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- Oscar Charles Raphael
- Also known as
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Oscar Charles Raphael
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primary name: Raphael, Oscar Charles
- Details
- individual; collector; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1874-1941
- Address
- 5a Mount Street, London W1 (in 1924-1938)
- Biography
- FSA; collector; founder-member, Vice-President (1939) and briefly President (June to September 1941, before his death) of the Oriental Ceramic Society. He was a collector from childhood and his Oriental objects, many of which were donated to the British and Fitzwilliam Museums, were of outstanding quality.He lent many dozens of items to the Royal Academy International Exhibition of Chinese Art 1935-1936. In 1929 he accompanied R.L.Hobson & L.Binyon on a tour to study the collections of the Far East (described in BMQ V 1930, pp.34-9).
In the field of Persian art, he was regarded as one of the leading private collectors of the so-called "Luristan Bronzes" during the early 1930s, and he actively supported the British Museum's acquisition of these and other Iranian antiquities. Raphael personally acquired a number of items from Ernst Herzfeld (q.v.), and donated various antiquities to the British Museum, and in 1945 bequeathed a large collection of mainly Oriental objects (died 6 September 1941).
In 1915, he joined the British Museum as an unpaid assistant in the British & Medieval Antiquities & Ethnography Department, to address staffing issues during the war, working for at least two years.
Member of the Karlbeck Syndicate (q.v.).
- Bibliography
- Harrison-Hall, 2001, p. 593; Hobson, Rackham and King 1931, pp. 89-96; '“Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society”', vol. 18, 1940-1941, p. 14, obituary, E. G. Spencer-Churchill; British Museum Book of Presents; Davids and Jellinek, 2011, p. 369; Pierson 2007, p. 89, 103, 107, 112-3, 116-7, 124, 125, 131, 154, 157. BMQ, Vol XV, 1941-50, pp.57-60, 91-95, 106-7; vol.XVII pp.12-13..
Basil Gray, 'The Oscar Raphael Collection for the Nation', BurlingotnMagazine, vol.87, November 1945, No. 512, pp. 276+278-283.