“Perhaps the best Prime Warden we never had” - a tribute to Dame Rosalind Savill 1951-2024
Former Prime Warden of The Goldsmiths’ Company Dr. Timothy Schroder remembers Dame Rosalind Savill 1951-2024. Director of the Wallace Collection from 1992 to 2011, specialist on 18th-century Sèvres porcelain, and “perhaps the best Prime Warden we never had”.
Dame Rosalind Savill - © Anne Schwarz
Dame Rosalind Savill, known to all as Ros, was unique. She was, for many years, director of the Wallace Collection, raising its profile from a museum best known to art historians and connoisseurs to one attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. At the same time, immersing herself in its great collection of Sèvres porcelain, she became a world authority on that subject. But Ros was also a tremendous champion of the decorative arts in general, which she considered an endangered field in terms of declining numbers of curatorial positions across the country.
As others have said, Ros never confused excellence with elitism, or popularity with populism, and never faltered in her opposition to dumbing down. Her contribution to national debate was widely recognised and is reflected in the obituaries she has received and continues to receive in the national press and specialist publications. But she was an important member of the Goldsmiths’ Company too and it’s appropriate that we should pay tribute to her ourselves.
Ros was perhaps the best Prime Warden we never had. Never one to take on a role if she didn’t feel able to give it her all, some years ago she declined an invitation to join the Court of Assistants, due to the weight of her other commitments. But in every other respect she was fully engaged with the life of the Company.
Seldom missing our annual church services and always attending other events when she could, she also served on the Collections Committee and the steering panel for the newly conceived Goldsmiths’ Lecture. To both roles she brought not only her professional experience but all the qualities that shone through everything she touched: searing intelligence, wisdom (which is not the same thing), imagination and ‘oodles’ (to use a favourite word of hers) of plain common sense. Nor did she ever accept the standard view on issues without thinking them through. And having done so, she invariably spoke her mind, often smothering at birth wrong-headed ideas that might otherwise have gone through ‘on the nod’.
These were all qualities for which she was greatly respected. But there were others for which she was loved: her warmth and concern for others and her boundless enthusiasm and energy. We will remember her with undying fondness and gratitude.
Dame Rosalind Savill, born May 12 1951, died December 27 2024.
Written by Dr. Timothy Schroder | Photograph used with kind permission of Anne Schwarz