Books
Caroline has authored two academic monographs; the first Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector with Lund Humphries (Autumn, 2025), and the other entitled Sèvres-Mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship with Bloomsbury Academic (Spring, 2026).
Caroline is delighted to be working on her first trade book, for more information please contact
In her new and highly anticipated book Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector, which will be published by Lund Humphries in 2025, Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth considers the legacy of Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895), one of the greatest women collectors of the nineteenth century.
Through more than thirty collecting trips from c.1865-1884 across England, Scotland, Ireland and Europe, Lady Charlotte Schreiber hunted down rare and marked specimens of pottery and porcelain in dealer shops and private collections. Determined to learn as much as possible about the history, technical and artistic processes of all she collected, Charlotte developed an extraordinary eye. By the mid-1880s she had carefully collected almost 12,000 objects; an encyclopedic range of early modern ceramics from Britain, Europe, Japan and China, as well as an impressive number of enamels, glass, paintings, prints, fans and ephemera, such as playing cards, recipes, board games and writing sheets. By the 1850s she was celebrated already as a collector of “old china,” and by the 1860s dedicated herself exclusively to the research, documentation, and acquisition of an impressive collection of ceramics; a feat that influenced scholarly publications, exhibition culture and museum collections for years to come. It is now 140 years since Charlotte’s strategic approach to collecting culminated in the Schreiber Bequest to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1884-85. Consisting of almost 2,000 pieces of English ceramics—an area thoroughly underrepresented by the museum at the time—English enamels, glass and prints, and accompanied by a catalogue written Lady Charlotte, this was a pioneering move for a female benefactor. With the publication of The Extraordinary Art Collection of Lady Charlotte Schreiber, McCaffrey-Howarth demonstrates that Lady Charlotte’s philanthropic endeavors and contributions to the study of ceramics deserve to be celebrated.
