaborately carved bedsteads and armchairs.53

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