Gabrielle Muriel Keiller (born Ritchie)

The Scottish photographer Gabrielle Keiller was one of the most important collectors of Dada and Surrealist art in Great Britain in the twentieth century, assembling her collection from 1960 to 1988. Her acquisition choices were shaped by pioneering collectors Roland Penrose and Peggy Guggenheim as well as by the British artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

The daughter of an aristocratic British mother and an American heir to a metals fortune, Keiller was raised in Scotland and became a world-renowned golfer. She traveled within the international competition circuit until the Second World War, during which she returned to England and drove ambulances. Her collecting did not begin in earnest until 1951, when she became the fourth wife of Alexander Keiller, a noted British archeologist and heir to the James Keiller and Sons marmalade business. The Keillers assembled a collection of Egyptian and classical Greek antiquities until Alexander’s death in 1955. Gabrielle, dubbed “Lady Marmalade” by British tabloids, turned the focus of her acquisitions to modern French painting in 1959, when she acquired a small work by Henri Rousseau.

Keiller was inspired to assemble her collection of Dada and Surrealist art when she traveled to Venice, Italy in 1960, where she encountered Paolozzi’s surrealist-inflected work in the British Pavilion at the Biennale. She also visited Peggy Guggenheim at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, her home on the Grand Canal, and was moved by the American expatriate’s collection of Surrealist paintings and objects. When she returned to England, she hired the British Surrealist artist, collector, and curator Penrose as an acquisitions advisor. With Penrose’s knowledge of Surrealism, Keiller presciently acquired exquisite corpse drawings and collage-novels by Max Ernst in addition to important paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, René Magritte, and Yves Tanguy.

In 1988, having served on the museum’s advisory board during the 1970s, Keiller bequeathed her collection of more than 170 works to the National Gallery of Scotland and also donated her library, consisting of more than one thousand books on Dada and Surrealism, to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.