How to Be a Collector : Sir Percival David and His Life in Chinese Art
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Overview
By the time Sir Percival David died in 1964, he had built one of the finest collections of Chinese ceramics outside China, a legacy now valued at over 1 billion and housed in the British Museum. Yet the public image he so carefully crafted as a scholar-collector tells only part of the story. Born into the vast Sassoon merchant dynasty in Bombay, David inherited a fortune that enabled his collecting, but his identity was never defined by commerce alone. He travelled the world in pursuit of rare Chinese treasures and did more than almost anyone to establish Chinese art as a field of study in the West. All the while, he kept his private life carefully hidden: his wife, his daughter, and later his young mistress. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, this first full portrait follows him through empire, war, illness, and the dispersal of China's imperial art. He let his collection speak for him and said almost nothing of himself--as though the only self-portrait he ever meant to leave was the one assembled, piece by piece, in porcelain.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9789882373952
- ISBN-10: 988237395X
- Publisher: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
- Publish Date: January 2027
- Page Count: 240
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