ABSTRACT
Small informal circles of amateurs were thus formed long before the study of Islamic art was instituted as a discipline in its own right in the major museums of England—only in the first quarter of the 20th century. In a word, learned societies and gentlemen’s clubs operated as the central hinge between strictly private practices and national institutions. The chapter discusses the very first efforts to analyse objects of Islamic art in London and follows the progress of scholarship from 1850 onwards—although no one yet dared call himself a “scholar” on that subject at that point of time. Rachel Ward gave a very precise survey of Augustus Wollaston Franks’s collections of Islamic art and of his contribution to the discipline. In 1862, the Archaeological Journal showed Franks trying to further refine his typology of the various types of “Persian” wares then known to European amateurs.
