Ellen Tanner’s Persia: A Museum Legacy Rediscovered

• Main Author: Catrin Jones
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2021-01-01
• Series: 19 : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Subjects: women collectors; Ellen Tanner; Holburne Museum; Persian art
• Online Access: http://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/3345/

Ellen Georgiana Tanner (1847–1937) was among the first British women to travel solo in Persia and Mesopotamia. A published author elected to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1913, this article examines Tanner’s reputation in her day versus her subsequent lack of recognition. In 1894, aged forty-seven, Tanner began an intrepid journey on the caravan route through Persia on horseback, accompanied only by local guides, visiting bazaars and collecting Persian handicrafts. Tanner later donated the objects acquired during these travels to museums in the West Country, including a collection of eighty-five Persian objects to the Holburne Museum, Bath. This article examines the context of British activity in Persia in the late nineteenth century, discussing Tanner’s unpublished journal, ‘By Road and River’ (1895) in the context of a growing literature on Persia by British travellers including George Curzon and other women including Isabella Bird Bishop, Gertrude Bell, and Ella Sykes. It outlines the biographical details of Tanner’s life, exploring the factors that set Tanner apart from her contemporaries and her perspectives on Persia as a somewhat enigmatic observer. The article discusses the recognition of Tanner and other women by the RGS. It discusses the history of collecting Qajar art for Britain’s museums, particularly of Robert Murdoch Smith and his role in growing the V&A’s holdings of Persian art. It outlines Tanner’s collecting of Persian handicrafts from Isfahan, Yezd, Shiraz, and other centres of production for the Holburne. It explores what we know of her impetus to collect, her particular interest in textiles, and the growth of interest in historic Persia, including Tanner’s part in the wholesale purchasing of historic Persian artefacts. The final section explores Tanner’s forgotten legacy at the Holburne Museum in the context of a renewed interest in rediscovering the stories of the women whose collections shaped late Victorian and early Edwardian museum collections. It argues that Tanner’s identity and the contents of her collections may account for her subsequent disappearance from institutional memory until a 2018 research project.