The mystery COLLECTOR

One of the joys of collecting antiques is that pieces often come to us with stories attached. The story of Murray Pollinger, who built up an important collection of Samuel Alcock porcelain, is like the stuff of fiction. Fittingly so, as Willa Latham discovered...

-  Willa Latham

To my regret, I never got to meet Murray Pollinger in person. Yet I consider myself fortunate that my life has been enriched by him in recent years. It all started when I first tried to find out more about early 19th-century porcelain by Samuel Alcock. I kept coming across it, but could find no documentation and I noticed that many pieces were misidentified. The pattern numbers made no sense and virtually nothing was marked.

Where to begin? I asked around, and I heard on the grapevine about a gentleman in Norfolk with a large, meticulously researched collection. Rumour had it there was no plan to publish his work. Keen to meet him, I tried in vain to discover his name, before abandoning my search in late 2022. Merely three weeks later, I received a phone call from someone seeking assistance with a large porcelain collection amassed by her father, Murray Pollinger, who had recently passed away. I asked some questions, and immediately knew that the elusive Norfolk collector had come to find me posthumously.

This was to be the start of many trips to Norfolk over the course of the following year. I stayed with Murray's daughter and her family in the large family home, and they were not only the gateway to this important collection, but also quickly became close friends. By spending long weekends photographing the porcelain as Murray had left it, and delving into his copious notes, the collection and the painstaking research behind it came to life - as did the man himself.

So who was Murray Pollinger? Ask anyone who knew him and you get the same answer: 'a true gentleman'. Getting to know his family, I understood this was not just a superficial description; Murray really was a gentleman in the full sense of the word.