Archives & Library

Library Collections

The library collections cover British painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, decorative arts, architecture and garden history from the medieval period to the present day. The collections on British artists and architects, the British and Irish country house and the eighteenth-century Grand Tour are particularly strong.

Michael Kerney

Approximately two hundred books. This material has been logged on the Library and Photographic Archive catalogue. It is fully searchable but not fully catalogued. It is all available for consultation.

Seventeen boxes of pamphlets. This material is in the process of being logged on the Library and Photographic Archive catalogue. Items are available for consultation once they are logged on the catalogue.

The collection is kept in the Library Special Collections under the classmark IN PROCESS – KERNEY.

The items in this collection focus on Victorian stained glass and church architecture. Approximately a third of the items in the collections were published in the nineteenth century and a few of these books contain hand-coloured illustrations. Some of the books contain marginalia in Kerney’s hand. The extensive collection of pamphlets is composed of guidebooks and leaflets on Victorian churches and stained-glass windows and artists. These items are often rare and not held by other libraries. There are also a small number of rare trade catalogues published by companies producing stained glass.

The collection was donated to the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023.

The Centre also holds material from Kerney’s archive.

(London: Printed for J.P. Hedgeland, 1830).

Plate VII from J. Hedgeland, A Description, Accompanied by Sixteen Coloured Plates, of the Splendid Decorations Recently Made to the Church of St. Neot, in Cornwall, at the Sole Expense of the Reverend Richard Gerveys Grylls, (London: Printed for J.P. Hedgeland, 1830).

Dr Michael Kerney (1934–2022) was an acknowledged authority on the history of English stained glass of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He devoted over thirty years to the detailed study of Victorian (and later) church architecture and decorative arts, with a focus on stained glass. He became an Honorary Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters and in 2005 was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.