Dame Rosalind Savill obituary

When, in 1992, Rosalind Savill announced that she was going to apply for the directorship of the Wallace Collection museum in London, reactions divided roughly in two. One group would smile wistfully and say how much they loved the Wallace, because no one ever went there. The second group would point out that Savill, who has died aged 73 of cancer, was variously unqualified for the job. “You’ve been here too long, you’re a woman and you have an illegitimate child,” was the terse summing up of one senior colleague.

This reflected the world of curating as it was 30 years ago. Savill had cut her professional teeth at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the early 1970s. The V&A, then, was modelled on the hierarchical lines of the British army.

Officers – keepers and assistant keepers – occupied the upper floors, and were treated as gentlemen, which, in terms of gender, most were. Museum assistants, in charge of cleaning, labelling and photographing objects, were relegated to the lower floors. Rising through the ranks was almost unheard of. Savill was a museum assistant in the ceramics department, remaining so when she moved to the Wallace Collection in 1974.

That she had done her degree at Leeds University, rather than Oxbridge or the Courtauld Institute, did her no favours. This made her appointment, in 1978, as assistant to the Wallace’s then director – in effect, one of its two assistant directors – extraordinary.

There was little in the museum’s recent history to suggest social innovation. Housed in the 18th-century mansion of the marquesses of Hertford in Manchester Square, off Oxford Street, its collection had been left to the nation by the widow of Sir Richard Wallace in 1897.

It was particularly strong in the art of the French ancien régime. Conditions of the bequest forbade lending works, or adding to them. In the three-quarters of a century since its opening to the public, the Wallace had gained a reputation as a museological Brigadoon.

Savill’s rise was fuelled by her work on the collection’s holding of Sèvres porcelain, among the finest in the world. As a scholarly resource, though, it had been underused.

The archive of the Manufacture National de Sèvres, owned by the French government, was exhaustive. However, as most of the factory’s historical output had gone abroad after the revolution, it had not been rigorously researched.

Savill set about doing this, focusing particularly on the objects owned by the Wallace. This resulted in her magisterial, three-volume The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, published in 1988. “It weighed 12 pounds and was produced in April,” Savill recalled. “In December, I had my daughter, who weighed 9 pounds 9 ounces.”

By then, she was also the Wallace’s curator of 18th-century French porcelain. When she became the collection’s director, she took over what had long been seen as a hidden gem, known mostly to fans of the French 18th century. Savill found this annoying. Her vision was of the museum as opera, enjoyable by all visitors even if they did not know the language of the libretto.

Eighteenth-century French taste was defined by sumptuousness. Adept at winning funding – she once approached Dustin Hoffman for a donation, on the grounds that the Wallace owned a Gainsborough called Mrs Robinson – Savill set about stripping the dowdy coverings from the collection’s walls, replacing them with silks specially woven in Lyon.

The museum, in 1992, was hung as a picture gallery, although arguably its greatest treasures were its furniture and objets d’art. Where its collection of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles furniture had been scattered among top-lit rooms hung with paintings of picnicking aristocrats – “They had nothing to do with Marie Antoinette,” Savill sniffed – the queen’s armoires and secretaires were now brought together in a smaller room more suited to their original role.

The gallery housing the gloomy furniture of André-Charles Boulle was rehung in emerald-green silk. “We wanted to give it life,” Savill told the New York Times in 2008. “You can’t do that in a namby-pamby way.” By the time she left the collection, she was, in the words of Sir Timothy Clifford, ex-head of the National Galleries of Scotland, “the most distinguished woman museum director not just of this country, but the western world”.

In particular, Savill had been fascinated by the porcelain commissioned by Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, the Sèvres pottery’s greatest patron. Pompadour had been good to her. In 1976, when a lowly museum assistant, Savill had been asked by the Duke of Buccleuch to look at two pieces decorated with “funny blue flowers”. “I knew instantly they were pot-pourri vases bought by Madame de Pompadour in 1759,” she recalled. This discovery brought her fame in the ceramics world, assisting her curatorial ascent.

In 2022, she published the two-volume Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain, tracing her subject’s collection year by year from her first purchases in 1747 to her death in 1764. Savill’s sense of affinity with the marquise as a woman both ambitious and humane was clear. Commonly seen as manipulative and spendthrift, the Pompadour who emerges in Everyday Rococo is unexpectedly frugal and frail. “As she was getting ill in the last years,” Savill noted, “she bought more chamber pots [and] eye baths … [and] furnished her dining table with Sèvres seconds.”

This stripping away of grandeur also marked Savill’s own two-decade directorship of the Wallace Collection. The taste for extravagance was shown as a living thing, appreciated not least by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Even before Savill’s directorship, Westwood had collaborated with her, modelling her 1990 spring collection on a cup and saucer identified by Savill as Sèvres. When Westwood reproduced one of the Wallace’s Boulle mirrors on a frock without asking permission, Savill wrote to her, gently pointing out that she was in breach of copyright. “Although Vivienne had broken our rules, I loved her for it,” she recalled. Westwood repaid her debt by selling her Boucher corsets in the museum’s shop.

Savill also gave the painter Lucian Freud a small show at the gallery in 2004, although she politely turned down his request to paint her in the nude. Her “cherished notion” that the works in the collection could be appreciated by anyone extended to schoolchildren, pupils at a local primary school being invited to curate a show called Shhh … It’s a Secret! at the Wallace in 2010.

Born in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, to Guy Savill, a consultant physician, and Lorna (nee Williams), a physiotherapist, Ros was a boarder at Wycombe Abbey school in Buckinghamshire before spending a year at a school in Switzerland, perfecting her French. A year after graduating from Leeds, she was in her first post at the V&A.

After her retirement in 2011, Savill took on a number of honorary posts, notably at Waddesdon Manor and, at the request of Queen Elizabeth II, at the Royal Collection Trust. (Thanks to a sharp-eyed George IV, the monarch’s holdings of Sèvres is the greatest in the world.) In these, she was notable for her attention to junior staff members, fostering their confidence and encouraging them to push themselves academically.

In her spare time, Savill raised Chinese quail in the garden of her house in Camden Town, north London, calmly tucking ailing fledglings down her cleavage to keep them warm. She was made a dame in 2009.

Savill is survived by her daughter, Isabella, grandson, Edward, and brother, Hugh.

• Rosalind Joy Savill, museum director and art historian, born 12 May 1951; died 27 December 2024