Peter Thornton; Furniture historian & curator (Very interesting)
Hyfler/Rosner
enough.
The Independent (London)
February 20, 2007 Tuesday
First Edition
PETER THORNTON;
Historian of furniture and interior decoration who left the
V&A to run Sir John Soane's Museum
BYLINE: Ronald Lightbown
Peter Thornton was a star even amongst the brilliant galaxy
of curators who transformed the collecting, the display and
the scholarship of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Edwardians had divided the museum among six departments,
using technique as their principle of division - so that the
collections were, so to speak, divided vertically by
material, rather than horizontally by period. The result was
to create a museum staff of specialists in the decorative
arts of an intensity of expertise which in many other
museums and galleries is the established privilege only of
painting, and which gave the V& A a unique international
reputation for connoisseurship and scholarship in its
fields.
The inter-war years were a period of impoverishment for the
museum - one annual grant for purchases in the 1930s was
said to have been £1,500 (spent on the library). After the
Second World War, the task of returning and exhibiting the
collections fell on the Director, Sir Leigh Ashton, who
fought an amazingly unscrupulous battle with the Ministry of
Education to get the galleries redecorated and fit for the
public to visit.
He took a major decision that was to alter the display of
the museum collections and to affect the work of the
departments profoundly. The Department of Architecture and
Sculpture and the Department of Furniture and Woodwork were
charged with assembling, mainly on the ground floor, what
were regarded as the finest objects in the museum
collections and arranging them by period in what were called
Primary Galleries. The departmental collections were kept
upstairs in what were mistakenly labelled Study Collections,
disguising (to their injury) under a dreary didactic name
the beauty and interest of the objects they contained.
The pre-war curatorial staff was once said to be divided
into those who worked hard and never travelled, and those
who never travelled. Peter Thorn-ton's own enthusiasm for
art had been first kindled by the Baroque churches he saw in
Carinthia, where he was stationed at the end of the war:
they ended his projected career as an aeronautical engineer.
The post-war curatorial staff of the V&A adopted almost
universally an international approach to the appreciation
and study of the museum's extraordinarily wide-ranging
collections. The difficulties of scholarship in the
decorative arts are not generally understood. The only
relatively well-documented arts are those of architecture,
sculpture and painting. In many of the other arts
represented in the museum documentation is very uneven, rich
for some celebrated state or princely manufactures,
elsewhere often scanty or non-existent, especially in the
central question of design. Much has to be reconstructed
over many years from chance records, from inventories and
from scattered references. Both progress and publication can
be slow.
After the First World War, moreover, the great wave of
European 19thcentury art research and scholarship in the
decorative arts, much of it French, had subsided into feeble
ripples, accompanied in Britain by the rise of arbitrary
aesthetic canons that condemned the Rococo and Art Nouveau
and damned the entire Victorian age.
With some difficulty the Regency, largely due to one or two
perceptive scholars, established a place for itself in an
orthodoxy that into the 1950s favoured the 1830s as a
terminal date in the arts. Even William Morris had to
retrieve a revival masterminded by Peter Flood and the
Circulation Department of the museum, one of the major
revolutions of taste instigated by the new museum
generation.
It was into this world of reorganisa-tion and revival that
Thornton came in 1954, with an open eye, a creative flair
and a inexhaustible capacity for work. After Bryanston he
had gone to the Havilland Aeronautical Technical School - to
the end he enjoyed working with his hands - and then, after
service with the Intelligence Corps in Austria, went up to
Trinity, Cambridge. He served a voluntary apprenticeship to
museum work in the Fitzwilliam, and then in 1952 took a post
with the National Art Collections Fund, where its chairman
the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres supplemented a small
salary with the occasional crumpled £5 note. Peter Kai
Thornton was born in 1925, the son of a distinguished
scientist, Sir Gerard Thornton, and a Danish mother, Gerda
(daughter of Kai) Nørregaard. His Scandinavian heritage was
very importantto him. It gave him a strict Nordic sense of
duty and under a quiet English
exterioraNordicemotionalwarmth.Italso gave him a knowledge
and understanding of German, Dutch and Scandinavian arts
that was unique in Britain, and a feeling for the importance
of design at a time when modern Scandinavian design was in
high vogue in Britain.
He first joined the Department of Textiles, where he worked
with Natalie Rothstein on Spitalfield silks and produced in
1965 his Baroque and Rococo Silks, still a standard work.
Already however, in 1962, he had moved to the Department of
Furniture and Woodwork, first as Assistant Keeper, becoming
Keeper in 1966.
His predecessor, Delves Molesworth, though furniture and
woodwork were not the subjects of his choice, had taken two
initiatives important for the future of furniture studies -
encouragement of the Furniture History Society and the
foundation of an archive of photographs. Thornton fostered
both of these. Molesworth had begun the rearrangement of the
furniture galleries in a more decorative style - his
introduction of artificial flowers shocked some museum
sensibilities - but his underlying conception of rooms
arranged by period was to be developed by Thornton with
flair and with a rigorousness of scholarship based on
documents and pictorial evidence that suddenly gave a new
and very influential authenticity to his displays as well as
a fresh attractiveness.
The department had acquired responsibility for three great
houses in London and in its environs, Ham House, Osterley
Park and, later, Apsley House. Ham House had long been
recognised as a sleeping beauty, still pervaded by the
atmosphere of the later 17th century. It also possessed
early inventories, which made possible a deeper
understanding of what should be done to preserve and enhance
its unique charm, and the administration of it was formative
in Thornton's philosophy of authenticity of display and
interpretation. His researches into the house were embodied
in The Furnishing and Decoration of Ham House (1980, with
Maurice Tomlin). His training in textiles led him to pioneer
the study of early upholstery, opening yet another avenue
along which others have since followed.
In the museum itself he saw display in the Primary Galleries
as the main work of his department, and the study of
interior decoration as one of its functions. He was
virtually the founder of the scholarly study of interior
decoration, establishing it as an exact historical science,
and giving it prominence as a master art in the evolution of
the arts it employs, from architecture to painting and the
arts of furnishing.
His influence, which became great, was disseminated through
a series of groundbreaking works: Seventeenth-Century
Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978);
Authentic Decor: the domestic interior 1620-1920 (1984),
which became an interior decorator's manual; and, perhaps
the crown of his work in the field, The Italian Renaissance
Interior 1400-1600 (1991).
Although now in Woodwork, he kept his interest in costume
and the new Costume Gallery he designed with the Textiles
Department made a sensation and entranced the public. He was
distressed by the state of the musical instruments
collection, which by its nature requires special conditions
and care, and it was a matter of pride to him that he was
able to have it restored and exhibited, and the instruments
themselves once more played, then a major innovation.
During Thornton's years as Keeper,
heassembledaroundhimateamofyoung enthusiasts and volunteers
whom he inspired with his enthusiasm, energy and dedication.
Realising that museum assistants, the lowest grade of the
curatorial hierarchy, contained graduates and non-graduates
of potential talent, he encouraged them to make themselves
authorities on aspects of the department's work. Under his
aegis, for instance, the late Clive Wainwright became a
noted authority on the Victorianage. His Deputy and
Assistant Keepers, Desmond Fitzgerald, Simon Jervis and John
Hardy, all made reputations under his encouraging regime.
In 1984, as he was nearing 60, it so happened that the two
highly distinguished but very elderly curators of Sir John
Soane's Museum, Sir John Summerson and Dorothy Stroud,
celebrated historians of English architecture and landscape
gardening, were now retiring, and Thornton successfully
applied for the curatorship.
The Soane museum was the very personal creation of a great
architect who was also a collector of exceptional taste and
flair, and had arranged the interiors of the house he
bequeathed to the nation with a Romantic sense of the
modulation of light within them and an arrangement of
furnishings, paintings and objects which sets them off to
perfection and in always harmonious relationship. The museum
also houses Soane's own archive, library and collection of
drawings.
When Thornton took it over, it was in a highly dangerous if
poetic state of atmospheric charm, that concealed the
underlying need for a thorough programme of restoration and
conservation. This he undertook with the same skill,
knowledge and dedication that he had shown at the V&A,
steadily supported by the trustees and their chairman, the
Duke of Grafton.
He soon discovered the richness of authentic information
about the house to be found in its archives, and based his
programme on what they revealed. Money, the origin of the
problem, he raised with the generous help of the
architectural profession and of private and co-operative
donors - he had the enviable advantage of seeking financial
help for a self-evidently beautiful house requiring projects
on not too large a scale. Again he recruited gifted and
dedicated assistants, notably his successor Margaret
Richardson, and Helen Dorey. Together they saw to the
improved recording and cataloguing of the collections and to
the opening of a small but very elegantly designed
exhibition room.
After 10 years Peter Thornton left the Soane a renovated,
conserved and reawakened national treasure. His achievement
was recognised on his retirement by his appointment as CBE.
His last work was to provide in 1998, in Form& Decoration in
the Decorative Arts, 1470-1870, the sort of manual that he
felt would have helped him as a young man.
Peter Kai Thornton, art historian and museum curator: born
St Albans, Hertfordshire 8 April 1925; Voluntary Assistant
Keeper, Fitzwilliam Museum 1950-52; Joint Secretary,
National Art Collections Fund 1952-54; Assistant Keeper,
Department of Textiles, Victoria and Albert Museum 1954-62,
Assistant Keeper, Department of Woodwork 1962-66, Keeper,
Department of Furniture and Woodwork 1966-84; Chairman,
Furniture History Society 1974-84; FSA 1976; Curator, Sir
John Soane's Museum 1984-95; CBE 1996; married 1950 Ann
Helps (three daughters; marriage dissolved 2001), 2002 Lena
Spindler; died Isleworth, Middlesex 8 February 2007.