The V&A’s Gilbert Galleries review – a fabulous treasure trove that must be seen to be believed

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We periodically hear when a masterpiece is “saved for the nation”, usually when a museum is obliged to raise eye-watering sums to prevent the export or sale of an artwork deemed of national significance. Museums also occasionally purchase at auction for the same purpose. They are, however, swimming in a pool among the superwealthy, with many news-making record sales subsequently disappearing into someone’s private yacht or bathroom.

It is this marketplace that makes it a momentous occasion when an entire private collection is bequeathed to the nation, usually upon the benefactors’ death. From the Wallace Collection in the 19th century to the 2025 acquisition of the Schroder treasure by the Holburne museum in Bath, museums are willing custodians of collections of such quality as can only be acquired through capital vastly exceeding their own. How they choose to present that gift is a curatorial issue in itself.

The Gilbert collection was bequeathed by the late Sir Arthur Gilbert after his first wife Rosalinde’s death in 1995. It was held by Somerset House in 2000 and then moved to the V&A in 2008. The couple began as fashion entrepreneurs in wartime London before locating to Los Angeles in 1949 where Arthur made success as a property developer. The now 1,000-plus collection began in the 1960s driven by a love for what Rosalinde called “beautiful things”, a rather superficial description for their collecting criteria of superlative craftsmanship of small-scale. These included European decorative works in gold and silver, Italian mosaics and enamelled portrait miniatures, and were linked to historical figures including Tsarina Catherine II of Russia or Napoleon. Frederick the Great’s 1765 mother-of-pearl snuffbox encrusted with gold, rubies and hardstones? Check. Enamel miniature portrait of Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 1781? Check.

In conjunction with architecture firm Citizens Design Bureau, the V&A has expanded the number of rooms holding the Gilbert Collection from four to seven, showing roughly half the collection, with rooms arranged by craft. The silver display has been reduced – a boon to those experiencing shiny-fatigue from the already excessive wider V&A collections – with micromosaics now taking up two galleries These mosaics, constructed of glass pieces on a minuscule scale, are so illusory of “regular paintings”, they have to be seen to be believed. Where previously one version of an item was displayed, say a snuffbox showing the Doves of Pliny, we now have the lot.

Tigress Lying Below Rocks, micromosaic by Decio Podio, 1880-1910, Venice, Italy.

The reopening is most significant however for reflecting a changing collective conscience among museums as custodians of world artefacts, moving towards acknowledging and accounting for the manner in which items have been acquired in the past. UK museums generally operate a no-deaccessioning policy, which means resisting international pressure to return contested items like the Parthenon marbles or Benin bronzes. They instead engage in diplomatic long-term loans or exchanges.

The Gilbert display however focuses on the idea of provenance and how our perception of this word has evolved through the history of collecting, in conjunction with a greater focus on the couple’s personal experiences and stories. Amazingly there is no legal requirement for auction houses to list full unedited provenance in their catalogues; the industry has long operated on the idea of trust, and at the outset of the Gilberts’ purchases it simply denoted “prestigious ownership”. Littered throughout Europe and beyond, the tendrils of Nazi-looted items continue to cause headaches for those handling them and pain for the original owners’ descendants. Museum displays have afforded little attention to this issue; for example, roughly 100 Nazi-looted paintings on display in the Louvre are denoted only by the letters MNR: Musées nationaux récupération.

The V&A created a provenance and spolia curator role in 2018, funded by the Gilbert Trust for the Arts – the charitable foundation established to manage the Gilbert collection. Most astonishing here are new dual captions informed by their research tackling Nazi-ownership head-on: one indicating what was known about an object’s provenance upon first acquisition, and then the full story, often detailing how items were taken by force. That the Gilberts were of Jewish heritage adds a complexity of emotion to the enterprise. The same goes for fakes and forgeries: secondary captions provide scientific and historical research identifying where items are less than genuine: a c.1580 tabernacle is exploded into its various “real” and “less than real” bits. For a market that has long attached shame to the discovery that the owner has collected a dud, this level of honestly represents a sea change that is apparently now to be applied throughout the rest of the V&A collections. The wider heritage industry should take note.

Certainly there is enormous pleasure to be had from marvelling at the exquisite treasures in a beautifully spacious gallery, complete with tactile examples of gold and micromosaic for those who simply can’t keep their mitts off, yet that’s of secondary importance here. Where restitution is not an option, it is instead more constructive to encourage the visitor to consider how and why they came to be looking at the item in front of them, and to question labels as received-gospel in their museum-going experience.