Peter Kai Thornton

Elected 1976

The following obituary, by Ronald Lightbown, FSA, was first published in The Independent on 20 February 2007.

Peter Kai Thornton, art historian and museum curator: born St Albans, Hertfordshire 8 April 1925; Voluntary Assistant Keeper, Fitzwilliam Museum 1950-52; Joint Secretary, National Art Collections Fund 1952-54; Assistant Keeper, Department of Textiles, Victoria and Albert Museum 1954-62, Assistant Keeper, Department of Woodwork 1962-66, Keeper, Department of Furniture and Woodwork 1966-84; Chairman, Furniture History Society 1974-84; FSA 1976; Curator, Sir John Soane's Museum 1984-95; CBE 1996; married 1950 Ann Helps (three daughters; marriage dissolved 2001), 2002 Lena Spindler; died Isleworth, Middlesex 8 February 2007.

Peter Thornton was a star even amongst the brilliant galaxy of curators who transformed the collecting, the display and the scholarship of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Edwardians had divided the museum among six departments, using technique as their principle of division - so that the collections were, so to speak, divided vertically by material, rather than horizontally by period. The result was to create a museum staff of specialists in the decorative arts of an intensity of expertise which in many other museums and galleries is the established privilege only of painting, and which gave the V&A a unique international reputation for connoisseurship and scholarship in its fields.

The inter-war years were a period of impoverishment for the museum - one annual grant for purchases in the 1930s was said to have been £1,500 (spent on the library). After the Second World War, the task of returning and exhibiting the collections fell on the Director, Sir Leigh Ashton, who fought an amazingly unscrupulous battle with the Ministry of Education to get the galleries redecorated and fit for the public to visit.

He took a major decision that was to alter the display of the museum collections and to affect the work of the departments profoundly. The Department of Architecture and Sculpture and the Department of Furniture and Woodwork were charged with assembling, mainly on the ground floor, what were regarded as the finest objects in the museum collections and arranging them by period in what were called Primary Galleries. The departmental collections were kept upstairs in what were mistakenly labelled Study Collections, disguising (to their injury) under a dreary didactic name the beauty and interest of the objects they contained.

The pre-war curatorial staff was once said to be divided into those who worked hard and never travelled, and those who never travelled. Peter Thornton's own enthusiasm for art had been first kindled by the Baroque churches he saw in Carinthia, where he was stationed at the end of the war: they ended his projected career as an aeronautical engineer. The post-war curatorial staff of the V&A adopted almost universally an international approach to the appreciation and study of the museum's extraordinarily wide-ranging collections.

The difficulties of scholarship in the decorative arts are not generally understood. The only relatively well- documented arts are those of architecture, sculpture and painting. In many of the other arts represented in the museum documentation is very uneven, rich for some celebrated state or princely manufactures, elsewhere often scanty or non-existent, especially in the central question of design. Much has to be reconstructed over many years from chance records, from inventories and from scattered references. Both progress and publication can be slow.

After the First World War, moreover, the great wave of European 19th- century art research and scholarship in the decorative arts, much of it French, had subsided into feeble ripples, accompanied in Britain by the rise of arbitrary aesthetic canons that condemned the Rococo and Art Nouveau and damned the entire Victorian age.

With some difficulty the Regency, largely due to one or two perceptive scholars, established a place for itself in an orthodoxy that into the 1950s favoured the 1830s as a terminal date in the arts. Even William Morris had to retrieve a revival masterminded by Peter Flood and the Circulation Department of the museum, one of the major revolutions of taste instigated by the new museum generation.

It was into this world of reorganisation and revival that Thornton came in 1954, with an open eye, a creative flair and a inexhaustible capacity for work. After Bryanston he had gone to the Havilland Aeronautical Technical School - to the end he enjoyed working with his hands - and then, after service with the Intelligence Corps in Austria, went up to Trinity, Cambridge. He served a voluntary apprenticeship to museum work in the Fitzwilliam, and then in 1952 took a post with the National Art Collections Fund, where its chairman the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres supplemented a small salary with the occasional crumpled £5 note.

Peter Kai Thornton was born in 1925, the son of a distinguished scientist, Sir Gerard Thornton, and a Danish mother, Gerda (daughter of Kai) Nørregaard. His Scandinavian heritage was very important to him. It gave him a strict Nordic sense of duty and under a quiet English exterior a Nordic emotional warmth. It also gave him a knowledge and understanding of German, Dutch and Scandinavian arts that was unique in Britain, and a feeling for the importance of design at a time when modern Scandinavian design was in high vogue in Britain.

He first joined the Department of Textiles, where he worked with Natalie Rothstein on Spitalfield silks and produced in 1965 his Baroque and Rococo Silks, still a standard work. Already however, in 1962, he had moved to the Department of Furniture and Woodwork, first as Assistant Keeper, becoming Keeper in 1966.

His predecessor, Delves Molesworth, though furniture and woodwork were not the subjects of his choice, had taken two initiatives important for the future of furniture studies - encouragement of the Furniture History Society and the foundation of an archive of photographs. Thornton fostered both of these. Molesworth had begun the rearrangement of the furniture galleries in a more decorative style - his introduction of artificial flowers shocked some museum sensibilities - but his underlying conception of rooms arranged by period was to be developed by Thornton with flair and with a rigorousness of scholarship based on documents and pictorial evidence that suddenly gave a new and very influential authenticity to his displays as well as a fresh attractiveness.

The department had acquired responsibility for three great houses in London and in its environs, Ham House, Osterley Park and, later, Apsley House. Ham House had long been recognised as a sleeping beauty, still pervaded by the atmosphere of the later 17th century. It also possessed early inventories, which made possible a deeper understanding of what should be done to preserve and enhance its unique charm, and the administration of it was formative in Thornton's philosophy of authenticity of display and interpretation. His researches into the house were embodied in The Furnishing and Decoration of Ham House (1980, with Maurice Tomlin). His training in textiles led him to pioneer the study of early upholstery, opening yet another avenue along which others have since followed.

In the museum itself he saw display in the Primary Galleries as the main work of his department, and the study of interior decoration as one of its functions. He was virtually the founder of the scholarly study of interior decoration, establishing it as an exact historical science, and giving it prominence as a master art in the evolution of the arts it employs, from architecture to painting and the arts of furnishing.

His influence, which became great, was disseminated through a series of groundbreaking works: Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978); Authentic Decor: the domestic interior 1620-1920 (1984), which became an interior decorator's manual; and, perhaps the crown of his work in the field, The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400-1600 (1991).

Although now in Woodwork, he kept his interest in costume and the new Costume Gallery he designed with the Textiles Department made a sensation and entranced the public. He was distressed by the state of the musical instruments collection, which by its nature requires special conditions and care, and it was a matter of pride to him that he was able to have it restored and exhibited, and the instruments themselves once more played, then a major innovation.

During Thornton's years as Keeper, he assembled around him a team of young enthusiasts and volunteers whom he inspired with his enthusiasm, energy and dedication. Realising that museum assistants, the lowest grade of the curatorial hierarchy, contained graduates and non-graduates of potential talent, he encouraged them to make themselves authorities on aspects of the department's work. Under his aegis, for instance, the late Clive Wainwright became a noted authority on the Victorian age. His Deputy and Assistant Keepers, Desmond Fitzgerald, Simon Jervis and John Hardy, all made reputations under his encouraging regime.

In 1984, as he was nearing 60, it so happened that the two highly distinguished but very elderly curators of Sir John Soane's Museum, Sir John Summerson and Dorothy Stroud, celebrated historians of English architecture and landscape gardening, were now retiring, and Thornton successfully applied for the curatorship.

The Soane museum was the very personal creation of a great architect who was also a collector of exceptional taste and flair, and had arranged the interiors of the house he bequeathed to the nation with a Romantic sense of the modulation of light within them and an arrangement of furnishings, paintings and objects which sets them off to perfection and in always harmonious relationship. The museum also houses Soane's own archive, library and collection of drawings.

When Thornton took it over, it was in a highly dangerous if poetic state of atmospheric charm, that concealed the underlying need for a thorough programme of restoration and conservation. This he undertook with the same skill, knowledge and dedication that he had shown at the V&A, steadily supported by the trustees and their chairman, the Duke of Grafton.

He soon discovered the richness of authentic information about the house to be found in its archives, and based his programme on what they revealed. Money, the origin of the problem, he raised with the generous help of the architectural profession and of private and co-operative donors - he had the enviable advantage of seeking financial help for a self-evidently beautiful house requiring projects on not too large a scale. Again he recruited gifted and dedicated assistants, notably his successor Margaret Richardson, and Helen Dorey. Together they saw to the improved recording and cataloguing of the collections and to the opening of a small but very elegantly designed exhibition room.

After 10 years Peter Thornton left the Soane a renovated, conserved and reawakened national treasure. His achievement was recognised on his retirement by his appointment as CBE.

His last work was to provide in 1998, in Form & Decoration in the Decorative Arts, 1470-1870, the sort of manual that he felt would have helped him as a young man.