Born: 1866 Simla, India
Died: 1936 Betchworth, Surrey, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1903
Biography
Collector Ferdinand Nassau Schiller was born in Simla, British India (now India) on 27 August 1866. He came from a prominent European banking family, the second of four children of Rosa Maria de Castro and Johann Christian Ferdinand Wolfgang, an exchange-broker in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Schiller was close to his philosopher brother, Ferdinand Canning Scott. He relocated to England around the end of the 19th century, first attending boarding school at Bristol’s Clifton College and then St John's College, University of Cambridge, where he earned his degree in 1893. His lifelong friend, noted art historian Roger Fry, was at Clifton and Cambridge at the same time. After graduation, Schiller returned to Calcutta, working in his father's firm, Piggott, Chapman & Co, as a bills clerk speculating on the silver market. Following his father’s death in 1901, Schiller wound up their financial affairs in India and permanently migrated to England in 1903. He continued in finance, and in 1918, he was appointed manager of the bank Credito Italiano until his retirement in 1930. During the First World War, he worked for the Admiralty. Schiller is remembered as one of the first wave of Asian art collectors in England and a central figure in the network of dealers and curators, leading to the inclusion of Asian art in British national museum collections.
The exact inspiration behind Ferdinand’s collecting is unknown, though Fry’s interests in non-Western art were likely a huge influence. Also, Schiller’s other Cambridge friend, Goldsworthy Lowe Dickinson, wrote Letters to John Chinaman, partly influenced by Fry, marking Dickinson’s lifelong affection for China. Schiller and his brother Max, keen climbers, joined the Alpine Club, and it is more than coincidence that two founding members of the Oriental Ceramics Society (OCS) were also club members. Another influential event in shaping Schiller's interests was Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, a 1910 exhibition featuring monochrome and blue and white ceramics, mounted by the Burlington Fine Arts Club, a gentlemen’s organisation at the nexus of curators, museology, and collectors. Bristol Museum archives show Schiller’s earliest recorded purchase as a Jun ware ceramic piece (Song Dynasty) from dealer KK Chow in 1913, the year Dickinson travelled to China. Most of Schiller’s pieces were bought from notable Asian art dealers. These included KK Chow, Bluett, Boode, Franck, C T Loo, Spink, Vignier, Yamanaka, and a handful of others. Schiller’s collection includes a high proportion of monochrome porcelains from the Tang (618-907 AD) and Song Dynasties (960-1279), as well as Tenmoku ware, bronzes, and jades. In 1915, the Burlington Fine Arts Club hosted an exhibition focusing on Chinese art with loans from Schiller’s collection, including a basalt Luohan head, a Buddhist apostle, and a Ming-style jade pony. Fry and Dickinson's collection pieces were also exhibited. In 1921, Schiller was recognised by his peers and became the 13th member of the OCS.
In 1930, Ferdinand retired to the Old Manor House in Betchworth, Surrey, with his younger brother Max Schiller and Max’s wife. Photographs reveal that it was an ideal place to showcase his Chinese and Japanese collections and his brother’s European works. In 1935, the Burlington Fine Arts Club, in conjunction with the OCS, hosted the largest ever exhibition of Chinese art and antiques, attracting over 420,000 visitors over three months. Younger members of the OCS were the dynamic forces behind the exhibition, as by this time Schiller was 70 years old. He loaned several pieces, alongside many other collectors, with additional loans from dealers and the Chinese government.
Schiller was primarily an aesthetic collector, as were many of his peers, since the science of the ceramics he collected was not yet discovered. The Quest of the Purple Ting, a paper written by Schiller in 1926, reveals the joy and sensual pleasure that his ceramics gave him. Regarding Schiller’s collecting preferences, Peter Hardie states: ‘We see two attitudes to ceramics: an unending quest to define their ever-undefinable aesthetic properties, and the equation, derived from Omar Khayyam, whom he both quotes and parodies, of clay and vessels made of it with the universe and with ourselves’ (2003, p. 44). Ferdinand Nassau Schiller died in Surrey, England in 1936. He left his collection of 438 Chinese ceramics, bronzes, and jades to his brother Max Schiller, Recorder of Bristol, who in turn bequeathed his and his brother’s collection to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery upon his death in 1946. The curator at the time was the émigré champion of Asian art, Hans Schubart. In the UK public domain, pieces from Schiller's collection are also represented in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, while a portrait head of Schiller by Cloudek is in the collection of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Related books
- Sarah Wong and Stacey Pierson, eds, 'Collectors, Curators and Connoisseurs: A Century of the Oriental Ceramic Society' (London: Oriental Ceramic Society, 2021)
- Stacey J. Pierson, 'Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London' (London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 2017)
- Peter Hardie, 'Ferdinand Schiller, Collecting Chinese Art 1913-1936' (Journal of Museum Ethnography, No. 15, March 2003, pp. 35-46)
- W. Sedgwick, 'In Memoriam, 'Ferdinand Nassau Schiller: 1866-1938', Alpine Journal, 1939, pp. 127-128
- Ferdinand Nassau Schiller, 'The Quest of the Purple Ting', Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 1925-6, pp. 15-20
Public collections
Related organisations
- Alpinist Club (Member )
- Clifton College, Bristol (Pupil)
- St Johns College, Cambridge (Student)
- The Oriental Ceramics Society (Founding Member )
Related web links
- Alpine Journal
- Lecture by Kate Newnham: Illustrating Chinese Ceramics in the Early 20th Century
- Mention in the London Gazette
- Sarah Wong, 'The Oriental Ceramics Society: 100 Years, Asian Art Newspaper, 28 September 2021
- Schiller
- Xueyan Shi and Yu Ying, 'Kate Newnham: Appreciating the Beauty of Chinese Art in Museums, 19 October 2023, People's Daily Online
Selected exhibitions
- International Exhibition of Chinese Art (group show), Royal Academy of Arts, London (1935)
- Chinese Art and Antiques (group show), Burlington Fine Arts Club, London (1915)
