Art Historians

Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von

Gender: male

Date Born: c. 1712-1713

Date Died: 1780

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Connoisseur, esthetician and collector. Influential author during the Enlightenment for art historians (J. von Schlosser, 1924)

Selected Bibliography

Lettre à un amateur de la peinture. Dresden, 1755. Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey. 2 vols. Leipzig, J. Wendlern, 1762.

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 138-139.

Connoisseur, esthetician and collector. Influential author during the Enlightenment for art historians (J. von Schlosser, 1924)

Haftmann, Werner

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

**Image Credit:** Deutsches Historiches Museum

Full Name: Haftmann, Werner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1999

Place Born: Poland

Place Died: Waakirchen, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and twentieth century (dates CE)

Overview

Museum director and author of major 20th-century art survey. He was born in Glowno, Prussia which is present day Poland. Haftmann studied art history, philosophy and archeology at the universities in Göttingen and Berlin between 1932-36. In 1935 he began contributing to the journal Art and Nation. These publications were soon banned by the Nazis, however, and Haftmann worked from 1936 onward at the Kunsthistorisches Insitut (Art History Institute) in Florence where studied the cultural history of the early Italian Renaissance. During World War II he served in the German army from 1940 until he was captured and interred. Between 1950-55 he was a lecturer at the Staatlichen Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg. In 1950 he published a book on Paul Klee, Paul Klee: Wege bildnerischen Denkens, appearing in English in 1958 as Paul Klee: The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. His most famous work was the two-volume Malerei im 20. Jahrhunderts in 1954 appearing in English as in 1960 as Painting in the Twentieth Century. He served as a committee member for the first three Documenta exhibitions. Haftmann was the director of the National Gallery in Berlin in 1967. He retired in 1974.

Selected Bibliography

Abstract Art Since 1945. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, [published in the United States as, Art Since Mid-Century. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971; and Gohr, Siegfried. E. W. Nay, a Retrospective. Cologne: DuMont, 1990; Emil Nolde. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1959; Emil Nolde: ungemalte Bilder, Aquarelle und ‘Worte am Rande.’ Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg 1963, English, Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures. New York: Praeger, 1965; and Hentzen, Alfred and Lieberman, William S, and Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff. German Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art/City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri/Simon and Schuster, 1957; [Chagall, Marc:] Gouachen, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1975, English, Gouaches, Drawings, Watercolors. New York: Abrams, 1984; Paul Klee: Wege bildnerischen Denkens. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1950, English, [Paul Klee:] The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1958; Jacques Lipchitz: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen, 1911-1961. Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1970; Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1954, English, Painting in the Twentieth Century. 2 vols. New York : Praeger, 1960; and Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Roché, Henri-Pierre. Wols: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1965; and Roland, Berthold. Verfemte Kunst: bildende Künstler der inneren und äusseren Emigration in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Cologne: DuMont, 1986.

Sources

Haftmann, Werner. Die Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin. Berlin: Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, 1969; Stonard, John Paul. Art and National Reconstruction in Germany 1945-55. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2004, p. 262.

Haenel, Erich

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Haenel, Erich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1875

Date Died: 1940

Home Country/ies: Germany

Institution(s): Dresdner Historischen Museum

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Spätgotik in Renaissance. Stuttgart, 1899.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 285

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Haendecker, Berthold

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Haendecker, Berthold

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Die französich-deutsch-niederlandish Einfluß auf die italienische Kunst von etwas 1200 bis etwa 1650. Strasbourg, 1925.

Hadjinicolaou, Nicos

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

**Image Credit:** Bodossaki Lectures on Demand

Full Name: Hadjinicolaou, Nicos

Gender: male

Date Born: 1938

Place Born: Salonika, Region of Central Macedonia, Greece

Home Country/ies: Greece

Subject Area(s): Marxism, Renaissance, Spanish (culture or style), and Spanish Renaissance-Baroque styles

Career(s): educators

Overview

Art historian of Marxist-methodology and historian of visual ideology; El Greco scholar and Professor, El Greco Centre, Institute of Mediterranean Studies, Rethymnon, Crete. Hadjinicolaou studied art history at the Universities of Berlin, Freiberg and Munich. In 1965, he moved to Paris where he continued study under Pierre Francastel, the philosopher and the director of the école pratique des hautes études, Lucien Goldmann (1913-1970) and the historian Pierre Vilar (1906-2003). His thesis, written for a class on “La lutte des classes en France dans la production d’images de l’année 1830,” became his 1973 book Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes. Its English translation Art History and Class Struggle,1978, burst on the academic scene as one of the clearest Marxist counter-approaches to the traditional practice of art history. Hadjinicolaou had written it as such, pointed, he wrote, to address the crisis in teaching art history in universities. He became Professor, El Greco Centre, Institute of Mediterranean Studies, Rethymnon, Crete. His class-view of art history moderated only slightly in the intervening years. His 1999 essay for an exhibition on El Greco was, “El Greco Invested with Nationalist Ideologies.” Art History and Class Struggle attacked the formalist approach to art history, fostered by the 19th-century writing of Théophile Gautier and the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867), which Hadjinicolaou characterized as still the dominant approach in the 1970s. He asserted that the production of images was an aspect of class ideology and that art history should be approached from that position. This is a direct application of György Lukács (1885-1971) History and Class Consciousness. He has also cited the works of Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and Frederick Antal as influential. His work was criticized by Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920-2005) in her 1977 feminist book, Histoire de lart et lutte des sexes, contending that gender struggle preceded class struggle.

Selected Bibliography

Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes. Paris: F. Maspero, 1973, English, Art History and Class Struggle. London: Pluto Press, 1978; El Greco. Rethymnon: Crete University Press/New Rochelle, NY: Orpheus, 1990, specifically, vol. 1. : Documents on his Life and Work, vol. 2. El Greco: Byzantium and Italy. 1990, vol. 3. El Greco: Works in Spain, vol. 4. El Greco: Altarpieces in Spanish Churches. Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 1999; El Greco in Italy and Italian art: Proceedings of the Iinternational Symposium, Rethymnon, Crete, 22-24 September 1995. Rethymnon: University of Crete, 1999.

Sources

de Zurko, Edward R. [Review of Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes]. Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 466-467; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 141-142; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 339-340.

Hackenbroch, Yvonne

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Hackenbroch, Yvonne

Other Names:

Yvonne Hackenbroch

Gender: female

Date Born: 27 April 1912

Date Died: 07 September 2012

Place Born: Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): costume (mode of fashion), jewelry, and Renaissance

Career(s): curators

Overview

British Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, Renaissance jewelry specialist. Yvonne Hackenbroch was born into a religious, Jewish middle-class family of intellectual and artistic interests. Her father, Zacharias M. Hackenbroch (1884-1937), was an art dealer and her mother, Clementine Schwarzschild Hackenbroch (1888-1984), a descendent of the art dealer/expert Selig Goldschmidt (1795-1863). The family summered in the Medieval town of Miltenburg. Hackenbroch was fluent in French, English, German (the family languages) as well as Italian by the end of her childhood. Her earliest art writing began when her father and other dealers purchased the Guelph Treasures and she wrote a booklet on the collection. She studied art history at Munich University both as an undergraduate and post graduate under Hans Jantzen and Wilhelm Pinder. The rise of Nazism in Germany made it impossible for Jews to attend universities or hold academic positions; Hackenbroch was the last Jew to gain a doctorate in Munich in December 1936. Her thesis, written under Jantzen, was on the topic of Italian medieval enamels. She traveled to Italy, but at her father’s death in 1937, immigrated to London where her older sister (and later her mother) lived. Hackenbroch took a position with the British Museum during World War II, participating in the excavation and cataloging of the Sutton Hoo treasure. She was assigned as part of the detail to pack up and safely store the Museum’s collection. Following the War, when Viscount Lee donated a Renaissance collection to Canada in appreciation of its assistance in the War, Hackenbroch acted on behalf of the British Government to expertise it in Toronto. Three years later she moved to New York and later became an American citizen. In New York she worked for Judge Irwin Untermyer, a Trustee and benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the donation of his gift of Renaissance objects, Hackenbroch was made a curator cataloging the collection. She published her work in catalogs and articles. In 1979 her book Renaissance Jewellery was published to acclaim, still considered the seminal work on the subject. In New York she regularly hosted in her apartment parties to bring together experts and students. She retired from the Museum and moved to London where her family lived in 1987. The University of Munich honored her with a FestSchrift. In retirement she researched in the libraries of the Warburg Institute, the Courtauld Collection and the British Museum producing a book on Enseignes – Renaissance Hat Jewels in 1996. She died soon after her 100th birthday.

Selected Bibliography

[pending] [dissertation:] Italienisches Email des frühen Mittelalers. Munich, 1936, published, 1938.

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. 257-60; [personal correspondence, Alan Philipp, September 2012].

Haak, Bob

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Haak, Bob

Gender: male

Date Born: 1926

Date Died: 2005

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): Dutch (culture or style) and painting (visual works)

Overview

Rembrandt specialist; director Amsterdam Historical Museum. Haak was the son of Jurrian Haak and Henrietta van Eek. He attended the Amsterdam Montessori Lyceum between 1938 and 1944. In 1950 he married Annette van Heek. Between 1950 and 1954, he served as assistant to the art dealer D. A. Hoogendijk in Amsterdam. In 1954 Haak began his museum career as assistant in the department of paintings at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. In 1963, he obtained the position of chief curator at the Amsterdam Historical Museum, of which he was appointed director in 1975. In 1956 Haak was involved in the Rembrandt exhibition in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. He then realized that the authenticity of a number of the displayed works was disputable, and that Rembrandt’s oeuvre was in need of revision. Several years later this conviction led to the creation of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). Launched in 1968, this project aimed at a comprehensive study of all of Rembrandt’s paintings. It was carried out in cooperation with J. G. van Gelder, J. A. Emmens, Josua Bruyn, Simon H. Levie, and Pieter J. J. van Thiel. In the same year his impressive monograph on Rembrandt appeared, Rembrandt, zijn leven, zijn werk, zijn tijd (Rembrandt; His Life, His Work, His Time) Another Rembrandt scholar, Horst Gerson, in his revision of the 1935 catalog by Abraham Bredius, published in 1969, independently proposed a drastic reduction of the master’s paintings. The approach of the Rembrandt team was even more drastic and led to further reductions. The findings of the first RRP volumes, published between 1982 and 1989, aroused serious debate and controversies in the art world. In 1993, Haak withdrew from the RRP, along with Josua Bruyn, Simon H. Levie, and Pieter J. J. van Thiel. They left the further organization of the project to their fellow team member Ernst van de Wetering, who advocated a different approach. In 1984, Haak published a broad study on seventeenth-century painting with The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. Acclaimed as the best art history book of the year, it won the 1985 Karel Van Mander Prize. In 1992, Haak received an honorary degree from the University of Amsterdam. With his Golden Age Haak provided a very readable overview of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, without limiting himself to the most well-known masters. He regarded his work as a follow up to the 1935-36 study by Wilhelm Martin, De Hollandsche schilderkunst in de zeventiende eeuw, which likewise paid attention to the broader art scene. For his iconological interpretations Haak relied on the research of the Utrecht professors J. A. Emmens and Eddy de Jongh. While he never obtained a university degree in art history, Haak considered the above mentioned art dealer Hoogendijk to have been his first teacher in the field of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

Selected Bibliography

and van Schendel, A.F.E. Art Treasures of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. New York: Abrams, 1966; Rembrandt, zijn leven, zijn werk, zijn tijd. Amsterdam: Contact, 1968; Rembrandt: His Life, His Work, His Time. New-York: Abrams, 1969; Rembrandt Drawings. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1976; The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Abrams, 1984; Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S. H. and van Thiel, P. J. J. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. 3 vols. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982, 1986, and 1989.

Sources

Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S. H. and van Thiel, P. J. J. Letter, The Rembrandt Research Project The Burlington Magazine 135 (1993): 279; Grasman, Edward. The Rembrandt Research Project: reculer pour mieux sauter Oud Holland 113 (1999): 153-160; Contemporary Authors Online. Gale, 2003; Schwartz, Gary. Bob Haak (1926-2005) has passed away The CODART List, News of the day (19 May 2005).

Gustenberg, Kurt

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gustenberg, Kurt

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Sought to establish German origins of late Gothic in what he termed the “Sondergotik” style (1350-1550) of the Rhine and South German areas.

Selected Bibliography

Deutsche Sondergotik. Eine Untersuchung über der Wesender deutschen Baukunst in späten Mittelalter. Munich, 1913.

Sources

Bazin 285

Sought to establish German origins of late Gothic in what he termed the “Sondergotik” style (1350-1550) of the Rhine and South German areas.

Gurlitt, Cornelius

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gurlitt, Cornelius

Other Names:

Cornelius Gurlitt

Gender: male

Date Born: 01 January 1850

Date Died: 25 March 1938

Place Born: Nischwitz bei Wurzen, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Baroque, and sculpture (visual works)

Institution(s): Technische Hochschule Berlin

Overview

Architect and seminal architectural historian for the Baroque. Gurlitt hailed from an illustrious creative family of assimilated Jews. He was named for his great uncle, the well-known composer [Gustav] Cornelius Gurlitt (1820-1901). His father was Louis Gurlitt (1812-1879), a Danish/German landscape painter and his mother Elisabeth Lewald (Gurlitt), sister of the writer Fanny Lewald (1811-1889). The conductor and composer Manfred Gurlitt (1890-1972) was also a relative. The younger Gurlitt was initially apprenticed to a carpenter before studying architecture at the Berliner Bauakademie and between 1869-1872 at the Polytechnikum in Stuttgart were he studied esthetics, under Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) and art history under Wilhelm Lübke. He became a practicing architect in 1871. However he abandoned this to study art history, under Anton Springer in Leipzig. After seeing the Baroque architecture in Dresden, he realized how poor contemporary sources for Baroque art were. Appreciation for the baroque was at a low ebb; the style was almost universally regarded as decadent since the enlightenment writings of Francesco Milizia. He toured Prague and Berlin studying additional examples of art of the period. Gurlitt joined the staff of the Dresden Kunstgewerbemuseum in 1879. Alwin Schultz commissioned Gurlitt to write the Baroque sections for the updating of Geschichte der bildenden Künste (History of the Pictorial Arts) left unfinished at the death of Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase. In 1883 Gurlitt began publishing his survey of Baroque decorative arts in Germany, Das barock- und rococo-Ornament Deutschlands. To study the original Baroque examples, Gurlitt traveled to Italy where even there scholars greeted him with suspicion. The humble draughtsman he employed to make renderings refused to work on the art of that period. Even Lübke, his former teacher, cautioned him not to squander his time on “Baroque folly.” Beginning in 1886, Gurlitt began publishing his survey of Baroque art (Low Countries, France and England in 1886, Italy in 1887, and Germany in 1889) as part of the Geschichte der Baukunst series begun by Franz Kugler, a series in the process of being revised as Geschichte der neuren Baukunst. Gurlitt lectured at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) Charlottenburg [Berlin] beginning in 1889. In 1893 he succeeded the late Richard Steche as associate professor professor of history at the practical arts. Commensurate with his duties was the continuation of the inventory of the monuments of Saxony. He was promoted to full professor in 1899 where the following year he expanded the program to allow architectural students to achieve Ph.D’s. similar to his own situation. As such, Gurlitt supervised the doctoral thesis of one of the most eminent architect/architectural historians, Hermann Muthesius.

From 1902 Gurlitt lectured on urban planning, among the first at technical universities. As an editor of Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit (Urban architecture in previous and modern times) he helped get Frühlicht, a radical architectural magazine by the architectural visionary Bruno Taut (1880-1938), published. Gurlitt initially embraced Nazi ideology with the rise of Hitler in 1933. However, the government declared him of Jewish ancestry. An investigation after his death in 1938 determine this to be false and he was buried in the Johannisfriedhof (cemetery) in Dresden. Gurlitt wrote over 90 books and hundreds of articles on all aspects of architecture, art, urban planning and politics. A street in south Dresden is named after him. His brother, Fritz Gurlitt (1854-1893), was a Berlin gallery dealer who represented Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880), among others.

Gurlitt’s work marks the beginning of a reevaluation of the Baroque and Rococo in art history. A full treatment of the period came with August Schmarsow in 1887, whose book Barock und Rokoko covered the entire spectrum of baroque art and not just architecture. Even after Gurlitt’s publications on the Baroque, the twenty-four year old Heinrich Wölfflin in his study, Renaissance und Barock, 1888, had condemned the full Baroque style (Watkin). Aloïs Riegl began lecturing on the Baroque in 1894 and 1895, though he criticized Gurlitt’s studies for avoiding historical background and for defining the term “Baroque” insufficiently. Gurlitt’s ideas reject the classicism standard Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) and other architects Schinkel espoused. In his memoirs, Gurlitt wrote that he had always considered himself more an architect than an architectural historian, confiding in Jahn’s biographical profile that he feared becoming an academic. Like most pioneers, his appreciation had limitations; he found the work of the great baroque architect Borromini lacking in “intrinsic value.” Other advisees of dissertations included Walther Leopold.

Selected Bibliography

Das barock- und rococo-Ornament Deutschlands. 4 vols. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1883-1889; [the following three books are also part of the larger Geschichte der neuren Baukunst series:] Geschichte des Barockstiles, des Rococo, und des Klassicismus in Belgien, Holland, Frankreich, England. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1886, (Geschichte der neuren Baukunst vol. 5, section 1); Geschichte des Barockstiles in Italien. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1887, (Geschichte der neuren Baukunst vol 5, section 2, part 1); Geschichte des Barokstiles und des Rococo in Deutschland. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubart, 1889, (Geschichte der neuren Baukunst vol. 5., section 2, part. 2); August der Starke, ein Furstenleben aus der zeit des deutschen Barock. Dresden: Im Sibyllem-Verlag, 1924.

Sources

“Cornelius Gurlitt.” in Jahn, Johannes, ed. Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924, pp. 1-32; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 174, 284; Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980, p. 11; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 135-137; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 136-137; Schrön, Barbara. Cornelius Gurlitt: Versuch einer biographischen und fachgeschichtlichen Darstellung seiner Persönlichkeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seines Wirkens als Kunsthistoriker, Hochschullehrer und Denkmalpfleger. [unpublished dissertation], Leipig, 1987; Paul, Jürgen. Cornelius Gurlitt: ein Leben für Architektur, Kunstgeschichte, Denkmalpflege und Städtebau. Dresden: Hellerau, 2003; Lienert, Matthias, and Gülck, Oliver. Cornelius Gurlitt (1850 bis 1938): sechs Jahrzehnte Zeit- und Familiengeschichte in Briefen. Dresden: Thelem, 2008.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Gunnis, Rupert

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Gunnis, Rupert

Other Names:

Rupert Forbes Gunnis

Gender: male

Date Born: 1899

Date Died: 1965

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Reading, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Amateur scholar of British sculpture and collector; sculpture dictionary author. Gunnis was the son of Francis George Gunnis (1862-1932), a merchant, and Ivy Marion Streatfeild (Gunnis) (1869-1960). As a boy, he was fascinated by church monuments. After graduating from Eton in 1916, he worked as the secretary to the last commissioner of the British South Africa Company (1923), and then entered the colonial (foreign) civil service. He was the private secretary to the governors of Uganda (1923-1926) and then Cyprus (1926-1932). In 1932 he became inspector of antiquities for the Cyprus Museum, writing Historic Cyprus: a Guide to its Towns and Villages, Monasteries and Castles (1936). He returned to England during the World War II (1939) where he was left a small fortune at the death of his aunt, the widow of General Sir Francis Lloyd. He bought Hungershall Lodge, a mansion in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where he and his life partner, then referred to as his “Cypriot manservant,” Namuk Kemal, lived in style. Gunnis began collecting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English sculpture. Gunnis began assiduously compiling data on sculpture around 1942, visiting churches, libraries, and archives throughout Britain. He intended his index to be part of a projected book, Dictionary of British sculptors in England by Katharine Esdaile. Apparently Esdaile suggested Gunnis widen his research to include sculptors from the British Reformation to the Great Exhibition. During these years, Gunnis worked in tandem with another art-dictionary compiler, Howard Montagu Colvin; Colvin on a biographical dictionary of architects. The two shared Gunnis’ limousine on jaunts to archives throughout Britain. Esdaile died without completing her project. Gunnis published his Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851 in 1953 and Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary of English Architects 1660-1840 appeared in 1954. Gunnis compiled a revised edition in 1964, which was published posthumously in 1968. He also collaborated with Margaret Whinney on a catalogue, The Collection of Models at University College by John Flaxman (1967). He died in the vicinity of Reading, England, UK of a heart attack at age 66 and is buried in the Streatfeild Mausoleum in Chiddingstone churchyard, Kent. Most of his sculpture collection was bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Gunnis’s Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 was…the work of a connoisseur and collector attempting to garner the lives and works of British sculptors much as Colvin was doing at the same time for English architects.” (Summerson). Gunnis was, like Colvin, an “archives man” who insisted on documentation for his lists. Though the public quibbled with some attributions, Gunnis’ work stood the test of time. His approach to the objects was one of connoisseurship.

Selected Bibliography

Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851. London: Odhams Press, 1953; and Whinney, Margaret. The Collection of Models by John Flaxman, R.A. at University College London. London: Athlone P., 1967.

Sources

Knox, Tim. “Portrait of a Collector: Rupert Gunnis at Hungershall Lodge and his Bequest to the Victoria and Albert Museum.” Sculpture Journal 2 (1998): 85-96; Summerson, John. “Margaret Dickens Whinney, 1894-1975.” Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 640; [obituaries:] “Mr Rupert Gunnis.” Times (London) August 2, 1965, p. 10; Whinney, Margaret. “Rupert Gunnis.” Burlington Magazine 107, no. 753. (December 1965): 634.

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