More than sixty public museums and art galleries in the United Kingdom have benefitted from the flair for collecting and generosity of the late John and Anne Hull Grundy.

Bristol has built up a major collection of costume over the years (a selection is displayed at Blaise Castle House Museum) but it had never gathered appropriate jewellery to go with it. Learning of this lack, Mrs Hull Grundy put together and presented to us more than 400 pieces spanning the period c.1800-1950, with emphasis upon the later 19th and 20th centuries.

The collection is notable for the unusual series of pieces made or at least decorated in Japan and exported to Western Europe, especially Britain, in the 1920s. The late 19th Century brooches and necklaces made of Whitby jet and of Irish bog oak are especially fine: and most other classes of costume jewellery of this broad period are well represented.