For over sixty years Robert and Lisa Sainsbury acquired objects which 'spoke' to them. Together they assembled that highly personal selection of objects which today is known and admired worldwide as the Sainsbury Col-lection. They did not consciously set out to create a collection and indeed, when they came to recognise what they had actually done, they gave it away. They started their joint collecting in 1937, the year in which they were married, and continued up to Bob's death in zooo. Bob Sainsbury had already started collecting in the years after he came down from Cambridge. He had started buying private press books whilst he was an undergraduate. Later with his close friend the engraver, Blair Hughes-Stanton, he co-founded the Gemini Press.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll

Personification:

Portraits by Clare Shenstone

Norbert Lynton

Catalogue

List of Works

Biography