Visual Culture as Historical Document: Sir John Drummond Hay and the Nineteenth-Century Moroccan Pottery in the National Museum of Scotland

摘要

The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh possesses a substantial collection of unpublished nineteenth-century Moroccan ceramics, including 49 pieces from the collection of Sir John Drummond Hay, British Minister Plenipotentiary in Morocco from 1845 to 1886. The Drummond Hay wares are of considerable interest to scholars of history and visual culture alike, as the personal collection of a major figure in nineteenth-century Anglo-Moroccan relations, and as representatives of a part of Moroccan visual culture that has been largely ignored within recent discourses of Islamic art history. This paper is the result of a research project into the history of the Drummond Hay ceramic group, examining not only the formal qualities of the ceramics but also their particular social history, and the insight their story provides into perceptions of the Maghreb in nineteenth-century Britain.