The Brooch
Rachel Church, Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass Department and Dr Dora Thornton, Curator of The Goldsmiths’ Company Collection discuss the history of the brooch in association with the Company’s previous online exhibition, ‘The Brooch Unpinned’.
Rachel Church is a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass Department. She was part of the team which redisplayed the V&A William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery (2008 and refreshed in 2018). She has lectured and written about jewellery and the decorative arts and is the author of ‘Rings’ (V&A, first edition 2011, updated for Thames & Hudson/ V&A 2017) and of ‘Brooches and Badges’ (Thames & Hudson/ V&A, 2019).
Dr Dora Thornton is Curator of the Goldsmiths’ Company’s Collection. Prior to that she was Curator of Renaissance Europe and Curator of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum from 1990-2018. She has published widely on the culture of collecting from the Renaissance to the present and on relationships between people and things, often collaborating with specialists in other fields. Her six books include two on the Waddesdon Bequest, for which she curated a new gallery, funded by the Rothschild Foundation, in 2014, and [with Sir Jonathan Bate] Shakespeare: Staging the World, to accompany the British Museum exhibition she curated in 2012.
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