The Arts Society Lecturer Oliver Watson: my life in art

The first artworks that moved me were Haydn’s Nelson Mass (if we are not counting pop music as art) and the paintings of Renoir at the National Gallery – he is very much the young man’s painter.

I don’t have a favourite museum. There are too many to mention: the National Gallery and several other national galleries, the Prado, the V&A, the Musée National de Céramique at Sèvres, and, of course, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, where I was director.

One I always try to visit when in Paris is the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes: an extraordinary late 19th-century presentation of animal skeletons that is overwhelming as an ‘art installation’ and fascinating as a snapshot of the intellectual and scientific interests of the time.

A little-known artist I love is the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi – his works have an extraordinary, calm intensity and a magical representation of light.

Discretion forbids me to say which artist I think is overrated, although I am not too fond of the Italian High Renaissance, preferring the Northern schools.

I’m looking forward to Klimt/Schiele at the Royal Academy and a return visit to the Ashmolean’s Spellbound.

If I could own any artwork, it would be a large Kashan lustre dish of about 1210, or perhaps a Chinese Yuan blue-and-white porcelain jar, or a pastel by Degas, or…

The greatest moment of my career so far was opening the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha – a wonderful collection of top-quality objects in a wonderful I. M. Pei building. It was a great occasion, thanks to all the hard work of the staff – and something Qatar can be proud of.

When I’m not thinking about art, I’m playing music. I play the violin in amateur chamber groups – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven usually, though Elgar and Shostakovich recently. Exciting!

Oliver Watson is an Islamic Art specialist. After almost three decades at the V&A, he directed the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. In 2011, he joined the University of Oxford as the first I. M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, retiring in 2016.