The Society for the History of Collecting is pleased to invite you to its Annual General Meeting and Annual Lecture on Wednesday, 17 September 2023 at the Art Worker's Guild, London.

We are delighted to announce that Judy Rudoe FSA, Honorary Research Fellow, British Museum will delivery the Annual Lecture: "The British Museum and collecting post 1850 applied arts"

The event is run as a hybrid event, the AGM and lecture will also be streamed via Zoom.
The AGM will start at 5:30pm and will be followed by the Annual Lecture at 6.30pm.
Registration via https://thesocietyforthehistoryofcollecting.wildapricot.org/event-6300917/Registration

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In the late 1970s, the decision was made to extend the European applied arts collections into the 20th century. This was in part to bring the European collections in line with other departments of the Museum where the collections went up to the present day. Contemporary manufactures had in fact been acquired from the Museum’s earliest years in the mid-18th century. This lecture looks at how the collection was developed, at some of the key figures who shaped it before the 1970s and at the expansion into new fields in more recent decades.

Judy Rudoe was Curator at the British Museum for almost 50 years (1974-2023), responsible for the post 1800 collections in what is now the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory – collections which include metalwork, silver, jewellery, ceramics and glass, alongside traditional and regional European costume and textiles, woodwork, basketry. She has written widely on many aspects of these collections, is co-author of the two-volume Catalogue of the Hull Grundy Gift of Jewellery to the British Museum (1984), author of Decorative 1850-1950. A catalogue of the British Museum Collection (1991, revised 1994), and Cartier 1900-1939, exhibition catalogue, British Museum (1997). Written with her longtime collaborator Charlotte Gere, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: a mirror to the world (2010) won the 2011 William Berger Prize for British Art History. She is currently President of the Society of Jewellery Historians and Trustee of the Albert Dawson Educational Trust.