The Rob Dickins Collection
The Rob Dickins Collection includes 3,500 photographs of over 1000 artists and leading personalities of the nineteenth century, together with 1,000 artist letters. After purchasing an archive collected over many years by Jeremy Maas, the London art dealer, one of the Watts Gallery’s trustees, Rob Dickins CBE added his own collection and generously donated it to the Watts Gallery in 2007. The Rob Dickins collection includes images of royalty and politicians, such as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, influential thinkers, writers and musicians including Ruskin, Darwin and Dickens, artist celebrities, including G. F. Watts and his circle. Also included are the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes including Holman Hunt, Rosetti, Burne- Jones and their muses.
The extent and value of this rich archive has yet to be fully researched and its importance is still in the process of being discovered. Treasures such as Holman Hunt’s family album can be found as well as “The Red Album”, made up of letters, photographs and biographies of artists.
In the nineteenth- century the fascination with celebrities was not limited to their visage but public curiosity extended to homes and lifestyles. Artists themselves encouraged this interest through the grand studio houses that they built. These were great extravagant buildings, which functioned simultaneously as homes, studios and palaces of entertainment as well as being a material embodiment of success. Some of the notable photographs included in the Rob Dickins Collection are the studio of G. F. Watts at Limnerslease and the interior shots of Heatherley’s School of Art in London.
This remarkable collection further develops the Watts Gallery’s centre for exploring Victorian art, social history and craft.
The Rob Dickins Collection Online
The full collection is now available to view online as part of the Gallery's collection database. Click here to be taken to the database where you can search by subject or photographer.
Exhibition: Victorian Artists in Photographs
‘Victorian Artists in Photographs’ is an exhibition of a selection of the photographs which has been touring since 2007. The reviews praised this significant collection and its catalogue was long listed for the Berger prize. In Country Life, Matthew Dennison wrote:
“Here are glimpses into a world that is not merely Watts’s, nor even Victorian, but everlasting: Edward Burne-Jones in the role of grandfather … the last meeting of Ruskin and Holman Hunt, poignantly preserved forever in silver bromide.”
Matthew Dennison in Country Life (September 2007)
The digitisation of
was supported by Echo
