Willett Gallery
The Willett gallery displays the pottery collection of Henry Willett, one of the founding fathers of Brighton Museum.
Willett was a man of great energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging interests. He was born in Newhaven, the youngest of eleven children, and moved to Brighton in 1841. He ran the West Street Brewery (a family business) and bought property throughout Sussex. He was an astute businessman and in his will left an estate worth £230,000.
Willett's first collecting passion was for chalk fossils, which he excavated from the Sussex Downs. He also collected natural history specimens, archaeology, local products such as iron fire-backs and Sussex pottery as well as artefacts from other cultures. Most of the important paintings he collected were later sold to international collections.
His most innovative collection was that of pottery and porcelain illustrating British popular history. Henry Willett collected ceramics in order to tell the history of the British people. There are some 2000 pieces in his collection, most of them dating from 1600-1900. He catalogued them under 23 themes which cover all aspects of British history; royal and political, military and economic, social and cultural.
An early version of the collection was lent to Brighton's new Museum in 1873. The collection was then enlarged and developed until Henry Willett presented it as a gift to Brighton in 1903. Willett was convinced that ceramic figures and vessels could tell stories from political, social and cultural history through the images with which they were decorated. The present display respects his intention that the pieces be grouped under the twenty-three subject headings listed in his catalogue of 1899.
Willett's thesis was that "the history of a country may be traced on its homely pottery" and he proceeded to assemble what could be found "..on the mantelpieces of English cottage homes, representations of what its inmates or their forefathers admired, reverenced, trusted in a kind of unconscious survival of the Lares and Penates [household gods] of the ancients."
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