As part of a CHASE-AHRC doctoral training partnership, I spent three months undertaking a provenance research placement at the V&A, where I explored the ownership histories of objects within the museum’s South-East Asian collections. I adopted a qualitative approach, using the V&A’s acquisition registers and archival files to focus on individual collectors and dealers, with the aim of interrogating the networks and spaces in which they collected and in which objects circulated. I am grateful to Louis Copplestone, Curator of South-East Asia, and Alexandra Watson-Jones, Provenance Research Curator, for their supervision of my placement project, and to CHASE for their generous funding of the placement.
The V&A has a substantial collection of objects from South-East Asia, including ceramics, metalwork, textiles, sculpture, arms and armour, and lacquerware. However, in contrast to objects from Myanmar and the Indian subcontinent, collected in the British colonial context of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the museum acquired relatively few objects from the mainland South-East Asian countries of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam until the latter part of the 20th century. Of these, only a handful of objects are from the former French colonies of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; the largest number are from Thailand. This led me to explore the particular circumstances of acquisition of objects from Thailand (or Siam, as it was known until 1939); who were these objects acquired from, and how were they originally collected in Thailand?
Interest in South-East Asian art and design in Europe was fuelled by the universal exhibitions of the second half of the 19th century, in London, Paris and Amsterdam, and by the trade and diplomatic networks that followed imperial expansion in the region. My research in the V&A archive shed some light on networks in the trade of art in this context: reviewing correspondence in the museum’s acquisition files, I found that a high proportion of the museum’s objects from Thailand were sold or given to the museum by individuals who had occupied official positions in Siamese state institutions, in many cases recruited during the period of modernisation in the reign of King Mongkut (r. 1851-1868) and King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910).
Copper alloy figure of Shiva, c. 15th century, Thailand, IM.42-1934. Donated by Lt.Col. M.M. Bidder.
Internal V&A correspondence regarding the offer of a loan of M.M. Bidder’s collection of Thai objects. V&A archival file T. 19409/05.
Louis Leonowens
A notable example of this is a group of 38 objects (comprising primarily metalwork including weapons) bequeathed by Reta May Leonowens, the widow of Louis T. Leonowens. Louis Leonowens was the only son of Anna Leonowens, whose time as a governess at the court of King Mongkut was fictionalised in the novel ‘Anna and the King of Siam’. Louis Leonowens later returned to Thailand, where he received a commission in the Royal Cavalry of Siam, and engaged in several commercial ventures. It is likely that the objects that were donated to the V&A were collected during this period of his life. Other donors included J.W. Hinchley, who from around 1904-1907 was appointed as an assayist at the Royal Mint of Siam, and his wife, Edith; and Alfred Mitchell-Innes, a British diplomat and economist who served as a financial adviser to King Chulalongkorn from 1896 to 1898. British military officers appointed to official roles in Siam were also involved in the museum’s acquisition of art from Thailand: Lt. Col. Maurice McClean Bidder, an engineer who was engaged with the Royal Survey Department of Siam at the beginning of the 20th century, donated a bronze figure of Shiva; and a Mrs Bigg-Wither donated a small collection including weapons, textiles, and bronze figures, acquired by her husband, Major Hugh Bigg-Wither, while he was an engineer in the service of King Rama V (Chulalongkorn).
Lt. Col. Bidder and Stefano Cardu
The objects donated by these individuals give us an idea of the kinds of objects that were circulating in Bangkok at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and of the collecting interests of the donors. In some cases, the V&A archive can also provide information about objects that were offered to the museum but not accepted, or that were on temporary loan to the museum. For example, while the V&A holds only one object donated by Lt. Col. Bidder, the archives record that he had a larger collection of Thai cultural objects, which was on loan to the museum between 1905 and 1910, comprising arms and armour, textiles (and specifically examples of court dress), silver, musical instruments, and figurative bronze sculpture, including the Shiva image which he later donated to the V&A.
Amongst all these early collectors and contributors to the museum’s Thai collections, one individual in particular stands out because of the sheer number of objects he donated, and sold, to the V&A. Stefano Cardu, an Italian who travelled to Siam in the 1870s and set up a successful building contracting company, amassed a vast collection of objects from Siam and other parts of Asia including Japan and China, the majority of which was donated to his native city of Cagliari in 1914 and now forms the core collection of the Museo d’Arte Siamese Stefano Cardu.
Ritual ladle, wood, lac and mother-of-pearl inlay, 18th century, Thailand, 441-1894. Purchased from Stefano Cardu.
Working through the V&A’s files helped me to understand that the museum’s holdings of objects formerly owned by Cardu was larger than had been recorded. The archive contains many letters between Cardu and museum curators, which show that, from 1894 to 1895, Cardu was in London trying to sell numerous objects he had collected in Siam. In 1894, the V&A bought 90 objects selected from his collection, including ceremonial instruments used in the traditional Thai coming-of-age hair-cutting ceremony, ceramics, metalwork, and lacquerware. These objects had not been associated with Cardu in the V&A’s online system, and a number of the ceramics which were made in China for the Thai market had later been transferred to the V&A’s East Asia department, so my archival research allowed me to reconstruct a more fulsome picture of Cardu’s collection.
The internal correspondence regarding the 1894 purchases also reveals something of the art trade networks of the time. The curators noted that, although they recommended some of the arms and armour in Cardu’s collection for purchase by the museum, the prices paid by Cardu in Siam were too high for them to be able to negotiate and to suggest purchasing more. This tells us that there seems to have been a flourishing market for objects of this kind in Siam in the late 19th century, and that Cardu collected within this market.
Pages from the catalogue relating to the sale of Stefano Cardu’s collection at Foster’s, Pall Mall, 5 April 1895. V&A archival file MA/1/C409/1.
On 5 April 1895, an auction of Cardu’s collection was held at Foster’s, Pall Mall. A copy of the auction catalogue held in the V&A’s archives shows that there were 199 lots, just over two-thirds of which remained unsold after the auction. After that auction, Cardu wrote to the V&A, offering to lend his collection to the museum, because he had to return to Siam and did not want to take the objects back with him. The offer was accepted and the collection, comprising approximately 403 objects, including porcelain, bronzes, weapons, lacquerware, and nielloware, remained on loan at the V&A until 1908. At that point, Cardu visited London again and reclaimed his collection, with the exception of 10 pieces purchased by the museum after negotiation with him, and 49 objects which he donated to the museum.
Letter from Alfred Inman to the V&A, offering Thai objects from “Signor Cardew’s” collection to the museum. V&A archival file 21089/1900.
The V&A’s archive thus provides insights into Cardu’s collecting, and his relationship with the museum, but it also tells us something about the collecting and market networks in which he operated. While his collection was on loan to the V&A, and in the year immediately after the loan ended, Cardu offered to sell the collection, or parts of it, to the V&A, both directly and through intermediaries, including the London-based dealers G.R. Harding Ltd and the Bangkok-based broker William Castle-Turner. Meanwhile, in 1900, the museum also acquired 5 objects, including a gilded terracotta Buddha image and a set of bronze weights, from a London dealer called Alfred Inman. These seem to have been the only objects that Inman ever sold to the V&A, and, in his letter offering them for sale to the museum, he described them as having formerly been in the collection of ‘Signor Cardew’, most likely a reference to Stefano Cardu and therefore adding to the number of objects that can now be associated with Cardu’s collection. Future research could explore Cardu’s networks in Bangkok and in Europe, and connections with other early collectors of Thai artworks and arms.
The underside of IS.105-1958, with a handwritten label bearing the words “Wat Chä Häng. Nan.” It is possible that this is a reference to the temple now known as วัดพระธาตุแช่แห้งพระอารามหลวง (Wat Phra That Chae Haeng Phra Aram Luang), which is on the outskirts of Nan town.
Mrs R.H. Carlisle
In other cases, the archives hold much more limited information on objects in the museum’s collection and their owners. For example, in 1958, a group of 29 bronze sculptures (mostly Buddha images from northern Thailand) were donated by a Mrs R.H. Carlisle. The correspondence does not provide any details of the history of the bronzes, except that they were acquired by the donor’s husband during his stay in Siam. However, while observing and handling some of the sculptures at V&A East Storehouse, I noted that several of the sculptures have handwritten labels in English which appear to have been applied by a previous owner rather than by the museum, with the names of temples or places written in ink. These places are clustered around the northern Thai provinces of Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Nan. This information could help to guide further research into their provenance and into the possible identity of the Carlisles.
Pim Fitzpayne is a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London. She was a doctoral placement in the Asia Department and VARI in 2025.
