Obituary of Walter Leo Hildburgh

From The Times, 28 November 1955

Dr W L Hildburgh, a devoted collector of works of art and one of the most important benefactors the Victoria and Albert Museum has ever had, died in hospital in London on Friday. He was 79.

He was born in New York in 1876 into a family which had emigrated to the United States in the early 19th century. He attended Columbia University where he obtained a PhD and afterwards engaged in various forms of scientific research. Since he did not have to depend for his livelihood on the proceeds of his research he was able to find time to become a figure-skater of international status, as well as a first-class swimmer.

He began to travel abroad in 1900 and thereafter his life was one of travel. In that year he started a prolonged tour of Japan, China and India. At an early stage he began to develop as a collector, but his interest was at first attracted by folk-lore and anthropology. Three further visits were made to the same area in the following years and he made a prolonged stay in Ceylon studying magic. After this he passed on to the Middle East and then to Europe. In 1912 he established a base in London and thereafter he never paid more than fleeting visits to the United States.

Tours of Europe

Soon after his arrival in London he began to frequent the Victoria and Albert Museum. As a result his interests widened to include the history of art and he began to tour Europe collecting. He started inexpensively on subjects like wrought ironwork, but, carefully tutored by Sir Eric Maclagan and by H P Mitchell, he began to acquire sculpture and metalwork. The first important fruits of this was the purchase in 1926 of the collection of English alabasters formed by Philip Nelson of Liverpool. At that date there was little of this important variety of English medieval art in English museums, so he set to work to fill the gap and was able to present some 300 examples to the Victoria and Albert Museum on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1946.

During the same period he was collecting Spanish goldsmiths' work. He obtained a first-class knowledge of the subject by visiting the church treasuries of Spain, but most of his purchases were made outside that country. The collection which he placed on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, when added to the existing collection there, made it possible to study this branch of Iberian art better in London than anywhere else north of the Pyrenees. He formed smaller collections of Dutch, German and Italian silver which were remarkably valuable, considering that he rarely spent large sums for his purchases.

His interests were by no means confined to alabaster carvings and goldsmiths' work. His collection of later English sculpture was built up especially to fill another gap at South Kensington, but he could never resist a good ivory or an Italian bronze at a reasonable price.

Pleasure of the Chase

As a collector he was almost free from the lust possession. He enjoyed the hunt for unfamiliar works of art in unlikely places and prided himself on buying ahead of fashion. He regarded his purchases as the raw materials for research and when he had discovered and published all that he could about them, they would sooner or later be passed on to the museum as gifts. He was prolific writer of short studies for learned magazines, particularly those of the Society of Antiquaries of which he became a Fellow in 1915. His one book, 'Spanish Medieval Enamels', appeared in 1936.