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- William Ockelford Oldman
- Also known as
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William Ockelford Oldman
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primary name: Oldman, William Ockelford
- Details
- individual; dealer/auction house; British; Male
- Life dates
- 4 Aug 1879-30 Jun 1949
- Address
- 77 Brixton Hill, London SW
- Biography
- Oldman was perhaps the most successful of all ethnographic dealers in the UK; alongside his dealing he built up a major private collection. In business from 1902. Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute on 9 May 1905. Issued 121 list/catalogues of works for sale between 1902 and 1914, all but the first 19 being fully illustrated. (These lists were reproduced in facsimile in 1976). Retired from business in 1927 and moved to a new house at 43 Poynders Road, Clapham Park, London where he set up a private museum with his personal collection which he had set aside from 1896 onwards. This survived World War II. After his house was threatened with compulsory purchase for redevelopment, he sold his Maori and Polynesian material to New Zealand government in 1948, which distributed it between different public museums there. Oldman died the following year. His widow sold the rest of the collection, which was primarily of African material, to the BM shortly after his death. The NACF paid for the finest 30 pieces.
See Af1949,46.1 to 845; also Am1949,22.1 to 239; As1950,05.1 to 8; and a handful of items from Oceania. There are now some 1,190 ex-Oldman items, many of great importance, in the BM. The remainder of collection was sold Sotheby’s 24 July 1950.
Oldman sold a collection of Pacific Islands artefacts, including some acquired by Charles Woodford, to Harry Beasley in 1915, numbered 972 to 982 in the Beasley catalogue; part of this are now in the BM.
Bound photocopies of his chronological series of books of acquisition are in the BM. These run from 1894 to 1926, with the main period of activity being between 1902 and 1922. They show that Oldman acquired very little after 1926, which therefore serves as a terminus ante quem for most of his acquisitions which were almost invariably made on the London market. His paper archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in California (c.2022).
- Bibliography
- H.J.Braunholtz, BMQ XVI 1951/2, pp.54-55; W.B.Fagg, ibid, pp.106-10.
Hermione Waterhouse and J.C.H.King, 'Provenance, twelve collectors of ethnographic art in England 1760-1990' (Paris, 2006)
Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent & Haward Morphy, 'Ancestors, artefacts, empire: indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums', London (BMPress) 2021
Robert Hales & Kevin Conru, ‘W.O. Oldman. The Remarkable Collector. William Ockleford Oldman's Personal Archive’, 2016.
His sales registers are in New Zealand (digitised on the Te Papa and Smithsonian websites). BM has photocopies of 13 of his purchase ledgers.
A digitised copy of the Oldman Archive is available on the website of the Smithsonian Institution Online Virtual Archives (https://sova.si.edu/record/NMAI.RM.001).
See also the reprinted 'W.O. Oldman, Illustrated Catalogue of Ethnographic Specimens', London 1976.
