The Khalili Collection, assembled by Sir David Khalili over more than five decades, is one of the largest privately held collections of art in the world. It comprises eight separate collections covering Islamic art, Japanese art of the Meiji period, Spanish damascened metalwork, Swedish textiles, enamels of the world, the art of the pilgrimage to Mecca, Aramaic documents, and Indian textiles, with a published catalogue programme running to dozens of volumes. Several of these collections contain significant holdings of jewellery and gemstone-related material.

Founder and structure

Sir David Khalili was born in Iran in 1945 and built his collection from the early 1970s onwards while pursuing a parallel career as a property developer and philanthropist. The collections are held by the Khalili Family Trust and have been the subject of an extensive publication programme through Azimuth Editions and similar publishers, with scholarship contributed by curators from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and major university departments. Selected items have been loaned for major exhibitions internationally.

Islamic art

The Islamic art collection numbers more than 35,000 items spanning roughly thirteen centuries and the geographical span of the Islamic world. Within it are Mughal jewelled objects including jade-handled daggers, turban ornaments, bazubands, and other items of personal adornment, alongside enamelled and gem-set vessels from Iran, Turkey, and Spain. The collection's cataloguing of jewelled jade is among the most thorough published references in this field, with photographic documentation and analysis of stones, settings, and inscriptions.

Enamels of the world

The enamels collection covers Byzantine, Russian, French, Chinese, and Japanese work, including pieces by major firms such as Fabergé, Khlebnikov, and Garrard. It is one of the few collections to attempt comparative coverage of enamel traditions across cultures, and its publications offer cross-comparisons of technique that are difficult to find elsewhere.

Japanese art of the Meiji period

The Meiji collection includes metalwork, lacquer, cloisonné, and other decorative arts produced during the Meiji era of Japanese export production, much of which involves jewellery techniques such as nanako-zogan, kebori, and shibuichi alloy work translated to vessels and objects rather than ornaments. The collection's documentation of the major workshops, including Komai of Kyoto and the Kiritsu Kosho Kaisha, has shaped the modern understanding of Meiji decorative arts.

Pilgrimage to Mecca

The collection devoted to the pilgrimage to Mecca includes textiles, manuscripts, and objects associated with the Hajj, alongside historical jewellery used in pilgrimage contexts. It informed major exhibitions at the British Museum and elsewhere.

Display and exhibition

The Khalili Collection has lent material to major institutions worldwide for special exhibitions, including the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian. The collection itself does not maintain a single permanent public museum, although individual pieces have been on long-term loan to institutional partners.

Scholarship and publication

The publication programme is the collection's most sustained public contribution. Volumes include J. M. Rogers' work on Islamic jewelled objects, Joseph M. Earle on the Meiji period, Haydn Williams on enamels, and others. The volumes are indispensable references for jewellery historians working in the relevant traditions, providing photographs, dimensional data, and provenance information at a level of detail rarely available outside major museums.

Significance for the gem and jewellery field

For specialists in jewellery history, particularly Mughal jewelled objects, Islamic enamels, and Meiji decorative arts, the Khalili Collection's published volumes are foundational reference works. Pieces from the collection appear regularly in scholarly bibliographies, comparison tables in auction catalogues, and exhibitions worldwide. The collection's combined size, scholarly seriousness, and accessibility through publication make it more important to working knowledge in these fields than many institutional museum collections of comparable scope.