Lunchtime Lectures: The Extraordinary Art Collection of Lady Charlotte Schreiber

This autumn marks 140 years since Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895) gave her celebrated collection to the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A. Charlotte was an extraordinary antiquarian, collector and connoisseur who dedicated her life to art, history, and philanthropy. A self-taught artist and linguist, she wrote a celebrated translation of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion in the 1830s, sought out works by Holbein and Velázquez in the 1840s, and soon developed a specialist eye for European ceramics. Charlotte excavated ceramic factory sites, discovered and transcribed archival documentary sources, and scoured the furthest corners of the globe, from Madrid to Capetown, for objects in her particular ‘collecting line’. After more than thirty collecting trips across the world she donated her trove of over 5,000 objects to the South Kensington Museum (1885), and the British Museum (1887-95). This lecture considers the legacy of one of the greatest women collectors of the nineteenth century. 

Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is an art historian, curator and writer. She is Director of Global Premodern Art and Senior Lecturer in French and British History of Art, c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the V&A Museum and Curator of The Chitra Collection. She has just published her first book Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector   (Lund Humphries, 2025).