An introduction to Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan
Peter Rose (1927-2020) and Albert Gallichan (1930-2001) were pioneering collectors of 19th Century fine and decorative arts. From the time they met in the early 1950s collecting was a shared passion and a shared joy. They were not wealthy but used their money wisely, going against accepted good taste as early as the 1950’s, when Victorian decorative arts were not merely detested but despised. Although always scholarly, their interest was not purely academic. The spoils of their labours were not racked like an archive but instead they populated a densely hung and beautifully arranged early Victorian Villa in Brighton.
The collection continued to grow and be refined throughout Peter and Albert’s lives with very strict rules adhered to by both on what could and could not be admitted. The extensive group of pictures and objects became one of the most respected in its field, with collectors and scholars alike keen for a chance to visit Montpellier Villas to see the assemblage in person.
With the aim of preserving their privacy, the collection was always referred to publicly as the Albert Dawson Collection, a combination of the couple’s second names. It was under this name that, after Albert’s death in 2001, Peter established the Albert Dawson Educational Trust in 2003 to provide grants to further the study of 19th century fine and decorative arts.
Following Peter’s death in November 2020, his Executors sold the house and the collection, minus legacies and gifts to certain museums, mainly at dedicated sales at Christie’s and Lyon and Turnbull. The proceeds have gone to enlarge the resources of the Trust, ensuring that the scholarly legacy of their life’s work can live on.
Memoirs of the couple and their collection are included below together with some images of the collection before it was dispersed. It was recorded in a feature in the September 2021 issue of The World of Interiors, with text by Stephen Calloway and photography by Jan Baldwin; and in The Best of British Arts & Crafts, published in 2004, by Brian Coleman.
A Memoir of Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan
Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan’s magnificent collection of 19th century fine and decorative art had grown over the decades and with it had developed a scholarly, often pioneering, knowledge of artists, craftsmen and designers some of whom had been all but forgotten.
They met in the 1950’s and, together, rented a small attic flat above an antique shop in Hampstead. They shared a fascination for what was then called Victoriana and, taking their cue from the Sitwells, who, before the war, had collected Staffordshire pottery and things under glass domes, embarked on the formation of a collection that became their mutual passion for the next fifty years. Before the 1970s boom, antique shops, apart from Bond Street establishments patronised by Queen Mary, were almost Dickensian. Furniture would be piled high, illuminated by single 60-watt lightbulbs and presentation was non-existent. Things Victorian were almost unsaleable and Peter and Albert must have felt like children in a sweet shop. Their taste then was less sophisticated than it became and cabriole legged chairs and and papier mâché furniture dominated.
From Hampstead they moved to Richmond where Peter worked for the Roman Catholic St Mary’s University, Twickenham, at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Albert for an advertising agency in London. In 1965 they moved to Brighton, where they bought 1, Montpellier Villas. Here they were surrounded by antique shops and open-air markets at a time when the contents of large Victorian house were being sold. They had their pick of nineteenth-century paintings, furniture and decorative arts and, as they became more prosperous, they were able to buy from London galleries and sale rooms; The Fine Art Society, Abbot & Holder, Richard Dennis, John Jesse, Paul Reeves and Michael Whiteway were favourite haunts and Sotheby’s Belgravia could have been set up especially for them. The FAS, in particular, was a key venue for those interested in nineteenth and twentieth-century paintings and decorative art and their Private Views were an opportunity to meet those with similar enthusiasms. Other connexions were made through the Victorian Society and in particular the Decorative Arts Society, which they helped found in 1975.
Although the basic disposition and decoration of the house did not change in the decades that they lived in the Villas, individual pieces were let go in order to accommodate new acquisitions and new interests were explored; they were amongst the first to research and collect French Studio Pottery. Now all has been be dispersed but the meticulous archive and hundreds of photographs will be preserved at the Brotherton Library in Leeds to become a rich source of information about a chapter of British collecting in which Peter and Albert were two of the greatest exponents.
Peter Miall