Robert Skelton obituary
This article is more than 1 year oldMuseum curator and scholar of Indian art, whose library and archive have been given to the Courtauld InstituteRobert Skelton, who has died aged 93, was for many years a curator in the Indian department of the Victoria and Albert Museum and a leading authority on Indian painting and decorative arts in the Sultanate and Mughal periods (13th to 19th centuries). This was an age rich in cultural interaction between the Persianate court arts of the Muslim rulers and indigenous Indian artistic traditions.
Among Robert’s achievements were two impressive and popular exhibitions, Arts of Bengal: The Heritage of Bangladesh and Eastern India (1979) and The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts Under Mughal Rule (1982), into which he poured much of his accumulated knowledge.
Conscious of the museum’s public role, Robert devised the former – an ambitious loan exhibition aimed in part at local Bengali communities (long before “outreach” became a buzzword in museums) – when appointed keeper in 1978. Ranging from early Hindu and Buddhist sculpture to the Mughal period and later, this exhibition was shown with much success at the Whitechapel Gallery and Manchester City Art Gallery (1979-80).
Not long after, the Festival of India took place in London in 1982. Robert was a prominent member of its steering committee, while at the V&A he oversaw the most comprehensive and spectacular survey exhibition ever held of the arts of Mughal India.
Outgoing and sociable by nature, Robert enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances, from fellow curators and academics to private collectors, art dealers and auction-house staff. Such friendships allowed him to study and photograph many rare works of art.
Combining a vast knowledge of his subject with a keen, intuitive intellect and connoisseur’s eye, Robert distilled many of his new discoveries and original insights into a wide-ranging body of writing over the years.
While still in his 20s, he produced groundbreaking articles on the Mughal artist Farrukh Beg, on the Bijapur and Murshidabad schools, and on the Ni’matnama, an illustrated book of cookery recipes and aphrodisiacs compiled around 1500 for a pleasure-loving sultan of Mandu.
He was also able to initiate numerous remarkable acquisitions for the V&A, including a fine Orissan stone sculpture of the Jain goddess Ambika, which he had spotted in an Edinburgh antiques shop, several superb Mughal paintings from a Harivamsa series illustrating the exploits of the Hindu god Krishna, and a magnificent carved jade wine cup made for the emperor Shah Jahan.
He published articles on these and other subjects, while a 1970 paper he delivered on the influence of European herbal illustrations on Mughal floral motifs won much acclaim. He was now, in his friend and scholar Simon Digby’s words, “the young magus who was to become a teacher to a whole subsequent generation of historians of Indian art”.
Born in Stockwell, south London, the son of John Skelton, a bus driver, and Victoria (nee Wright), a fur machinist, Robert was educated at Tiffin school in Kingston upon Thames, leaving at the age of 16. Subsequently he worked as a trainee seedsman for Carter’s Tested Seeds, as a Royal Artillery pay clerk during his national service, and as a council health department clerk auditing midwives’ expenses. He was also a proficient violinist, and playing chamber music would remain a favourite activity for much of his life. He married Frances Aird, a fellow musician, in 1954.
When Robert applied to work at the V&A in 1950, at the age of 21, he had hoped to pursue his interest in English furniture and musical instruments, but he was swiftly talent-spotted by WG Archer, formerly of the Indian civil service and now keeper of the Indian section (later Indian department). Archer was a specialist in Pahari (Punjab Hills) court painting and, under his avuncular guidance, Robert soon established himself as a rising star in Indian painting studies. In 1961 his catalogue of a Venice exhibition of works from a private collection, Indian Miniatures from the XVth to XIXth Centuries, offered fresh insights into Pahari painting in particular.
Another mentor at this time was Basil Robinson, the V&A’s keeper of metalwork and an eminent Persian painting scholar, whom Robert assisted with a paintings exhibition while immersing himself in learning Persian, the official court language of Mughal India.
In 1960 Robert was appointed assistant keeper of the Indian section, and two years later made his first, revelatory visit to the subcontinent as a Nuffield travelling fellow. On another study tour soon after, he was accompanied by the artist Howard Hodgkin, whose subsequent work drew lasting inspiration from this and other Indian journeys.
From the 70s onward, Robert was active on the councils of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society for South Asian Studies and the Asia House Trust. Towards the end of the decade he lobbied unsuccessfully for a plan to convert the old St George’s hospital on Hyde Park Corner (now the Lanesborough hotel) into a national museum of Asian art that would have united the great collections of the V&A and British Museum.
Retiring as keeper in 1988, he was made OBE the following year. He moved from Twickenham to a larger family home in south Croydon, to be filled with his ever-expanding library and slide archive (both now at the Courtauld Institute of Art). During a long retirement, he became founding president of the Indian Art Circle and continued to lecture and travel. On one occasion he was called to Baghdad to advise on the restitution of Mughal art objects plundered from Kuwait during the Gulf war.
Many of his abundant ideas never found their way into print, but often they surfaced in the work of other, younger writers, to whom he was always a generous informal mentor. Robert hosted many convivial slide evenings at his home for visiting Indian or US scholars and a few fortunate local students. He continued to welcome many to his “South Croydon Institute” until recent years, when he suffered increasingly from Alzheimer’s disease.
Frances, their three sons, Oliver, Gregory and Nicholas, and three grandchildren survive him.
Robert William Skelton, museum curator and scholar of Indian art, born 11 June 1929; died 22 August 2022
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