Charles Truman
Curator, scholar and dealer whose expertise embraced Renaissance jewellery, fakes and fakers
CHARLES TRUMAN, who has died aged 67, was a leading authority on Renaissance jewellery, gold snuff boxes, and antique silver. An ebullient and sociable figure, he was always generous with his encyclopaedic knowledge of all the decorative arts. Thanks to a superb visual memory and sense of historical style, he had a remarkable ability to detect fakes of all periods. His career embraced the worlds of curator, scholar, dealer, consultant and showman. Truman’s early museum years laid the foundations for his later career and scholarly interests.
Turning his back on a life in the law, at the age of 20 he joined the V& A as a volunteer in the Woodwork Department, learning quickly as he went along, being appointed soon afterwards as museum assistant to the Metalwork Department. At the time when the new jewellery gallery was being reconstructed, Truman volunteered to help sort out the gold snuff boxes. It happened that senior colleagues were preparing two major catalogues – one about French silver in the V& A and another on gold boxes in the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon. He assisted with each. All three authors – Ronald Lightbown, Anthony Blunt and Serge Grandjean – paid tribute to Truman’s precocious mastery of detail, particularly on the complexities of French hallmarking.
In 1977, to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the V& A staged a celebrated Fabergé exhibition. The young Truman was detailed to assist the show’s creator, Kenneth Snowman of the royal jewellers, Wartski. No one who saw the exhibition will forget the sparkle of diamonds, enamels and fine gold displayed in cases against a luxurious dark green velvet backdrop. Imperial Easter eggs jostled with delicately realistic flowers, all of gold, enamels, diamonds and pearls.
Members of the Royal family and other distinguished lenders liked to visit without the crowds, led by Snowman; Truman spent many evenings in attendance. One night he averted near-disaster when a priceless miniature enamelled sedan chair with its blackamoor bearers, animated by the automaton inside it, began marching towards the edge of a shelf. Truman, summoned to the rescue as a museum key-holder, saved the day.
In 1979 he caused a sensation with an article for The Connoisseur magazine, an analysis of numerous designs in the V& A by the 19th-century Aachen goldsmith, Reinhold Vasters, unmasking him as an inventive faker of Renaissance jewellery and goldsmiths’ work. As a result of his work, many jewels, long accepted by scholars as Renaissance, were now recognised as being after Vasters’s designs. The market has never quite recovered.
Among his many new discoveries, he also realised that an extraordinary gold and mudstone snuffbox, leopard-shaped, with diamond eyes and teeth and a gold tongue (Dresden, circa 1750) was in fact a long-lost item from the inventoried collections of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. He then suggested convincingly that the maker’s mark on a silver-gilt cup at Waddesdon Manor was that of Charles I’s virtuoso goldsmith, Christian van Vianen. Remarkably, in 2005, he found, at the Maastricht Fair, a painting by Bartolomaeus van der Helst (1613-74) showing a boy holding the very same cup, which thanks to his discovery is now also at Waddesdon.
Truman’s rare ability was to combine documentary scholarship with the fruits of decades of handling goldsmiths’ work. Among a stream of books and articles on silver, porcelain, glass, and gold boxes, two recent works stand out. One is the brilliant summary of collecting Renaissance jewellery in modern times and what we know about fakes, which forms the preface to his new catalogue on the Lehman Jewels’ Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. But his finest contribution to scholarship is the definitive Wallace Collection gold boxes catalogue, published in 2013. Gold snuff boxes were his greatest passion.
The son of Kenneth, a solicitor who headed the family firm at Bicester, and Dorothy, Charles Henry Truman was born at Stratton Audley, Oxfordshire, on April 5 1949. After Marlborough College he read Law at the University of Kent, Canterbury, but left early.
In 1971 he was appointed to the V& A Metalwork department, promoted in 1977 to the Ceramics department, and headhunted by Christie’s in 1984 to become a director and Head of Silver and Objects of Vertu, moving in 1990 to Asprey’s as director of Antiques. From 1997 he was an independent dealer and researcher. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, liveryman of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and at various times chairman of the British Antique Dealers’ Association and of the Silver Society.
In 1984 he married Laura Green, who survives him with their children, Louise and Harry. Charlie Truman was a devoted family man, remembered glass in hand, talking passionately about a precious object. Charles Truman, born April 5 1949, died February 10 2017