B W Robinson; scholar of Persian miniature painting (fascinating)
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 03/01/2006) Telegraph
B W Robinson, who died on December 29 aged 93, formulated
the bases for the classification and chronology of Persian
miniature painting upon which scholars continue to depend;
he was also a world authority on both the arts of the
Japanese sword and the work of the celebrated 19th-century
print maker Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
"Robbie" to his friends, BW Robinson to his readers, he was
Keeper of the Department of Metalwork at the Victoria and
Albert Museum from 1966 until his retirement in 1972. He
then spent four years as Keeper Emeritus, helping to
establish the museum's Far Eastern Department.
Robinson had joined the V&A's staff in 1939, and throughout
his working life there - with a break for war service - he
consistently combined a powerful intellectual range with a
structured routine of careful study and regular publication.
This enabled him to build up the most impressive knowledge
and expertise in fields well outside the immediate area of
his day-to-day professional concerns, as well as within.
Many of Robinson's publications and in particular his
important catalogues of Persian miniatures and manuscript
illuminations in public collections - including those in the
Bodleian, Chester Beatty, India Office, and John Rylands
libraries published between 1958 and 1980 - are, and will
long remain, essential points of reference for the serious
scholar.
Equally, A Primer of Japanese Sword-blades (1955), The Arts
of the Japanese Sword (1961) and Kuniyoshi (1961) have all
come to be considered indispensable items in the library of
any museum curator or collector in those fields.
Robinson's book Kuniyoshi: the Warrior Prints (1982) won the
Uchiyama Memorial Prize of the Japan Ukiyoe Society.
The great success of the V&A's loan exhibition Persian
Miniature Painting from Collections in the British Isles
(1967) - later described by the Museum's Director, John
Pope-Hennessy, as "one of the most sensitive and sheerly
beautiful exhibitions that had ever been held in the
museum" - was due entirely to Robinson's sure
connoisseurship and skill.
He also provided the inspiration for the museum's Kuniyoshi
centenary exhibition in 1961 which, commentators agreed,
firmly established that artist's reputation as the last
great master of the Japanese colour-print.
Basil William Robinson was born in London on June 20 1912,
the only child of William Robinson and his wife Mabel (née
Gilbanks).
The family lived in Stanhope Gardens and on wet afternoons
young Robbie (he never liked the name Basil) would be taken
to the museums at South Kensington, where his fascination
with eastern art began.
The Arms and Armour and Oriental collections at the V&A
became firm favourites, and it was there that Robbie first
saw and fell in love with Persian miniatures - starting with
a Layla and Majnun manuscript of Qasimi, left open in the
display case at a miniature showing Majnun in the
wilderness.
His enthusiasm showed no signs of abating, and once he had
become familiar with the V&A's limited Persian manuscript
holdings, his mother began to take him to the British
Museum. There Dr Lionel Barnett once showed them the
delightful Shahnama (Book of Kings) of 1486.
Mabel Robinson also took her young son to call on the
secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, Miss Ella Sykes, who
thereafter sent Robbie a book every Christmas. One of them -
A Persian Caravan, by A Cecil Edwards - he would continue to
re-read, with great enjoyment, for the rest of his life.
By the time he went to Winchester as an exhibitioner in
1926, Robinson had already accumulated, by way of birthday
and Christmas presents, a small library of books about
Persia and Persian art, including histories of the country
by Sir John Malcolm and Sir Percy Sykes (Ella's brother),
and Ernst Kühnel's Miniaturmalerei im islamischen Orient
(minus one or two illustrations his father considered
unsuitable).
By the time he left school, he had acquired all nine volumes
of the Warners' translation of the Shahnama, as well as Sir
Thomas Arnold's Painting in Islam - the latter bought with
some of the £5 he received for winning the Kenneth Freeman
Prize with a paper on Greek sculpture.
In the spring of 1931, during Robinson's last year at
Winchester, the great International Exhibition of Persian
Art opened at Burlington House. Robinson attended the
exhibition on several occasions, once as guide to his
housemaster, and at other times with Miss Ella or Sir Percy
Sykes.
On one embarrassing occasion, Robinson recalled, "Sir Percy
gave a running commentary on the exhibits in a loud voice,
with the result that, although his remarks were addressed
directly to me, we soon found ourselves followed by a
growing crowd which must have numbered 20 or 30 by the end.
As we left the exhibition he said to me: 'I wanted to give
these people the benefit of my knowledge and experience.' "
From Winchester, Robinson went up to Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, where what he later described as "an excess of
extra-curricular activities" - such as drawing cartoons for
Isis and playing the guitar in the University jazz band -
led to his securing only a Third in Greats.
He nevertheless persuaded the university authorities to
allow him to stay on for a further year to write a BLitt
thesis on the collection of Persian miniatures in the
Bodleian Library. This was to form the basis of the
comprehensive catalogue he would later produce.
Oxford was followed by a short spell as a prep school master
at Bognor, and then the offer of a place at the V&A. Having
always wanted a museum post, he accepted at once, and took
up his duties in January 1939.
After a few months in the library, where his first job was
to re-catalogue the small collection of Persian manuscripts,
Robinson was transferred to the Department of Metalwork,
with its extensive Islamic and Far Eastern collections. He
remained there until the outbreak of war in September, and
then from 1946 until his retirement.
After call-up and a year in the ranks of the Royal Sussex
Regiment, Robinson was sent out to India. He was
commissioned in the 2nd Punjab Regiment, Indian Army, and
served in India, Burma and Malaya.
Arriving at 14 Army HQ, Comilla, East Bengal, in 1944,
Robinson fell in with two officers at the mess bar. After a
few drinks they asked him his name and, on the spur of the
moment, he answered "Kegworthy" (a character from PG
Wodehouse). Thereafter he was known in the Army as
"Keggers".
Two chance wartime encounters enabled Robinson greatly to
advance his knowledge of eastern art. In India he found a
bearer who wrote, and taught him, Nastaliq script; and when
later, in Malaya, at the time of the Japanese surrender,
Robinson was given the task of listing and cataloguing the
Japanese swords - many of them with blades handed down in a
family over generations - he enlisted the help of a Japanese
PoW, Colonel Yamada, who was expert in the field, to assist
and teach him.
A large, amiable figure, with an air about him of the
Victorian era to whose music-hall songs and traditions he
was much attached, Robinson was a great encourager of the
young and a dependable friend to people all over the world.
He always remained, for instance, a firm friend to Colonel
Yamada.
An enthusiastic singer of traditional English songs - he
once impressed a party of Uzbeks in Samarkand with his
rendering of The cheerful 'arn blows in the marn' - Robinson
founded the Aldrich Catch Club, which met regularly at his
London house to sing rounds and catches of the 15th-19th
centuries, often ones which Robinson himself had unearthed.
He had a phenomenal memory for songs, and with RF Hall
compiled The Aldrich Book of Catches (1989).
In 1967 Robinson was elected honorary president of the
To-ken Society of Great Britain. He was president of the
Royal Asiatic Society from 1970 to 1973, and Keeper Emeritus
(one of the last) at the V&A from 1972 to 1976.
He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow
of the British Academy. He gave the Hertz Lecture at the
British Academy in 1983, taking as his subject "Persian
Painting and the National Epic".
His later publications included Persian Paintings in the
Royal Asiatic Society (1998) and The Persian Book of Kings
(2002).
Robinson married first, in 1945, Mary Stewart, who died in
1954. He married secondly, in 1958, Oriel Steel, who
survives him, together with their son and daughter.