MUSEUM ANGEL
James Laver (1899-1975), Keeper of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 1938 to 1959, relates a curious incident in his autobiography, Museum Piece: The Education of an Iconographer (1963). Laver joined the V&A in 1922, and at the time of the incident described below, he was curator of the museum’s theatre collection under Martin Hardie. Besides poetry and fiction, Laver’s published works include Nostradamus, or the Future Foretold (1942), and books on Whistler, Wilde, Huysmans, theatre design, art and costume history.
“I have been in the most curious fashion’, he wrote (in , p.218). “Sometime in the ‘twenties an old man brought into the Museum four large, faded drawings in pen and bistre wash. They represented theatrical scenes, and as the date was plainly towards the end of the sixteenth century, they were undoubtedly the earliest stage scenes I have ever seen. With the Director’s approval they were duly purchased, and I was looking forward to an interesting if difficult piece of research to find out what
