Ellen Tanner’s Persia: A Museum Legacy Rediscovered

Abstract

In December 1894 Miss Ellen Georgiana Tanner FRGS (1847–1937) set off from Victoria Station for Marseilles, took a merchant steamer through the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia, and up the River Tigris to Baghdad. Tanner was accompanying Emma Mockler, wife of the British Resident at Baghdad, who was returning to the city: ‘as we came in sight of Baghdad it looked like a fairy city with the palm-fringed river, orange gardens, the houses on the water side like Venice, and all her mosques and minarets gleaming in the yellow evening sunlight.’1 It was during this journey that Tanner decided to visit Persia after an acquaintance ‘spoke of its scenery, its ruins and its climate with an enthusiasm that fired my already stimulated imagination and fixed a floating fantasy not to stop short in Mesopotamia’ (i, 2). Tanner headed for the port of Bandar Bushehr at the foot of the caravan route to central Persia, and began a remarkably intrepid journey across the region on horseback, visiting the bazaars of Shiraz, Isfahan, and Kerman along the way. The journey marked her emergence as a collector: years later, she would donate her unusual collections of Persian art to several UK museums. Ellen Tanner was the elder daughter of a wealthy attorney-at-law, William Tanner. The family lived at Frenchay House, just outside Bristol. Tanner’s mother had died when she was a child and she spent much of her adult life caring for her father. On his death in 1887, she and her sister each inherited the sum of £18,000, while their two brothers received the family’s shipping and business interests. By then in her late forties, she travelled widely throughout Europe and to Egypt, Turkey, and India, before making her first visit to the Middle East. Tanner is one of a group of ‘intrepid emigrants, formidable travellers and driven philanthropists’ subverting the ‘breathless inadequacy model of bourgeois femininity’ queried by Amanda