Robert Lockhart Hobson

Robert Lockhart Hobson CB (26 July 1872[1][2] – 5 June 1941) was a British civil servant and antiquarian.

He was noted for his cataloguing which The Times described as establishing firm facts for what had previously been "surmise and unproved tradition"[3] and he was highly influential through his writing in the elevation of Chinese ceramics from craft works to the status of objects of fine art.

[8] In 1934 he was made keeper of Oriental Antiquities and Ethnography, a position he held until his retirement in 1938[9] at which time he was presented with the gift of a portrait by Francis Dodd RA.

[11] He was one of the founding members of the Oriental Ceramic Society,[3] and after his retirement, chairman (or president) from 1939 to 1942 in succession to George Eumorfopoulos.

[15] He was one of the first to explicitly date the earliest blue and white porcelain to the Song dynasty when most scholars still placed it in the Ming period, indicating his awareness of the latest archaeological excavations.

[16] His The wares of the Ming Dynasty (1923) was described by John Alexander Pope as an early attempt at an "overall objective classification of Ming wares" and a "kind of landmark" as a more critical approach began to enter the field of Chinese ceramics[17] and he was highly influential through his writing in the elevation of Chinese ceramics from craft works to the status of objects of fine art.