The magic of legendary collector Christopher Gibbs' home in Tangier

Christopher later shared another sort of house in Tangier with his great friend Peter Hinwood. It was a rambling sort of house, part of which once belonged to the painters James and Marguerite McBey, arranged over a garden, with little courts of washing, drying and woodsmoke. Irises were jovially corralled in simple beds, looking like a Mughal carpet come to life at Easter, and daturas dripped with flowers in all stages from promise to decadence. It was the garden of a painter and a lover of paintings, recalling the bosky sort of paradise described in the Old Testament and much loved by Islamic artists as a metaphor for heaven.

Tangier sits at the centre of a complex web of memories and ideas, fact and fiction, ancient and modern. The Phoenicians who stopped here and left their tombs high on the cliffs 26 or so centuries ago, trading all the way from Sidon and Tyre to Cornwall. The long sojourn of the Almoravids and their successors in Andalusia, which ended in a scramble for safety back over the mouth of the Mediterranean, bringing many artisans with them along with those who wished to live a life of tolerance rather than religious submission. The Jews who fled persecution in Europe in the middle parts of the 20th century. Writers and painters and a fair few more déshabillé characters. The place itself was a merry muddle that became an apt setting for Christopher's collections. Among his many and varied possessions was a trunk that supposedly came to England containing items from the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Tangier, as it happens, was also part of her dowry and so the long line of chance by which this object survived became a circle, seemingly perfectly turned out like a hand of cards.

Living in another land can be a simple expatriate experience, but at its best it can be a generator and sustainer of ideas. While you might imagine that those who come to Morocco are in some measure driven by orientalising tendencies, Christopher for me wasn't one of those sorts. He had Moroccan friends and clearly loved the place that had become a home over several decades. He participated in the sort of cultural exchange that comes from offering what you have and exchanging it for what others are willing to offer. If you have an interest in Cretan archaeology, or Trecento painting, or the embroidery of the Greek islands, then the arts of the Islamic world are an integral part of what you love, with Mediterranean trade as the mechanism of exchange. Ideas of utility and beauty are transferred from one place to the next as much by needles stitching quietly at home, appreciating the work of others separated by space and time, as by the grandeur of palatial architecture.

Collecting has its rather more academic parts – surveying, organising, and cataloguing – but there is also the thrill of it, hunting down and acquiring that thing that especially speaks to the strange personal mixture of experience and memory that makes up desire. If you go too hard on either, collecting can become a bit heavy going, but these images are testament to a form of collecting that was a rare mixture of both. A love of things beautiful made in the past, with just enough rubbed out to give them the look of having survived a few all night parties. Christopher himself perhaps summed it up best: “Know to be useful, believe to be beautiful, Morris’s credo is mine too, but I’ve always been catholic in my enthusiasms, softened the noble and splendid with the modest and humble, grandeur with simplicity, richness with poverty. Thus in all these rooms will be found things of every age, from far and wide, making fresh conjunctions, new music.”