Basil Gray

In 1933 Basil Gray married the calligrapher Nicolete Mary Binyon (1911-1997), daughter of Laurence Binyon, poet, art scholar and dramatist. There were five children from the marriage including the art historian Camilla Gray. Basil Gray died on 10 June 1989 and is buried in the churchyard of Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire.

He became the temporary Director of the British Museum in 1968, and retired in 1969. During retirement his focus turned to the relationship between Chinese ceramics and Persian painting. He became Vice-President of the British Institute of Persian Studies in 1969, chaired the Sixth International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology at Oxford in 1972, and became President of the Societas Iranologica Europara in 1983. As an art historian Gray wrote exhibition guides and books on Orientalism and Islamic Art.

The archeologist Roman Ghirshman invited Gray to Iran in 1951, to study Ville Royale excavations at Susa. Further visits to Iran included Iranian Institute's and British Council lectures at Isfahan, Tabriz, and Mashhad, and for Shiraz he urged, as a member of the Iranian Institute governing body, investigations of the dye trade between the Persian Gulf and China.

On his return to England he joined in 1930 the Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, under Laurence Binyon, in 1940 becoming the Department's deputy keeper, and in 1946, its keeper. Under his tenure he managed employment intake, collections and acquisitions, and curated special exhibitions using the Department's own collections, and those from public and private sources.

Following graduation in 1927 Gray travelled to the Schönbrunn Palace and Osterreichisches Museum in Vienna to view Mughal painting. While in Vienna he studied under Josef Strzygowski, and developed a friendship with Otto Demus, art historian and Byzantinist. Following this he worked with art historian David Talbot Rice at the British Academy excavations of the palace of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople.

Basil Gray, CB, CBE, FBA (1904 – 1989), was an art historian, Islamicist, author, and the head of the British Museum's Oriental department.

Basil Gray was born in 1904 at Kensington, the son to Charles Gray and Florence Elworthy Cowell. His father was a Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon. He attended Bradfield College and in the 1920s studied at New College, Oxford.