‘There never was such a collector since the world began’

The Sir Thomas Phillipps manuscript collection was extremely broad in scope, both geographically and chronologically. Phillipps was not just a collector of manuscripts, however and not everything listed in his printed catalogue and given a number was a manuscript or a document. He owned somewhere between 1,600 and 1,800 Old Master drawings. The Phillipps collection was notable for its sheer size, and included a substantial number of documents and papers, which ranged in date from medieval through to the nineteenth century. But he also owned beautiful and valuable manuscript codices, many of which are among the treasures of the modern collections where they now reside. The Phillipps collection was also surprisingly rich in Persian, Turkish and Arabic manuscripts and miniatures. Among these were several albums of seventeenth–and eighteenth–century Mughal paintings, two of which had formerly been owned by Warren Hastings and another by Sir Elijah Impey.