Amulet Atlas

peopleWalter Leo Hildburgh

also: W. L. Hildburgh

peopleBritain and IrelandIberiaWestern EuropeSouth AsiaJapanUnited KingdomUnited States of AmericaSpainconfidence mediumneeds checking

American collector and art historian, 1876–1955, who bought amulets in vast numbers across Europe, Asia and the Middle East and then wrote about them. His amulet collection was left to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1985; his English medieval alabasters went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 300 of them in 1946 for his seventieth birthday.

cited

When

1876–1955 cited

PeriodTwentieth century
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteYears only; no day-dates were read.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Hildburgh took a doctorate at Columbia on alternating current, then spent his life on objects. The University of London gave him a D.Litt. in the History of Art in 1937. He gave or bequeathed over 5,000 objects to the Victoria and Albert Museum alone, and further material reached the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt and the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

The amulets are the part that concerns this atlas, and they are also the part that moved. They went first to Henry Wellcome's museum, and in 1985 the whole Wellcome amulet material was transferred to Oxford. Inference — that means a tray of Spanish hands or Japanese charms catalogued as Pitt Rivers material may have been bought by an American in a Madrid street in 1906, passed through a pharmaceutical fortune's private museum in London, and only reached Oxford eighty years later. The label says Pitt Rivers. The object's history says four other things first.

He published on what he bought rather than only accumulating it: articles on cowrie shells as amulets, on hand images as amulets in Spain, and on the psychology he thought underlay amulet use in Europe.

cited

Now

Hildburgh's amulets are the bulk of what a visitor to the Pitt Rivers charm cases is looking at, and the Wellcome connection is why the same names recur in both institutions' catalogues. This project has read no published account of how individual pieces were acquired, and does not assert that any particular object was bought fairly or unfairly.

inference

What this is near

orgThe Pitt Rivers Museumwhere his amulets landed in 1985, and where most of them are catalogued todayorgWellcome Collectionthe collection he left the amulets to first, and which passed them onplaceThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers Museumthe cases his material largely fillsmaterialCowrieone of the classes he published on, treating the shell as an amulet rather than as currencymotifThe handthe Spanish hand-shaped charm he wrote a paper onkinFigathe closed hand with the thumb between the fingers, the Iberian form of what he was collectingparallelEdward Lovetthis London contemporary; both collections passed through Wellcome and both ended up scatteredstoryWho owns a charmthe long read on how a charm changes hands; a Hildburgh object has usually changed them four times

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers Museumthe other collector whose amulets came here from Wellcome in the 1985 transferpersonThe Lovett charms at Wellcome Collectionthe other amulet collector whose material passed through this building and out of it in 1985personAugustus Pitt Riversthe collector whose amulets reached the museum in 1985, long after the founder's scheme was setparallelSiegfried Seligmannanother private amulet collector of the same decades whose collection also ended up in a public museumpersonThe Pitt Rivers Museumthe collector whose amulets came here from Wellcome in 1985personWellcome Collectionthe collector who bequeathed his amulets here before they went on to Oxford

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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