Basil William Robinson was a British art scholar and author, specializing in Asian art and history.
Life
Robinson was born in London, and attended Winchester College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1939 and was shortly afterwards transferred to the Department of Metalwork where, apart from war service in the East from 1939 to 1946, he spent the rest of his career. He served as Keeper of the Department of Metalwork from 1966 until his retirement in 1972. In 1967 he was elected honorary president of the To-ken Society of Great Britain and was president of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1970 to 1973. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal fields of scholarship were: Persian miniature paintings, Japanese swords, and the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi. He died in 2005. He had married twice: firstly Mary Stewart, who died in 1954, and secondly Oriel Steel, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Works
Robinson's publications include:
Robinson, B. W., Islamic art in the Keir collection, London, Boston, Faber and Faber, 1988
Robinson, B. W., Islamic painting and the arts of the book, London, Faber and Faber, 1976
Diba, Layla, S., Maryam Ekhtiar with essays by B.W. Robinson, Royal Persian paintings, the Qajar epoch, 1785-1925, Brooklyn, N.Y., Brooklyn Museum, 1998
Robinson, B. W., Japanese sword-fittings and associated metalwork, Genève, Collections Baur, 1980
Robinson, Basil W., Orient d'un collectionneur: miniatures persanes, textiles, céramiques, orfèvrerie rassemblés par Jean Pozzi, collections du Musée d'art et d'histoire, Genève, du Musée historique des tissus, 1992
Khalili, Nasser D., B.W. Robinson and Tim Stanley, Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, Lacquer of the Islamic lands, Oxford University Press, 1996
Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Persian miniatures, translation by Edward Fitzgerald, notes by B. W. Robinson, New York, Crescent Books, 1979
Robinson, B. W. and Basil Gray, Persian art of the book: catalogue of an exhibition held at the Bodleian Library to mark the sixth International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1972
Robinson, B. W., Persian drawings from the 14th through the 19th century, Boston, Little, Brown, 1976
Robinson, B. W., Persian miniature painting from collections in the British Isles, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967
Robinson, B. W., Persian miniatures, New York, Citadel Press, 1957
Robinson, B. W., Les Plus beaux dessins persans, Paris, Éditions du Chêne, 1966
Robinson, B. W., Primer of Japanese sword-blades, Leatherhead, Surrey, Dyer, the Printer, 1955
Robinson, B. W., Some illustrated Persian manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, Manchester,
Robinson, B. W., Studies in Persian art, London, Pindar Press, 1993
