Henry Ginsburg

Henry David Ginsburg, museum curator: born New York 5 November 1940; Curator of Thai and Cambodian Collections, British Library 1973-2002; died New York 29 March 2007.

Henry Ginsburg, an American who lived in London for decades, worked on behalf of two spiritual homes, one being the realm of Thai culture, about which he wrote in many publications, the other the British Library, which he enriched through selective purchases of superbly illustrated manuscripts created in 18th- and 19th-century Siam. From 1973 Ginsburg was the Curator of Thai and Cambodian Collections at the British Library.

Born in New York City in 1940, Ginsburg had parents who were immersed in the world of objects. The scholarly Benjamin Ginsburg was partner in Ginsburg & Levy on Madison Avenue, a leading source for the finest American antiques and decorative objects since the first decades of the 20th century. His wife Cora became best known following her husband's retirement as a dealer in European and American costumes and textiles.

Henry Ginsburg was heir to both paternal and maternal virtues; outside the area of manuscript painting, he was a knowledgeable connoisseur of textiles and ceramics. His parents also had ties to other pockets of New York cultural life, and Ginsburg once remarked that if he had had a godfather, it most likely would have been Barnett Newman (whose renown as an Abstract Expressionist painter lay far ahead in 1940).

Introduced to Asia with a stay in India, Ginsburg nevertheless studied Russian at Columbia, then joined the US Peace Corps, which sent him to Thailand. There he taught English in the provincial town of Chachoengsao, 1964-66. His interest subsequently took him to the only viable academic institution where he could pursue the topic of Thai literature, namely the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Under the guidance of Stuart Simmonds, he wrote a dissertation on a set of embedded Thai fables, progeny of the Sanskrit Pancatantra, that, as can be learned from his 1975 scholarly article on the subject, serve to discourage humans from allowing identities to be perverted (don't marry a nymph, and remember that the mythic Garuda bird lost his credibility when he allowed the birds he ruled over to see him featherless while moulting).

Ginsburg's position at the British Museum and then the British Library involved the acquisition of printed books, but it was the chance to strengthen the library's holdings of illustrated manuscripts that allowed him to exercise his innate talents. With the publication of Thai Manuscript Painting (1989), the world had an opportunity to see not only the riches of the British Library and knowledgeable analysis of Thai manuscript painting but a kind of art that had been little studied.

Many of these manuscripts were sent to Bangkok in 1996, in an exhibition that also included long-held documents. The exhibition, at the Thailand Cultural Centre, was opened by the Queen, then on a state visit, and subsequently became the basis for the book Thai Art and Culture: historic manuscripts from Western collections (2000).

As an American in London, in 2003 Ginsburg played a key role in ensuring that the British Library, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum all received gifts of South-East Asian art from the Doris Duke Cultural Foundation, which was in the process of distributing objects acquired by the heiress Doris Duke to American institutions. More recently, Ginsburg contributed to the catalogue of a 2006 exhibition in Bangkok, "Siam in Trade and War - Royal Maps of the 19th Century", an exhibition that demonstrated that the prevailing scholarly opinion, that accurate maps were not produced in Siam until the Westernisation of the mid-19th century, was false. At the time of his death, Ginsburg was at work on a book about Thai banner painting and a catalogue of the Thai manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

Although a man of independent means, Ginsburg strove to live modestly. Visitors to his house were startled to discover that his dishwasher was really a compartment for housing used plastic bags. An apparent extravagance, a house in the nearly abandoned Tuscan farming village of Toppole, was an opportunity to support the remaining residents. Ginsburg also provided private scholarships in the UK. Just a year ago, he acquired British citizenship, after being told by an immigration official that he was puzzled why such a long-term resident did not hold a British passport.

Ginsburg had studied the piano seriously as a youth, and in London he took up the harpsichord. On just a few occasions did he bring his various worlds together. In September 2005, with Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand in attendance, Ginsburg, together with his friend the amateur flautist Simon Cornwell, performed on the piano in the parlour for the benefit of the Thai television cameras; then, the cameramen sent away, the assembled crowd moved to the ground floor of his Islington home, where the harpsichord stood, for the real concert and the Thai meal that followed.

Hiram Woodward