Americanist art historian; H. Rodney Sharp Professor and frist chair of the department of art history at the University of Delaware. Homer’s father was Austin Homer, president of the J. E. Caldwell Company, a jeweler in Philadelphia. He was raised on raised on the Main Line, PA. The younger Homer entered Princeton University in 1947, hoping to become a painter. Courses taken with art history professors Albert M. Friend, Jr., and George Rowley convinced him to study art history. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1951. He continued for his master’s degree in fine arts at Harvard University, marrying Virginia Doris Keller in 1954 (later divorced). He worked as acting director the Princeton University art gallery (1956-1957) while completing his Ph.D. Homer’s 1961 Harvard dissertation was on Georges Seurat’s color theories. After gaining his Ph.D., he was briefly associate professor of Art & Archaeology, 1961-1964. That year he published a revised version of his dissertation as Seurat and the Science of Painting. Homer moved his research interest to Amercian art. He was appointed associate professor at Cornell University, 1964, but was called to the University of Delaware in 1966 to serve as the first chairman of UD’s Department of Art History in 1966 (though 1981). He remained at Delaware the rest of his career. While researching his book on American artists, Homer became interested in photography. This lead to his publication on Stieglitz and the American avant-garde in 1977. He was awarded the UD’s highest faculty honor, the Francis Alison Faculty Award, in 1980 followed by a 1981 Distinguished Faculty Lectureship in the College of Arts and Sciences. He published his Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art in 1992. He was named H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Art History in 1984. He married for a second time to Christine Datri Hyer in 1986, a University of Rochester gallery staff person. His book on Albert Pinkham Ryder appeared in 1989. Homer was responsible for steering a major collection of African-American art collected by Paul R. Jones of Atlanta to the University of Delaware. In 1999, he issued his Language of Contemporary Criticism Clarified. Homer retired, emeritus, in 2000. His last book, The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins, was published through a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant from the College Art Association. A volume of Eakins’ letters remained unfinished at the time of his death. His papers, including research on Albert Pinkham Ryder are housed at the University of Delaware Library.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Seurat’s Theories of Color and Expression: their Origins and Application. Harvard, 1961; Seurat and the Science of Painting. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964; and Organ, Violet. Robert Henri and his Circle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1969; Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-garde. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977; and Goodrich, Lloyd. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Painter of Dreams. New York: Abrams, 1989; Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992; The Language of Contemporary Criticism Clarified. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999.
Americanist art historian; H. Rodney Sharp Professor and frist chair of the department of art history at the University of Delaware. Homer’s father was Austin Homer, president of the J. E. Caldwell Company, a jeweler in Philadelphia. He was raised
Place Born: Karlsruhe, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
Place Died: Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): manuscripts (documents) and Medieval (European)
Overview
Medieval manuscript scholar. Homburger attended the local Gymnasium in Karlsruhe, graduating and spending a year in volunteer military service in 1903. He studied under Adolph Goldschmidt and the medievalist paleographer Ludwig Traube (1818-1876). In 1912 he published Die Anfänge der Malschule von Winchester im X. Jahrhundert, a study between the Winchester School illuminators and their continental counterparts. He served in the military in the First World War 1914-18. Homburger continued to assist Goldschmidt with his corpus of ivory carving, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen, which was concluded in 1918. He worked as a curator and later acting director of the Baden state museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, between 1919-1927. His 1928 Art Bulletin review of English Illuminated Manuscripts by Eric G. Millar was a significant supplement to this area. Between 1930 and 1935 he served as honorary professor at the university in Marburg. In 1935 he was declared “non-Aryan” by the Nazi government, for, although protestant, he was of Jewish extraction. He left Germany for Switzerland in 1936. Homburger had an offer for an appointment at New York University, issued by Walter W. S. Cook in 1937, but it never materialized. In Switzerland he completed his analysis of the manuscript collection of the Burgerbibliothek in Bern. His careful paleogeographic and art-historical analysis made this work important. After the war, Homburger took charged of Goldschmidt’s photographic collection from his mentor’s estate, which was now part of the University library in Basle. In 1949, he and Albert Boeckler mounted one of the important exhibition for early medieval art in the twentieth century, “Kunst des frühen Mittelalters.” He was an honorary professor at the University in Bern, Switzerland. Francis Wormald called Homburger, “the scholar who first mapped out the history of late Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts. Goldschmidt had already through his work on early ivory carvings seen that this was an important field of study…Homburger was interested in the connections between England and the Continent in tenth-century art and saw in the Winchester School of illumination a significant monument of the renewed relationship with the Continent after the debacle of the Danish invasions in the second half of the ninth Century.”
Selected Bibliography
Die Anfänge der Malschule von Winchester im X. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung/T. Weicher, 1912; and Hürlimann, Martin. Der Trivulzio-Kandelaber; ein Meisterwerk frühgotischer Plastik. Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1949; and Boeckler, Albert. Kunst des frühen Mittelalters. Bern: Berner Kunstmuseum, 1949; and Goldschmidt, Adolph, and Hübner, Paul Gustav. Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der Zeit der Karolingischen und Sächsischen Kaiser, VIII.-XI. Jahrhundert. 2 vols. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft. 1914-1918; Die illustrierten Handschriften der Burgerbibliothek Bern; die vorkarolingischen und karolingischen Handschriften. Bern: Selbstverlag der Burgerbibliothek Bern, 1962. 0.Metzler
Sources
Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 320-323; [obituary:] Wormald, Francis. “Otto Homburger.” Burlington Magazine 106 (November 1964): 513.
Citation
"Homburger, Otto." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/homburgero/.
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Medieval manuscript scholar. Homburger attended the local Gymnasium in Karlsruhe, graduating and spending a year in volunteer military service in 1903. He studied under Adolph Goldschmidt and the medievalist paleographe
Classical art historian; associated with the DAI during the year of Nazi dominance. Homann-Wedeking formed a group of young assistants under the direction of Walther Wrede at the DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) in Athens in late 1930s. In the post-war years, Homann-Wedeking was director of the Institut für Klassische Archäologie der Universität München, Ludwig Maximillians Universtiy, 1959-73.
Selected Bibliography
Die Anfänge der griechischen Grossplastik. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1950; Das archaische Griechenland. Baden-Baden: Holle, 1966, English, The Art of Archaic Greece. New York: Crown Publishers, 1968; Archaische Vasenornamentik in Attika, Lakonien und Ostgriechenland. Athens: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, 1938; “Italische Nymphe.” Antike und Abendland 8 (1959): 127-132.
Sources
“German Archaeological Institute — Athens.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 495.
Citation
"Homann-Wedeking, Ernst." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/homannwedekinge/.
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Classical art historian; associated with the DAI during the year of Nazi dominance. Homann-Wedeking formed a group of young assistants under the direction of Walther Wrede at the DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) in At
Subject Area(s): documentaries (documents) and documentary (general concept)
Overview
Documentary historian of art. Gilmore was the daughter of Eugene Allen Gilmore, a former Vice Governor General of the Philippines and later President of the University of Iowa. Holt attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduating in 1928. She wrote her master’s paper at Radcliffe College in 1930 continuing on to the University of Munich’s Kunsthistorisches Institut where she completed her Ph.D., in 1934 with a dissertation (in German) under Wilhelm Pinder on the Augsburg epitaphs. Holt joined the faculty of Duke University in 1934. In 1936 she married John Bradshaw Holt (1910-1994), then a professor at William and Mary and later a foreign service officer in the State Department. Holt defined herself first as a State Department wife and then mother; her teaching positions were only when they would coordinate with her family. As such the brilliance of her career was not through her advancing teaching appointments, but of the important primary texts she published. Immediately after World War II, she worked in Berlin, rebuilding the trade unions and occasionally helping East Germans escape to the west. She taught at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, and at Talladega College, American University, and Boston University. In her 60’s, she rode an oil tanker truck in Iran and India in order to follow the route Alexander the Great had taken. After her husband retired in 1970, Holt was free to do independent research. She focused on the role of criticism and exhibitions in art history, publishing some of the most important texts for the nineteenth century. Her skill, as E. H. Gombrich pointed out, was in her selecting the most representative writing of the age, all personally translated. She was a 1980 Guggenheim fellow. She died of cancer in 1987. Holt believed that art was a social expression of its times. To that end, she wrote books which were the compilation of documents affecting the history of art. Her documentary histories of art are still classroom standards today.
Selected Bibliography
Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthropology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, revised and reissued as, A Documentary History of Art. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doublday, 1957; From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966; The Triumph of Art for the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Sources
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 34; [obituary:] “Elizabeth G. Holt, 81, Peripatetic Art Expert.” New York Times January 28, 1987. p. D26; Gombrich, Ernst H. “Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (5th July 1905-26th January 1987).” Burlington Magazine 129, No. 1011 (June 1987): 396.
Citation
"Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/holte/.
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Documentary historian of art. Gilmore was the daughter of Eugene Allen Gilmore, a former Vice Governor General of the Philippines and later President of the University of Iowa. Holt attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduating in 1928
Place Born: Potternewton, Leeds, Yorkshire, England, UK
Place Died: Weybridge, Surrey, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Overview
Director of the National Gallery, London, 1906-1916. Holroyd’s father was William Holroyd, a cloth dealer, and his mother, Lucy Woodthorpe. After attending Leeds grammar school and studying mine engineering at the Yorkshire College of Science, he entered the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1880 studying under Alphonse Legros. Legros taught him etching, Holroyd’s principle medium as an artist. Holroyd was appointed a teacher at the school in 1885. He lived at the artists’ colony of Newlyn in Cornwall, submitting his first picture accepted to the Royal Academy the same year. In 1889 he left the Slade to travel in Italy on a scholarship. He married Fannie Fetherstonhaugh Macpherson (1864/5-1924) in 1891, a former student of the Slade School whom he met in his travels in Rome. Holroyd returned to England to be appointed the first keeper of the newly-founded National Gallery of British Art at Millbank (today the Tate Britain, formerly the Tate Gallery) in 1897. At the Tate he actively promoted British artists, founding and building Alfred Stevens holdings among others. He joined the Art Workers’ Guild in 1898, rising to master in 1905. Around 1900 he added medal design to his repertoire. In 1903 he wrote a biography of Michaelangleo which incorporated his own translation of the artist’s life by Ascanio Condivi. In 1906 his name was put forth to direct the National Gallery, London, succeeding Edward John Poynter. A debate ensued regarding whether the Gallery should be run by practicing artists or connoisseurs/art historians, as was being done on the continent. Holroyd received the appointment, but he would be the last artist to do so. His predecessor, Poynter, had had his acquisitions duties sharply curtailed by the Gallery’s Board of Trustees and Holroyd, like Poynter, was limited in his purchases both by the rising cost of pictures and the Board’s relatively conservative taste. He issued catalogs of the north and central Italian collections of the museum in 1906. The same year, Holroyd also moved the collection of J. M. W. Turner paintings (many unfinished at the artist’s death) from the storage at the National Gallery to the (Millbank) Turner gallery, mounting an exhibition. The later Tate exhibition space, donated by Joseph Duveen (1869-1939) in 1910, began at Holroyd’s suggestion. Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (“Rokeby Venus”), in 1906, and Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan in 1909 were acquired under his directorship through the National Art Collections Fund. Among the bequests to the Gallery under Holroyd’s tenure were the collection of George Salting (1835-1909) in 1910, raising the level of French nineteenth-century painting, and the important renaissance pictures of Sir Austin Henry Layard, received after years of dispute, in its entirety in 1916. Holroyd’s personal interest, stemming from his Roman visits and etchings, was Italian renaissance art. He was reappointed for a second term at the Gallery in 1911. A guard and cataloger he hired briefly in 1914 was the future novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970). In 1915 he was diagnosed with heart disease at age 54 and he resigned from the Gallery the following year, succeeded by C. J. Holmes. Holroyd died at his home in Surrey, in 1917. His complete etchings were cataloged by Campbell Dodgson after his death.
Holroyd’s 1903 monograph on Michelangelo was influential at the time in the artist’s scholarship although today many of his conclusions have been discounted. He doubted Michelangelo’s Madonna della Scala;was an authentic work based upon connoisseurship examination. However, his analysis of Donatello’s relief sculpture on Michelangelo is still considered “brilliant” (Eisler).
Selected Bibliography
[preface] Brockwell, Maurice Walter. The National Gallery: Lewis Bequest. London: George Allen & Sons, 1909; Michael Angelo Buonarroti. London: Duckworth, 1903; The National Gallery, London: the North Italian Schools. London: G. Newnes, 1906; The National Gallery, London: the Central Italian Schools. London: G. Newnes, 1906; A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest. London: H. M. Stationery/Darling & Son, 1909; and Rawlinson, William George. The Water-colours of J. M. W. Turner. London: ‘The Studio,’ 1909.
Sources
[obituaries:]
Dodgson, Campbell. “The Late Sir Charles Holroyd, M. A.” Burlington Magazine 31, no. 177 (December 1917): 250-251;
“Sir Charles Holroyd. Work At The National Gallery.” The Times (London) November 19, 1917, p. 6;
Eisler, Colin. “The Madonna of the Steps: Problems of Date and Style.” Michelangelo.. vol II of Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes: Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte 1964. Berlin: Mann, 1967, p. 187, no. 23.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Holroyd, Charles, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/holroydc/.
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Director of the National Gallery, London, 1906-1916. Holroyd’s father was William Holroyd, a cloth dealer, and his mother, Lucy Woodthorpe. After attending Leeds grammar school and studying mine engineering at the Yorkshire College of Science, he
Place Died: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): art critics, directors (administrators), painters (artists), and publishers
Overview
Burlington Magazine co-editor and director, National Gallery, London; painter. Holmes was the sone of Charles Rivington Holmes (d. 1873), a clergyman, and Mary Susan Dickson. Holmes attended Eton College beginning in 1883, and then won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1887. At Oxford he met Walter Pater. He initially worked as London publisher’s assistant between 1898 and 1903. During this time, he taught himself to draw, and then lessons by Charles S. Ricketts (1866-1931) and etching under William Strang (1859-1921). In 1897, Laurence Binyon solicited his first art criticism in The Dome for 1897 on the Japanese woodcut artist Hiroshige. Another on Hokusai followed in 1899. Holmes shared an art criticism column with Roger Fry in the Athenaeum. In 1900 his paintings were exhibited for the first time with the New English Art Club. A 1901 article on Constable led to a full book Constable’s landscape painting and it’s influence in 1902. Holmes married his first cousin, the composer/violinist Florence Mary Hill Rivington (b. 1872/3) in 1903. The same year Fry approached Holmes to save the financially foundering Burlington Magazine, which Fry and others had started. Holmes joined Robert Dell as co-editor undertaking a serious campaign with Fry to bring the magazine solvency and art-historical repute. In 1904 Holmes was elected Slade professor of fine art, Oxford–an appointment Fry was hoping for–and a member of the New English Art Club, the same year as John Singer Sargent. His lectures at Oxford on modern art were developed and published as Notes on the Science of Picture-Making in 1909. Holmes wrote an important catalog to the Grafton Galleries Post-Impressionist exhibition, the first in England, organized by Fry. When Lionel Cust retired as director of the National Portrait Gallery in 1909, Holmes succeeded him, resigning his position from the Burlington Magazine. At the National Portrait Gallery, his artists’ skills at rehanging the collection and we greatly admired. He resigned as Slade Professor in 1910, publishing a second group of formerly Slade lectures as Notes on the Art of Rembrandt in 1911. Following the retirement of Charles Holroyd from the National Gallery in 1916, Holmes reluctantly accepted the director position. Acquisitions at the National Gallery were subject to a review board of amateurs; even one member alone could negate a selection. Holmes worked within this arrangement as best he could. He continued to fundamentally change the museum for public access, including reorganizing the photograph and publications departments. He personally launched an Illustrated Guide to the National Gallery in 1921 to interest laity. The same year he was knighted. New catalogs on Old Masters and Modern Art in the National Gallery appeared between 1923 and 1927. He contributed an essay to the 60th birthday Festschrift of Max J. Friedländer in 1927. In 1928 Holmes retired from the National Gallery, testifying about the frustrations with the acquisitions vetting process at the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries the same year. He was elected an honorary fellow of Brasenose College in 1931. Holmes wrote an autobiography, Self and Partners in 1936, the year of his death. His grandfather was the antiquary John Holmes (1800-1854) and his uncle, Sir Richard Holmes (1835-1911), librarian at Windsor Castle. Holmes’ approach to art history was as that an artist. He focused on the artist’s materials, such as his “Leonardo da Vinci” (1919), An Introduction to Italian Painting (1929), and A Grammar of the Arts (1931). His administrative abilities, honed from his early years in the publishing field, brought Museum publications to a higher standard.
Selected Bibliography
Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1902; Notes on the Post-impressionist Painters, Grafton Galleries, 1910-11. London: Chatto & Windus, 1909; The National Gallery: Italian Schools. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1923; The National Gallery: the Netherlands, Germany, Spain. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1925; “Three Early Italian Frescos.” Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer: Zum 60. Geburtstag. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann 1927, pp. 209-212; The National Gallery: France and England. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1927;and Tatlock, Robert Rattray, and Tyler, R. Spanish Art: an Introductory Review of Architecture, Painting, Sculpture. London: 1927.
Sources
Holmes, Charles J. Self and Partners (Mostly Self): Being the Reminiscences of C. J. Holmes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936; [obituaries:] Baker, C. H. Collins. “Sir Charles Holmes.” Burlington Magazine 70, no. 407 (February 1937): 93-94; Child, Harold. “Sir Charles Holmes: An Appreciation.” Burlington Magazine 70, no. 406 (January1937): 3-4; “Sir Charles Holmes Landscape Painter And Art Critic.” The Times (London) December 08, 1936, p. 11.
Citation
"Holmes, C. J., Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/holmesc/.
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Burlington Magazine co-editor and director, National Gallery, London; painter. Holmes was the sone of Charles Rivington Holmes (d. 1873), a clergyman, and Mary Susan Dickson. Holmes attended Eton College beginning in 1883, and then won a
Subject Area(s): Baroque, catalogues raisonnés, prints (visual works), and Renaissance
Overview
Cataloger of major corpus of Renaissance and Baroque prints. Hollstein was a major dealer in prints and drawings in Berlin before World War II. With the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, Hollstein, a Jew, was forced to take refuge in Amsterdam. He was given a permanent seat in the print room (Rijksprentenkabinet) of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, where he set about compiling an index and catalog of known examples of prints. He based his corpus on examples from the collection and his own extensive knowledge and business notes. He published his first series, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts beginning in 1949 (in English), with forwards by J. G. van Gelder and Max J. Friedländer. A second series, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, began appearing in 1954. Hollstein published fourteen volumes of Dutch and Flemish Etchings until his death. The Director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet, Karel G. Boon, assumed the responsibility of publishing the remaining original set. Hollstein modeled his catalog on the catalogs of the peintre-graveur, the “painter-engravers,” i.e., printers who cut their own works, as distinct from those engraved by professional engravers. Although he incorporated other engravers, too, his volumes gave the work of secondary engravers considerably less attention. His work was also criticized for neglecting cartography prints, history prints, and prints created for books, which considered part of the “minor arts.” He did not consult the prints or the various print states in other collections. To rectify this, his works were re-edited by subsequent editors and issued in additions known as the “New Hollstein.” His accomplishment, like that of Adam von Bartsch and others, remains the foundation for print study.
Selected Bibliography
Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700. 36 vols. Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1949- [later years published by Van Gendt, Rosendaal: Koninklijke van Poll]; German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400-1700. 65 vols. Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1954-
Sources
Veldman, Ilja M. “Forward.” The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700; pt. 1. Maarteen van Heemskerck . vol. 1 Roosendaal, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Van Poll/Rijksprentenkabinet, 1993, pp. 10-
Citation
"Hollstein, F. W. H.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hollsteinf/.
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Cataloger of major corpus of Renaissance and Baroque prints. Hollstein was a major dealer in prints and drawings in Berlin before World War II. With the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, Hollstein, a Jew, was forced to take refuge in Amsterdam. He
Place Born: Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, England, UK
Place Died: Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)
Career(s): educators
Overview
Courtauld Institute of Art medievalist. Hohler born into a wealthy family. He engaged in the privileged pursuits of hunting and riding as well as in education. He was educated at Eton and at New College, Oxford, initially studying archaeology before taking a degree in Modern History in 1938. A year later he married his first wife, Jane (divorced 1961). When World War II broke out, Hohler joined the Royal Corps of Signals and was posted to the Combined Intelligence Center in Iraq. He became fascinated by the Middle East both its pleasure pursuits of horse riding and its history. He remained there after the war to improve his Arabic in hopes of joining the diplomatic service after the war. In 1947 he returned without prospects for employment in the depressed post-war years. Hohler’s professor at Oxford, T. S. R. Boase, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art who had announced his retirement, suggested Hohler to his successor, Anthony Blunt. Boase prevailed upon Blunt to make Hohler a Reader at the Courtauld, though Hohler had had little experience in art history outside amateur excavation at Notley Priory. Blunt, who was still clandestinely spying for the Soviet Union, could not have been more dissimilar than the anarchic right-wing Hohler, but, as Peter Kidson observed, the appointment was extremely shrewd. Hohler was a product of the conservative Oxford history school, obsessed by primary Latin sources and a vision of history as moved predominantly by the nobility. His appointment balanced the staff of the Courtauld at a critical time when the primarily German-educated scholars were changing the traditional face the British art-history from connoisseurship to a scholarship based upon theory and research. Hohler remained at the Courtauld the rest of his life, working on a dissertation– never completed–on the pilgrimage church of St. Gilles-du-Gard. Hohler published little but did contribute to the published study of the relics of St. Cuthbert, as well as a work on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago da Compostela and on Stavanger Cathedral. He also contributed a great deal to liturgical scholarship and was a member of the Henry Bradshaw Society, a group founded in 1890 to publish editions of rare liturgical texts. He retired to Oslo in 1979, where he maintained an extensive correspondence with his former pupils. His second wife was Erla Hohler. Of independent means and a bon vivant, his reputed final words were: “I think it’s about time for a whisky”.Hohler was one of a group of post-war scholars who shaped the Courtauld Institute into the most influential centre of art-historical study in the English-speaking world. Hohler’s reputation as a teacher derived from a broad range of antiquarian knowledge innovative approach to art historical problems. Methodologically Hohler differed from newer-age medievalists who based their research on intensive study of individual monuments, such as Kenneth John Conant, whom Julian Gardner described as one of Hohler’s bêtes noires). Hohler looked at medieval art through the eyes of the patrons for whom it was made rather than those of the craftsmen who created it (Kidson). His students at the University of London included Andrew Martindale and Neil Stratford.
Selected Bibliography
[festschrift] The Vanishing Past: Studies of Medieval Art, Liturgy and Metrology Presented to Christopher Hohler. Borg, Alan, and Martindale, Andrew, eds. Oxford: B.A.R., 1981.
Sources
Kidson, Peter. “A Short History of the Courtauld Institute of Art.” Courtauld Institute of Art (webpage) http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/history; [obituaries:] Borg, Alan. The Independent (London), February 19, 1997, p.16, The Times (London). March 10, 1997; Gardner, Julian. “Andrew Martindale (1932-1995).” Burlington Magazine 137, No. 1109 (August 1995), p. 517.
Citation
"Hohler, Christopher." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hohlerc/.
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Courtauld Institute of Art medievalist. Hohler born into a wealthy family. He engaged in the privileged pursuits of hunting and riding as well as in education. He was educated at Eton and at New College, Oxford, initially studying archaeology befo
Subject Area(s): connoisseurship, Dutch (culture or style), painting (visual works), and seventeenth century (dates CE)
Career(s): art collectors
Overview
Art historian, art collector, expert and connoisseur; specialized in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. After finishing his Gymnasium education in Coburg, Germany, Hofstede de Groot briefly studied Art History in Leipzig. The death his father, a professor in Groningen, forced Hofstede de Groot to return to Groningen, where he altered his studies to Classics. Later he transferred to Leiden, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree. In 1889 he moved to Leipzig and studied Art History, where, encouraged by Abraham Bredius, he specialized in Dutch seventeenth century painting. In 1891 he obtained a doctorate in Art History, with a dissertation on Houbraken’s Groote Schouburgh. During his study he became a temporary assistant at the Print room in Dresden. In 1891 Bredius, then director at the Mauritshuis, invited him to became his assistant director. The relationship was rancorous, however, with the petty Bredius leaking stories of their disputes to the newspapers. One of the results of their collaboration was the Mauritshuis Catalog, published in 1895. The next year, Hofstede de Groot left the Mauritshuis to become director of the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam (National Print Cabinet) in Amsterdam, but resigned after two years, discouraged by the authoritarian administrative style of the head of the Directory of the Department of Arts and Sciences of the Ministry of the Interior, Victor Eugène Louis de Stuers (1843-1916). From this moment, Hofstede de Groot worked as an independent art historian, researcher and connoisseur, earning a livelihood as a publisher and art expert, living in Amsterdam. He published most frequently in Oud Holland and in the Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft. He wrote more than seventy biographies of Dutch painters for biographical dictionary of Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker. He traveled extensively in Europe to study private and public collections of Dutch art. He used his research touring to assemble an impressive personal collection of paintings, drawings, medals and object d’art. At the request of the U.S. millionaire art collector Peter Widener (1834/6-1915) he went to America. Together with the director of the Berlin Museum, Wilhelm Bode, he was the author of eight volumes on Rembrandt paintings, which appeared between 1897 and 1904 (1905?). In 1906, the year of the Rembrandt Commemoration, he edited Die Urkunden über Rembrandt, and the first catalog of Rembrandt drawings. In the same year he was awarded, together with four other Rembrandt scholars (Wilhelm Bode, Abraham Bredius, Jan Veth, and Émile Michel), a doctorate honoris causa at the University of Amsterdam. His most important work appeared between 1907 and 1928 in ten volumes: Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, a revision of John Smith‘s Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, (1829-1837). Hofstede de Groot changed the makeup of Smith’s catalog, omitting Flemish and French painters and replacing them with more Dutch artists. The Werke benefited from the collaboration a number of mainly German art historians: Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner, Kurt Freise, Kurt Erasmus, Eduard Plietzsch, Karl Lilienfeld, Heinrich Wichmann, Otto Hirschmann, Hans Kauffmann, Wolfgang Stechow, Kurt Bauch, and Elisabeth Neurdenburg, only the latter of whom was Dutch. In 1928 Horst Gerson, then still a student, became his assistant. In 1907 Hofstede de Groot was offered a prestigious professorship in Art History in Leiden. However, he declined the associate professorship, insisting that the city where Rembrandt was born deserved a full professor. Wilhelm Martin subsequently accepted the position. In the same year, however, a full professorship for Art History was established at the University of Utrecht, the first in The Netherlands, of which Willem Vogelsang was the first appointment. As a Rembrandt scholar, Hofstede de Groot was involved in the question of the authenticity of the Rembrandt oeuvre. After the controversial publication of Valentiner’s Wiedergefundene Gemälde, in 1921, Hofstede de Groot vehemently defended Valentiner’s number of 690 authentic Rembrandts against scholars like Martin and Bredius, who doubted a number of attributions (Bredius’ The Paintings of Rembrandt, 1935, put the number of paintings at 630). In addition to his work as publisher and researcher, Hofstede de Groot engaged himself in various responsibilities. In 1916, he became a member of the Rijks Monumentencommissie (State Commission for Monuments) and collaborated in the making of the “provisional lists” of monuments all over the country. He also participated in the development of museum management, as a member of different advisory committees. The inflexibility of his character more than once caused problems with people with whom he had to collaborate. In 1919, when the Rijkscommisie voor het Museumwezen (State Commission for Museum Affairs) was set up, Hofstede de Groot became its first secretary. But his inability to embrace modern notions about art caused an almost immediate resignation. At the end of his life, Hofstede de Groot had gathered a huge collection of photographs and reproductions of works of art, documents and thousands of museum-, exposition- and auction-catalogs. His collection was (and still is) accessible to students and researchers. In 1926 he donated this important archive to the State of The Netherlands and in this way he can be considered the founder of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague, which was opened in 1932 and where other collections of documentation found their destination. He bequeathed his collection of drawings to the city of Groningen, while the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet acquired 65 Rembrandt drawings. He donated his Italian medals to the municipal Museum of The Hague. Smaller donations also went to the museums of Haarlem and Leiden. But old animosities remained even after his death. Bredius, so reviled the memory of Hofstede de Groot, that he refused to speak to the current head of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie except outside the building that housed his papers. Methodologically Hofstede de Groot depended strongly upon stylistic analysis and an intuitive eye to authorize his art work. Horst Gerson, in his memorial to Wolfgang Stechow, asserted that Hofstede de Groot frequently ignored iconography in favor stylistic judgments.
Selected Bibliography
For a complete list, compiled by H. Gerson, see: Handelingen (as mentioned above): 126-155; Arnold Houbraken in seiner Bedeutung für die holländische Kunstgeschichte. Zugleich eine Quellenkritik der Houbrakenschen Groote Schouburgh. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1891; Arnold Houbraken und seine Groote Schouburgh kritisch beleuchtet. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1893; Die holländische Kritik der jetzigen Rembrandt-forschung und neuest wiedergefundene Rembrandtbilder. Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-anstalt, 1922; Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts: nach dem Muster John Smith’s catalogue raisonné. Assisted by O. Hirschmann, W. Stechow and K. Bauch. 10 vols. Esslingen am Neckar: Paul Neff Verlag, 1907-1928; Reprint: Teaneck, NJ: Somerset House, 1976; A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century: based on the Work of John Smith. 8 vols. Translated and edited by Edward G. Hawke. London: Macmillan (volumes 9 and 10 remain untranslated).
Sources
Lugt, Frits. “History of Art.” in Barnouw, A. J. and Landheer, B., eds. The Contribution of Holland to the Sciences. New York: Querido, 1943, pp.187-90, 210; Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953, p. 85, mentioned; Van Gelder, H.E. in Handelingen van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden en Levensberichten harer afgestorven medeleden 1930-1931. Levensberichten: 99-125, English, F.M. Daendels-Wilson, see Van Gelder, H.E. “Dr Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930)” in Bolten, J. Dutch Drawings from the Collection of Dr C. Hofstede de Groot. Introduction and Critical Catalogue [Groninger Museum voor Stad en Lande] Utrecht: A. Oosthoek’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., 1967: 17-36; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 47 mentioned; [discussion of his methodology] Gerson, Horst, “Wolfgang Stechow,” Print Review 5 (1975): 74-77; Ekkart, R.E.O. in J.Charité (ed.) Biografisch woordenboek van Nederland, 1.The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1979: pp. 248-249; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 497; Halbertsma, Marlite. “Die Kunstgeschichte in den Deutschsprachigen Ländern und den Niederlanden 1764-1933: ein überblick” in Halbertsma, Marlite/Zijlmans, Kitty (eds.) Gesichtspunkte. Kunstgeschichte heute. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1995: 56-57; Ekkart, R.E.O. “Grondleggers van het kunsthistorisch apparaat” in Hecht, Peter; Hoogenboom, Annemieke; Stolwijk, Chris (eds.) Kunstgeschiedenis in Nederland. Negen opstellen. Amsterdam:Prometheus, 1998: 9-24, in particular 15-21; Dolnick, Edward. “Bredius.” in The Forger’s Spell. New York: Harper, 2008, p. 122; [obituaries:] Van Gelder, H.E. in Jaarboek Die Haghe (1931): 1-5; Vogelsang, W. in Oudheidkundig Jaarboek (= 3e serie of the Bulletin van den Nederlandschen Oudheidkundigen Bond 10 (1930): 4-9.
Contributors: Monique Daniels
Citation
Monique Daniels. "Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hofstededegrootc/.
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Art historian, art collector, expert and connoisseur; specialized in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. After finishing his Gymnasium education in Coburg, Germany, Hofstede de Groot briefly studied Art History in Leipzig. The death his father, a
Subject Area(s): art theory, symbolism (artistic concept), and Symbolist
Overview
One of the founders of the 20th-century re-evaluation of the Symbolist movement in art. He issued a catalogue raisonné of the graphic work of Caspar David Friedrich in 1978.
Selected Bibliography
Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende: Voraussetzungen, Erscheinungsformen, Bedeutungen. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1965; Caspar David Friedrich: das gesamte graphische Werk. Herrsching: Manfred Pawlak, 1978; Jugendstil: Druckkunst. Wiesbaden: R. Löwit, 1968, English, Art Nouveau: Prints, Illustrations and Posters. New York: Greenwich House, 1984;
Citation
"Hofstätter, Hans Hellmut." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hofstatterh/.
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One of the founders of the 20th-century re-evaluation of the Symbolist movement in art. He issued a catalogue raisonné of the graphic work of Caspar David Friedrich in 1978.
