Decorative art takes centre stage at the Walker; this month sees the official opening of the Craft and Design Gallery, at the Walker, Liverpool, the museum's first dedicated space for decorative art. Robin Emmerson introduces a selection of the recent acquisitions that form highlights of the new display

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Robin Emmerson

The Walker's new Craft and Design Gallery forms part of a major and unfolding project. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the European Regional Development Fund, and supported by donations from the museum's Friends organisation, trusts, foundations and private individuals, this project has already seen the restoration of magnificent gallery spaces at the Walker for temporary exhibitions, and next year will see the creation of new galleries at the Liverpool Museum.

The Walker is traditionally associated with pictures rather than with the decorative arts. When it opened in 1877, its main purpose was to house the autumn exhibitions of painting and sculpture that had previously disrupted the displays of the Liverpool Museum on an annual basis. The Museum (two doors down the road) already housed the splendidly wide-ranging collections of decorative art and antiquities given in 1867 by Joseph Mayer, from medieval ivories to Wedgwood. Over the next century, the Walker's acquisitions of decorative arts were largely confined to the Wavertree bequest of silver, and two groups of furniture and woodwork, one by Alfred Stevens, the other by Herbert MacNair.

In 1986 the creation of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (since renamed National Museums Liverpool) brought the Walker and the Liverpool Museum for the first time under the same director, the late Sir Richard Foster. As a result, in 1989 responsibility for western decorative art (defined as from 1200 to the present) moved to the Walker. In the same decade major acquisitions of furniture by the Regency designer George Bullock were made. Shortly afterwards, display cases designed by Alec Cobbe were installed in three galleries when hey were re-hung, to house a selection of medieval, renaissance and eighteenth-century decorative art; a long-term loan of renaissance furniture was obtained from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and an important pietra dura table was acquired as a centrepiece for the gallery of renaissance art.

Over the past decade, under the keepership of Julian Treuherz, the Walker has both broadened and focused its collecting policy. One aim is to redress previous indifference to the major designers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to collect exciting contemporary work. The other aim is to acquire outstanding pieces from earlier periods, especially where there is a local link that makes the Walker their next-to-natural home.

The support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the National Art Collections Fund has been invaluable, and we are most grateful to them. The former provided the lion's share of the funding for the amber cabinet from Ince Blundell and the Ormskirk astronomical clock, both illustrated here. In the case of the clock, the decision of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art was crucial in allowing the Walker the chance to match the price at which it would otherwise have been exported to an overseas buyer. The NACF helped to fund not only both these items but also many others. Privately donated pieces included a silver casket from the Rathbone family, a wonderfully romantic treasure chest. A chair designed by A.W.N.Pugin for himself was one of a pair, bought jointly with the National Museum of Wales so that each institution could have one; the price was reduced thanks to the Capital Taxes Office's system of sharing the benefit of remission on 'exempt' objects. Over the decade, the decorative art collections have benefited from every national initiative except the acceptance-in-lieu scheme.

National Museums Liverpool regards itself as a national collection with a unique regional responsibility, and sees the combination of the two as a great opportunity. For example, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Liverpool area vied with London as the most important production centre for precision timekeepers. Outstanding examples of local clock- and watch making are therefore a priority for acquisition.

Liverpool was, with north Staffordshire and London, one of the three principal centres of ceramic manufacture in Georgian England. Its products remain of central importance to the Walker's collecting policy because knowledge about them changes rapidly. The sale at Phillips of the collection formed by the late Dr Bernard Watney, President of the English Ceramic Circle, who had made a speciality of Liverpool porcelain, offered the chance to acquire important local pieces, such as a beautiful jug from Samuel Gilbody's factory.

The Craft and Design Gallery represents the next step in the movement of the decorative art collections into the Walker. In planning the gallery, we have felt rather like doorstep evangelists. The challenge has been to introduce visitors not only to the range of the collections but also to a range of different approaches to them, in ways that capture imaginations and leave people wanting more--all in a space of 145 square metres. Because of this, we decided to organise the works not by periods or materials but by three broad themes: style, making, and use. A fourth section is devoted to a changing selection from the costume collection.