John Conran Irwin

John Irwin was born in Madras on 5 August 1917, and educated at Canford School in Dorset. On leaving, he worked as a journalist on a number of newspapers including The Daily Mirror, and wrote theatre criticism for the New Statesman under Kingsley Martin's editorship. Commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders in 1939, he was invalided out in 1942 after a motorcycle accident which left him permanently slightly lame. He was then sent to India where he worked under three successive governors of Bengal, first as A.D.C., then as non-political private secretary. But his interests and activities extended well beyond the confines of the raj: he was a sympathetic observer of the accelerating independence movement, made lasting friendships among Indian scholars and artists and began his career as an art historian by writing, jointly with the progressive poet, Bishnu Dey, the first biography of Jamini Roy, a luminary of the Indian school of avant-garde art, which the Indian Society of Oriental Art published in 1944. War service over, Irwin joined the Victoria and Albert Museum as assistant keeper in the Indian section and soon attracted notice for his work on the ground-breaking exhibition, Arts of India and Pakistan, 1947-8, at the Royal Academy, to which he had been seconded by the V & A. Interest in the art of the sub-continent burgeoned during the period following independence in 1950, promoted notably by Basil Gray of the British Museum; William Archer, Irwin's keeper at the V & A; Irwin himself and the museum's younger orientalist, Robert Skelton. Although his predilection was for sculpture and antiquities, Irwin, somewhat to his initial bewilderment, was put in charge of the Indian Department's vast holding of textiles and he published Shawls in 1955. From reluctant beginnings, this involvement with textiles endured and resulted in the publication, jointly with Katharine Brett, of The Origins of Chintz in 1970 and a revised edition of Shawls under the title, Kashmir shawls in 1974. Irwin succeeded to the keepership of the Indian Department when Archer retired in 1959, and was later also given responsibility for the new Oriental Department when it was established in 1970. He remained at the museum for a further eight years but was consistently outward-looking; he extended his overseas connections, especially with India, and travelled widely in the far east. From 1956-7 he was UNESCO's Expert on Museum Planning and led a mission to Malaysia to found the Malaysian National Museum in Kuala Lumpur; and in 1967, with a grant from the J. D. Rockefeller III Fund in New York, he embarked on his fruitful association with the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad. Irwin co-edited its publication, The Journal of Indian Textile History, helped to build its collections and directed the project to catalogue them. Jointly with his research assistant, Margaret Hall, he published the first volume of the Calico Museum's catalogue in 1971, Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics, followed by Indian Embroideries in 1973. Thereafter, the museum staff took over but Irwin continued as adviser. He retired from the V & A in 1978 as senior keeper and deputy director during his final year. The award of a travelling fellowship by the British Academy in 1975 had enabled him to tour the third-century BC A_okan pillar sites, the earliest surviving examples of Indian monumental stone sculpture, and it was to the study of the origins of these monuments and their influence on Indian art that he turned in retirement. His theories were highly original, and therefore controversial, when they were first published in a series of four articles entitled `Asokan Pillars: a re-assessment of the evidence', in The Burlington Magazine

between 1973 and 1976. He revised some of his ideas in the light of subsequent archaeological evidence and discussions with scholars arising out of his lectures and conference contributions in this country, India, the USA and Europe, and planned to publish a book on the subject. Only two chapters, and part of a third, had been completed when a stroke in 1995 led to a steady decline in his health and he died peacefully in his sleep during the night of 22-23 January 1997. Irwin deposited his research papers and comprehensive library of relevant material with the National Archive of Art and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum and his long-standing colleague, Margaret Hall, hopes to complete his proposed volume d.v.