Name Victor Skipp | ||
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Books A history of greater Birmingh, The making of Victorian, Crisis and development, Medieval Yardley, Industrial Revolution 'then' and | ||
Victor Henry Thomas Skipp (1925 – 24 December 2010) was an English local historian, art collector and amateur philosopher, who left his estate to Kettle's Yard in Cambridge.
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Life
Bought up in an "austere Nonconformist family", Victor Skipp "was exposed to a very different life serving with the Marines during WW2, and different again with post-war Cambridge". He graduated from Cambridge University in 1950 before teaching in secondary schools. In the 1960s and 1970s Skipp lectured at Bordesley College of Education, as well as running extramural research in local history at the University of Birmingham.
Collection
Skipp built a collection of Modernist art and literature which he and his wife Pat arranged around their home, an old farmhouse in Hopton, Suffolk. His art collection included work by Ivon Hitchens, Bob Law, Linda Karshan and Alison Turnbull. Skipp took enormous care to consider the possibilities created by arranging disparate works of art in relation to each other:
In the last resort, the 'right' relationships often appear to be a matter of precise positioning, and/or of slight (and generally accidental) visual echoes and correspondences.
Upon his death he left his estate to Kettle's Yard in Cambridge. An exhibition of objects from Skipps' collection showed at Kettle's Yard in 2013-14.