Gordine and Hare’s Russian Art Collection

In 2024-25 the museum hosted Kingston University AHRC Techne PhD candidate Lauren Warner-Treloar on a placement to research Gordine and Hare’s collection of prints which resulted in a symposium, workshop and online exhibition.

Lauren Warner-Treloar is an art historian specialising in book arts, printmaking, and eastern European modernism and is a PhD candidate at Kingston School of Art. Her AHRC Techne-funded PhD project is entitled Sound Art and Visual Culture: The Anti-Book Experiment in the Romanov Empire and the USSR, 1881-1932.

During her placement at Dorich House Museum, Lauren researched and catalogued the museum’s full collection of 22 prints, building on initial cataloguing of the mid-1990s. With Visiting Research Fellow Dr Louise Hardiman, Lauren also planned and delivered a one-day public event at Dorich House, Behind the Glass: Deconstructing the Hare-Gordine Print Collection which included a print workshop, a tour of the museum’s Russian art collection by Dr Hardiman, and an afternoon research symposium. Alongside the day’s events, the museum launched a virtual exhibition of the museum’s collection of prints The Grand Tour, Northward Bound: Sojourns and Souvenirs on ArtUK, which Lauren curated.

In 2023-24, with the support of a Collections Access Grant from the Decorative Arts Society, phase two of our research on Gordine and Hare’s Russian art collection investigated the museum’s silverware, lacquerware, glassware and folk art.  The research was conducted by Cynthia Coleman Sparke and Dr Louise Hardiman with the support of the Dorich House Museum curator.

In 2022, the Temple Gallery kindly reviewed the museum’s icons and supported their interpretation.  We are grateful to Richard Temple and Benjamin Shearer for generously sharing their knowledge.  We are grateful, also, to Visiting Research Fellow Dr Louise Hardiman who has been a generous supporter of the museum.  Her research on Richard Hare’s role as an icon collector, presented at the international conference “Collecting Orthodox Art in the West” hosted by the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, Massachusetts in 2021, is published as “Richard Hare’s Russian Icon Collection and the Persistent Lure of Byzantium in Anglo-Soviet Artistic Relations” in the Journal of Icon Studies, Volume 4, Fall 2025.

In 2020, the museum embarked on a programme of research on Dora Gordine and Richard Hare’s Russian art collection to support its future care and interpretation.  Supported by an Art Fund Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant, the first phase of this research investigated the museum’s Russian porcelain holdings.  The research was conducted by Cynthia Coleman Sparke and Dr Louise Hardiman with the support of the Dorich House Museum curator.