Collecting and Giving: Highlights from the Sir Ivor and Lady Batchelor bequest

In 2015, the Museum received an exceptional collection of drawings, ceramics, glass and bronzes from Sir Ivor and Lady Batchelor, through the Art Fund.

Sir Ivor, Professor of Psychiatry at Dundee University, and his wife Honor, spent decades collecting a wide array of fine and decorative arts, advocating that ‘One had to learn by looking, which is the best education’. Highlights from the collection are on display for the first time, including drawings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Orpen, Walter Sickert and Gwen John, alongside fine examples of eighteenth-century salt-glazed stoneware, rare seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish glass, and nineteenth-century French animal bronzes.