Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain

Collecting Spain: Coleccionismo de artes decorativas españolas en Gran Bretaña y España / Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain (Madrid: Polifemo, 2022) examines the collecting of Spanish decorative arts between about 1850 and 1945, from both British and Spanish perspectives. It focusses on the period in which museums and private collectors in both countries valued and acquired different types of objects from Spain, such as ivory caskets, silk textiles, carpets, lusterware ceramics, furniture, jewellery and silverware. The essays reveal similarities and differences in approach in Britain and Spain, as well as the key figures involved and the differing national contexts in which their activities took place.

Dr Cabrera, the co-editor of the book, will highlight the role played by specific museums, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and by local, national and international exhibitions of the decorative arts, in disseminating knowledge about Spanish objects, historical and contemporary. In her talk, Dr Cabrera will also focus on the significant role of textiles in the history of taste and collecting in this period.

Ana Cabrera Lafuente is a Spanish museum curator from 2001, with a wide experience in historical textiles and historical dress/fashion. She has worked in different museums from 2001 to 2020, as The National Museum of Decorative Arts and Fashion Museum, both in Madrid. She was awarded with a Marie S.-Curie Fellowship, developing the project Interwoven at the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, between 2016 to 2018, after her Ph. in Late Antiquity and early medieval textiles from the Egypt at the Museu de Disseny (Barcelona). 

She is member of different research projects related to historical textiles, museums, and cultural heritage. She is co-editor of Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion (2020) and Collecting Spain: Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain (2021) and has curated ¡Extra, Moda! (2019) with Maria Prego and Tejidos y alfombras del Museo de La Alhambra (1997).

All welcome- but booking is required.