Art Historians

Condit, Carl W.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Condit, Carl W.

Other Names:

Carl Condit

Gender: male

Date Born: 29 September 1914

Date Died: 04 January 1997

Place Born: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA

Place Died: Evanston, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Americanist architectural historian of the skyscraper. Condit was the son of Arthur Thomas and Gertrude Pletz (Condit). His father was employed as a teacher in Cincinnati. After attending Walnut Hills High School in the city he entered Purdue University in Indiana studying Mechanical Engineering. He graduated with a BS in that subject in 1936. Condit’s interests were stronger in the humanities, however and he returned to Cincinnati and the University there to study English literature. He awarded his A. M. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1941. His dissertation topic was on Geoffrey Chaucer. While working on his graduate degrees he taught English at Cincinnati University. With the outbreak of World War II, Condit taught in the U.S. Army War Production School, Cincinnati, as a civilian instructor in mathematics and mechanics, 1941-1942. He was thereafter appointed at the instructor level mathematics at the University, 1942-1944, marrying Isabel Marian Campbell, then employed as a teacher, in 1943. Condit worked for the New York Central Railroad in Cincinnati as an assistant design engineer in the building department, 1944-1945. At the conclusion of the War, he taught as an instructor of English at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1945-1946. His first tenure-track appointment was a Carnegie Institute of Technology (modern Carnegie-Mellon University), Pittsburgh, PA, as assistant professor in the humanities and social sciences in 1946. He rose to associate professor in 1947. By this time, Condit’s interest was on the phenomenon of the skyscraper’s roll in modern architecture. While a postdoctoral fellow University of Wisconsin for the 1951-1952 academic year, Condit issued his book on architecture, The Rise of the Skyscraper. He followed this with American Building Art: the Nineteenth Century in 1960, a book on the origins of American architecture. In 1964 Condit wrote his most important book, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Buildings in the Chicago Area, 1875 to 1925, examing the phenomenon of a city rebuilding itself (from the fire) into a specific genre of modern architecture. The book, however, somewhat overstated the contribution of Chicago the development of modern architecture. He was appointed full professor in 1966. In 1972 he returned to Northwestern as Professor of History, Art and Urban Affairs. Condit was named a member of advisory council, Smithsonian Institution, 1973-1978. In later years he admitted the prominence he’d given to Chicago in The Chicago School of Architecture had been too great. To counter this, he authored a book with New York University professor of architecture Sarah Landau, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 in 1996. Condit died after a brief illness at age 82. Condit had no formal training in architecture or architectural history. His architectural histories adopted a structural-view of building and social history. The Chicago School of Architecture was the first to term the architecture of the Chicago Loop a school. He characterized the big windows and steel framework construction as the beginning of modern architecture. But the book failed to take into account the advances in skyscraper architecture in New York. American Building became a staple of architectural history classes, frequently used a the textbook.

Selected Bibliography

The Rise of the Skyscraper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; American Building Art: the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960; The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Buildings in the Chicago area, 1875 to 1925.Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964; American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Settlements to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; and Landau, Sarah Bradford. Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Sources

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. 40 mentioned; Bey, Lee. “Architecture Expert leaves Towering Legacy.” Chicago Sun-Times January 12, 1997 p. 65; [obituaries:] Landau, Sarah Bradford. “Carl Wilbur Condit.” Society of Architectural Historians Newsletter 41 no. 4 (August 1997): 5; Vogel, Robert. “Carl W. Condit.” Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter 26 no.1 (Spring 1997): 9-11; “Carl W. Condit, NU Professor.” Chicago Sun-Times January 9, 1997, p. 57.

Conant, Kenneth John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

**Image Credit:** John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Full Name: Conant, Kenneth John

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1984

Place Born: Neenah, Winnebago, WI, USA

Place Died: Bedford, Calhoun, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): archaeology, architecture (object genre), Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Archaeologist-historian of medieval architecture, particularly of the monastery buildings at Cluny. Conant was the son of son of John F. Conant and Lucie Mickelsen (Conant). He grew up in the paper-producing town of Neenah, Wisconsin, entering Harvard University in 1911. While taking fine arts courses, he took an architecture course offered by Herbert Langford Warren, founder of the Harvard School of Architecture. Conant continued at Harvard after graduation, studying (practicing) architecture at the School. He received a fellowship for study at l’école des Chartes and école due Louvre under Marcel Aubert, despite the war in Europe. In 1917 with the United States’ entry in World War I, Conant enlisted in the 42nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force in the engineering corps. He was wounded in the second battle of the Marne in 1918. With a master’s degree in architecture, he joined the firm of Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, Boston, in 1919. During a 1920 summer trip to Europe, Conant encountered the Harvard medievalist A. Kingsley Porter. Porter’s charismatic enthusiasm for medieval architecture swayed Conant toward architectural history. Conant returned Harvard working as an instructor while writing his dissertation under Porter, The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in 1925. He married Marie Schneider in 1923 (later divorced). At Porter’s suggestion, Conant visited the site of the great monastery complex remains of Cluny in 1924. Cluny would be his life’s work. In order to learn archaeological techniques, he signed on to digs at Chichen-Itza in 1926 and then Pueblo Bonito in Mexico. Conant was appointed as a professor of architecture in the School of Architecture (not Fine Arts), where he remained teaching a heavy courseload throughout his life. His first Cluny excavation, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, was in 1927. Actual digging began in 1928, expanding in mission and scope with funds provided by the Medieval Society of America, concluding (with interruptions) only in 1950. The excitement Conant generated personally regarding his discoveries can partially be gauged in the reconstructed medieval courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum, created from casts of Conant’s finds in the 1930s. In 1933 at the 13th International Congress of the History of Art, Stockholm, he traveled with a group of medievalists including Richard Hamann, Hans R. Hahnloser and Paul Frankl, lead by Johnny Roosval, to see the discovery of the only gothic church still with its wooden arch scaffolding remaining (Frankl). He became a full professor in 1936. Conant’s Cluny work rankled many French scholars, in part because he insisted on Porter’s early dating of the capitals, and partially because he was a field archaeologist. Burgundian scholars, such as Jean Virey (1861-1953) and Charles Oursel (1876-1967), remained enthusiastic. Conant’s second interest was in eastern church architecture. He participated in the Kiev excavations of 1936-38 and converted to Orthodox Christianity. In 1940, many of his former students established the Society of Architectural Historians, citing him as inspiration. During World War II, Conant delivered one of the “public lectures on fine arts” at Johns Hopkins (published 1950) and the Wimmer lecture for 1947, “Benedictine Contributions to Church Architecture.” After Walter Gropius became head of the School of Architecture, history of architecture courses were no longer required, but Conant’s classes always remained filled. Conant retired in 1955 and the following year married Isabel Pope, a musicologist. In 1959 he published the volume on Romanesque architecture for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series (volume 13) and the same year, the citizens of Cluny named the street in front of the church “Rue K. J. Conant.” Cluny had become for Conant the consuming passion, the embodiment of all the important events of the Romanesque: the use of doorway sculpture, the synthesizing of the international style, and the first use of the pointed arch. After the 1968 Cluny: les églises et la maison du chef d’ordre Conant’s claims for the total primacy of Cluny as a monument began to be questioned more by scholars; Conant’s achievement, which is great, was clouded by his at times elliptical arguments for the supremacy of the building in art history. A revised edition of the Pelican History volume appeared in 1978. He died of cancer and is buried in Mout Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA. Conant’s enthusiasm for medieval architecture was part of the early 20th-century belief that the middle ages held a key for contemporary life. In this he was spurred on not only by Porter, but also by another friend, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, (1863-1942) (“the American Goth”) who designed in the medieval style. Conant’s methodology was to make accurate measurements and drawings of the archaeological remains of buildings, and the, using his knowledge of masonry types, date the various building campaigns. His architectural drawing skills resulted in some of the first detailed renderings of the monuments he studied. His sole intent in excavation was to discover objects (architectural elements); his lack of concern for archaeological strata on which they were found was less out of carelessness than a lack of uniform world archaeological standard. Conant’s scholarship, most clearly discerned in his Brief Commentary on Early Medieval Church Architecture (1942), frequently relied on buildings known solely from architectural projections constructed from only their foundations. His work is often more speculative than it appears. He avoided the social context in which the buildings were produced. Ironically, that aspect of medieval architectural history, Peter Ferguson noted, came to the United States via French art historians Marcel Aubert and Henri Focillon, and the Germanic émigrés trained in Kulturgeschichte. Richard Krautheimer, for one, did not approve of Conant’s Pelican History of Art volume (Sears). Conant was convinced that Cluny was the acme of the artistic revival of the 11th and 12th centuries. Conant wrote so convincingly of Cluny’s appearance that the medievalist Linda Seidel quipped, “you’d think he worshiped there every Sunday.”

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Harvard, 1925, published, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926; Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture: 800-1200. The Pelican History of Art 13. Baltimore: Penguin, 1959; Cluny: les églises et la maison du chef d’ordre. Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1968; edited, Bailey, Albert Edward. The Arts and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944; Benedictine Contributions to Church Architecture. Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1949; A Brief Commentary on Early Mediaeval Church Architecture, with Especial Reference to Lost Monuments. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942 [published 1950]; “Mediaeval Academy Excavations at Cluny.” Speculum 4 (January 1929): 3-26, 168-76, 291-302; “Iconography and the Sequence of the Ambulatory Capitals of Cluny.” Speculum 5 (July 1930): 278-87; “Apse at Cluny.” Speculum 7 (January 1932): 23-35; “Observations on the Vaulting Problems of the Period 1088-1211.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 26 (July 1944) : 127-34; “Original Buildings at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.” Speculum 31 (January 1956): 1-48; “New Results in the Study of Cluny Monastery.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 16 (October 1957): 3-11.

Sources

Frankl, Paul. The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 15, n. 20; 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. 50 mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 265-266; Coolidge, John P. “Kenneth Conant and the Founding of The American Society of Architectural Historians.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43 (October 1984): 193-4; Fergusson, Peter. “Medieval Architectural Scholarship in America, 1900-1940: Ralph Adams Cram and Kenneth John Conant.” Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 127-42; [obituaries:] Ferguson, Peter. “Keneth John Conant 1894-1984.” Gesta 24 no. 1 (1985):. 87-8; Coolidge, John. P. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43 (October 1984): 193-4; [Seidel remark, personal knowledge – LRS]; Sears, Elizabeth. “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 20, note 30.

Comolli, A.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Comolli, A.

Gender: unknown

Date Born: 1783

Date Died: 1792

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre)

Overview

biobliographer of art history

Selected Bibliography

Bibliografia storico antica dell’architettura civile ed arti subalterne.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 390

biobliographer of art history

Comini, Alessandra

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Comini, Alessandra

Gender: female

Date Born: 24 November 1934

Place Born: Winona, Winona, MN, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): fin de siècle, German (culture, style, period), and music (discipline)

Career(s): educators

Institution(s): Southern Methodist University

Overview

Scholar of fin-de-siècle Germanic art and music; Southern Methodist University professor of art history. Alessandra Comini was born in Winona, Minnesota to Eleanor Frances (“Megan”) Laird (Comini), a writer, and Raiberto Comini, a hotel-and- business owner in Geneva, Ibiza (island) and London, in 1934.

Her parents lived in Italy but before her birth, returned to Minnesota so that their child would be born with American citizenship. They moved to Barcelona, but the Spanish civil war forced them to Comini’s grandparents in Milan. By 1937, the Comini family returned to the United States, first Winona and then to Dallas where her father set up a portrait photography studio. During World War II, Comini, who still spoke with an accent and suffered from strabismus, endured prejudice because of her Axis-country origin. Comini was introduced to the arts early with art lessons by landscape artist Ed Bearden and at15, a filing job at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. She graduated from the Ursuline Academy, run by the Ursuline order of nuns.

Comini entered Barnard College, her interest primarily music. The art historian Marion Lawerence introduced her to art history. A summer in Italy (to study the language) resulted in an enthusiasm for art, especially medieval and Renaissance.

Back at Barnard College she enrolled in Italian renaissance classes with Julius Held with whose family she became close. She studied German with her mother at Southern Methodist University where her mother eventually taught German and Italian, later establishing the Italian department there. Comini took an intensive senior art history seminar at Barnard taught by Lawerence, graduating with an A.B., in 1956. Held encouraged her to study at the University of Vienna. In Vienna she studied under Karl Maria Swoboda and Fritz Novotny . Her advisor at Vienna was Gerhard Schmidt, for whom she photographed medieval manuscripts at the Abbey of St. Florian, finding free time to help Hungarian refugees from that country’s revolt. Comini left the University of Vienna in 1957 without a degree for New York and San Francisco. The peripatetic Comini travelled to Mexico learning Spanish and viewing works of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keefe. After a few months she returned to New York, taking a job at Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center for Russian composer Vladimir Ussachevsky. Ever restless and now interested in the folk music of Scandivania, she travelled throughout Scandinavia and Denmark, continuing to Paris, London, and Prague. In 1962, applied for a teaching position at San Francisco State College, and when turned down,elected to get an art history degree at University of California Berkeley.

The Viennese Expression exhibition, organized by Herschel Chipp focused her interest on the Austrian artists Egon Schiele. She wrote an MA thesis on Schiele University of California, Berkeley, granted in 1962. Later she cited professors Jean Bony and Walter Horn as influences. She accompanied a class of students led by Held and Harry Bober (of New York University). Walter Hofmann, who was director of Vienna’s Museum of the 20th Century. Comini discovered contemporary Austrian artist, Friedrich Hundertwasser, who was living in Italy at the time. Some of his work was later put into Comini’s 1978 book, The Fantastic Art of Vienna.

Comini continued her research on Schiele contacting relatives and friends, among whom, art historian Otto Benesch who had been painted by Schiele. She assiduously visited his homes and haunts, including the prison cell he was incarcerated in. Comini entered Columbia University graduate school in 1964, hearing lectures by Theodore Reff, George Collins, and Meyer Schapiro. As her Schiele profile grew, other specialists, Otto Nirenstein-Kallir, Thomas Messer, contacted her. While still a graduate student she was a guest professor at Berkeley University in 1967. Comini received her Ph.D., “with distinction” in 1969 from Columbia writing her dissertation under Reff, on the topic of Egon Schiele’s portraiture.

Comini shared an office with art historian Edith Porada. Her students included Horst Uhr, Barbara Buenger, Charles Meyer, Aliso Hilton, and Janet Kennedy. In 1972, Comini was the first woman to be awarded Princeton University’s Charles John Gwinn and Alfred Hodder Memorial Fellowship. She guest lectured at Yale University on Expressionism in 1973. She presented an early women’s history paper in 1980, “Art History, Revisionism, and Some Holy Cows.”

Comini accepted a professorship of art history at Southern University in 1974. There she met fellow art historian Eleanor Tufts and two became life partners. The same year Comini was awarded the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Comini’s research interest expanded to Picasso Caspar David Friedrich. Her 1974 book, Egon Schiele’s Portraits appeared. In 1990, Comini contributed to Norma Broude’s book, World Impressionism. Tufts died of ovarian cancer in 1992.

In 1994 she authored another catalog and traveling exhibition on Egon Schiele. Comini received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 1995. In 1996 she was named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at European Humanities Research Centre, Oxford University. The same year she received the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts. Her autobiography, In Passionate Pursuit was published in 2004. Beginning in 2014, Comini wrote art history murder mystery books, including Killing for Klimt, The Schiele Slaughters, and The Munich Murders. Two scholarships have since been created in her name by former students for undergraduate and graduate research. In 2014, Comini curated the Neue Galerie Museum (New York) on Egon Schiele’s Portraits (2014-2015).

Comini described herself as a revisionist art historian. She applied social-historical criteria to the popular Klimt and Schiele, artists whose histories had been largely aesthetically focused. She characterized her work as concentrating on “neglected geographical areas such as Scandinavia; women artists past and present; modern myth-making and the manipulation of imagery.”

Selected Bibliography

Schiele in Prison. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1973;
Egon Schiele’s Portraits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974;
The Fantastic Art of Vienna. New York City: Knopf, 1978;
The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1987;
“Nordic Luminism and the Scandinavian Recasting of Impressionism” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860 – 1920. Norma Broude. New York City: Harry N. Abrams, 1990;
Nudes: Egon Schiele. New York City: Rizzoli, 1995;
Gustav Klimt. New York City: Braziller, 2001;
In Passionate Pursuit. New York: George Braziller, 2004;

Sources

“Alessandra Comini.” National Book Foundation. Accessed January, 2020. https://www.nationalbook.org/people/alessandra-comini/;
“Alessandra Comini.” People Pill. Accessed December, 2019.https://peoplepill.com/people/alessandra-comini/;
“Art Historian Alessandra Comini Retires From SMU.” Art Daily. Accessed January, 2020. https://artdaily.cc/news/12176/Art-Historian-Alessandra-Comini-Retires-From-SMU#.XjD6PBd7lE5;
Comini, Alessandra. “Introduction.” Alessandra Comini. Accessed December, 2019. https://www.alessandracomini.com/;
“Dallas Museum of Art Exhibits Rosa Bonheur Ewe Gift.” UT Dallas. January 18, 2019. Accessed December, 2019. https://ah.atec.io/2019/01/18/dallas-museum-of-art-exhibits-rosa-bonheur-ewe-gift/;
“SMU Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita Alessandra Comini Updates.” UT Dallas. May 10, 2018. Accessed December, 2019. https://ah.atec.io/2018/05/10/smu-distinguished-professor-of-art-history-emerita-alessandra-comini-updates-3/;

Comfort, George Fisk

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

**Image Credit:** Rutgers School of Art and Sciences

Full Name: Comfort, George Fisk

Gender: male

Date Born: 1833

Date Died: 1910

Place Born: Berkshire, Tioga, Tompkins County, NY, USA

Place Died: Syracuse, Onondaga, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

American scholar and early art history exponent, founder of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Comfort was the son of Rev. Silas Comfort, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal church. He attended Wesleyan University in Middleton, CT. After graduation he taught science and drawing in New York seminaries. In 1860, Comfort traveled to Europe to study art history and archaeology. In Berlin he met or studied with the philosopher Friedrich Kaulbach, Carl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884, curator of Egyptology at the Berlin Museum), Gemäldegalerie director Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), and others. In 1865 he returned to the United States to become professor of modern languages at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania. He move to Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N. J., to become lecturer in Christian (late ancient and early medieval) archaeology. Resident in New York, he helped found the American Philological Society, of which he was president in 1869-74. In 1869, he helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The following year he published his Art Museums in America, a book outlining his vision for museums and museum education in the United States. In 1871 he married Anna Manning (1845-1931), a medical doctor and pioneer in women’s health. Comfort remained on the board of the Metropolitan until 1872. That year he moved to Syracuse, NY, to become professor of modern languages and esthetics at the newly founded university. He was instrumental in founding the College of Fine Arts there in 1873. In 1896, Comfort founded the Everson Museum of Art at Syracuse, holding its first exhibition in 1900. Under Comfort’s leadership the museum developed the first regular educational program in a museum in America. His papers are held at Syracuse University and the Archives of American Art.Comfort’s outline for art museums in the United States became the principal vision, based on the German model. His facility in the German language directly transported those ideas to the United States. His famous Union League Club address espoused an art museum for New York that “represent[ed] the History of Art in all countries and in all ages of art both pure and applied.”

Selected Bibliography

Art Museums in America. Boston: H. O. Houghton, 1870; “Esthetics in collegiate education.” Methodist Quarterly Review (October 1867): 573-593.

Sources

Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 30, 47 [incorrectly as “Fiske”]; “Comfort, George Fisk.” National Cyclopedia of American Biography 3: 162.

Colvin, Sidney, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Colvin, Sidney, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Sydney Colvin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1845

Date Died: 1927

Place Born: Norwood, Croydon, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works) and prints (visual works)

Career(s): curators

Overview

First director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge University; British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings (1883-1912). Colvin was the son of Bazett David Colvin (1805-1871), a commercial agent in India, and Mary Steuart Bayley (1821-1902). Colvin was raised and privately tutored the family home, The Grove, Little Bealings, near Woodbridge, east Suffolk. As a boy he knew John Ruskin, whose work he emulated. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1863 graduating at the top of his class in Classics in 1867. The following year he was appointed a fellow. Colvin moved to London, writing art criticism for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Fortnightly Review, and the art journal The Portfolio, among others. Colvin’s literary friends included Robert Browning (1812-1889), and Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), Henry James (1843-1916), and Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Through Edward Burne-Jones, Colvin entered the circle of Dante Gabrielle Rosetti from 1868 to 1872. A member of the Society of Dilettanti since 1871, he acted as its honorary secretary from 1891 to 1896. He collected essays from The Portfolio as a book, Children in Italian and English Design in 1872. A Selection from Occasional Writings on Fine Art appeared the following year when Colvin was elected Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge. As Slade professor, he regularly lectured on classical sculpture and his professorship was renewed four times. Colvin fell in love with a married woman, Frances “Fanny” Jane Fetherstonhaugh Sitwell (1839-1924) in the 1860s. A great beauty unhappily married, she left her husband, Reverend Albert Hurt Sitwell (1803-1894), in 1874 to be Colvin’s partner, though the two lived separately. Archaeology and especially sculpture captured Colvin’s interest. He visited the excavations in progress at Olympia in 1875. Colvin was named director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1876. Colvin began assembling a collection of plaster casts of classical sculpture from which to lecture. This became the core of the classical collections which fellow lecturers such as Charles Waldstein, whom he hired, taught from. He resigned from the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1884, succeeded by Waldstein, and his Slade professorship to become keeper of the department of prints and drawings in the British Museum. As keeper, he hired Lionel Cust, a civil service transfer from the War Office as an assistant. Though Cust had been a poor performer in the War Office, he shone in the Department under Colvin, and later became Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Colvin became a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1893. His attempt to become director of the National Gallery the following year was thwarted. His facsimile of (supposed) Maso Finiguerra drawings, A Florentine Picture-Chronicle appeared in 1898, a purchase from Ruskin. Colvin raised the department’s already high profile of scholarship and collections to new levels. He reinstalled the collections and added new exhibition space. His attention to art was wide-ranging; an 1899 exhibition of Rembrandt’s etchings, for example, displayed the artist’s work for the first time in chronological order. His colleagues in related works-on-paper divisions over the years included Laurence Binyon. He lobbied the government in 1895 to buy the collection of works on paper assembled by the art collector John Malcolm of Poltalloch (1805-1893). Colvin was crucial to the career of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). He encouraged Stevenson and introduced him to editors and publishers. Stevenson fell deeply in love with Frances; his lifelong he considered Colvin his literary mentor and friend. After Stevenson’s death in 1894, Colvin edited an edition of Stevenson’s works the same year and published Stevenson’s letters to him, Vailima Letters in 1895, and additionally, collections, Stevenson’s Letters in three separate editions in beginning in 1899. Nine years after the death of her husband, Sitwell and Colvin married in 1903. At the Museum, Colvin hired Arthur Mayger Hind as his assistant [keeper]. He and Hind issued important print catalogs, Early Engraving and Engravers in England in 1905 followed by Catalogue of Early Italian Engravers, 1910, in which Hind play the greater role. He applied for directorship of the British Museum in 1909 but was again unchosen to run a large museum. He was knighted in 1911. He retired from the Museum in 1912 and was succeeded by Campbell Dodgson. A biography of John Keats appeared as John Keats, his Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics and after-Fame in 1917. Colvin’s own memoirs were published in 1921 as Memories and Notes of Persons and Places. Frances, now Lady Colvin, died in 1924. Colvin himself died at his home, Kensington, at in 1927 at age 81. His cremated ashes are interred in his wife’s grave, Church Row cemetery, Hampstead. In addition to the Malcolm collection, Colvin added the prints and drawings bequests of William Mitchell (1895), Henry Vaughan’ (1900), and George Salting (1910).

Selected Bibliography

Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. London: Department of Prints and Drawings, British Musuem, 1910; edited, with Cust, Lionel. History of the Society of Dilettanti. London: New York, Macmillan, 1914.

Sources

Colvin, Sydney. Memories & Notes of Persons & Places, 1852-1912. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921; Lucas, Edward Verrall. The Colvins and their Friends. London: Methuen & Co., 1928; Beard, Mary. “Mrs. Arthur Strong, Morelli, and the Troopers of Cortés.” in, Donohue, A. A. and Fullerton, Mark D., eds. Ancient Art and its Historiography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 151, mentioned, Mehew, Ernest. “Colvin, Sydney.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; [obituary:] “Sir Sidney Colvin. Art Critic And Friend Of Stevenson.” Times (London) May 12 1927, p. 16.

Colvin, Howard Montagu

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Colvin, Howard Montagu

Gender: male

Date Born: 1919

Date Died: 2007

Place Born: Sidcup, Bexley, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): educators

Overview

Architectural Historian and Oxford University lecturer. Colvin came from a lowland Scots family, the son of Montagu Colvin, a Vickers Corporation executive and stamp dealer and Anne Winifred Colvin. As a youth, he won scholarships to a number of public schools, but his father selected Trent College, Nottingham, for him for financial reasons. There, he encountered a history master, Mike Morgan, who encouraged Colvin to visit churches instead of participating in athletics. Colvin’s first architectural history paper, published in 1938 when only nineteen, was on Dale Abbey, Derbyshire. He continued in history at University College London. There, as an undergraduate, Colvin began compiling a dictionary of architects. After Britain entered World War II, he joined the RAF in 1940 but remained assigned to base in England. A chance meeting in Blackpool with the daughter of an under-secretary in the Air Ministry led to a wartime appointment as Flight Lieutenant and posted to Malta for archaeological photography reconnaissance. He continued to work on his dictionary throughout the war, using the three libraries in Valletta, the 18th-century Royal Malta Library, the Garrison Officers’ Library founded by the British in the 19th century, and the modern British Institute Library. In 1943 he married Christina Edgeworth Butler (d. 2003), daughter of a Cambridge Latin professor. After the war, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in History, University College London in 1946. Two years later he received his M.A., from Oxford and was offered a Fellow position at St. John’s College. He remained at that Oxford College the rest of his career. He was named Tutor in History in 1948 (through 1978). As a history Tutor he inserted a class on English architectural history 1660-1720, architectural history being the only form of art history available to Oxford undergraduates at the time. Colvin added the duties of Librarian in 1950 (through 1984). His first published book was The White Canons in England (1951). Colvin continued researching his biographies, now aided by the tandem research of Rupert Gunnis, assembling his Dictionary of British Sculptors. Colvin had become increasingly aware that architectural historians frequently falsely attributed buildings to the few named architects of the era. Chief among these offenders was A. E. Richardson, the head of the Bartlett School of Architecture, who signed certificates of authentication which hung in churches and country houses throughout England. In 1951 the Ministry of Public Building and Works, then known as the Ministry of Works, commissioned him to oversee a series of authoritative volumes on historic buildings, which he set about doing. In the meantime, Colvin produced the authoritative Biographical Dictionary of English Architects 1660-1840 in 1954. He received the Banister Fletcher Prize for the book in 1957. The first volume of Colvin’s commissioned magnum opus, History of the King’s Works, appeared in 1963. He was a commissioner of the Royal Fine Art Commission from 1962 to 1972, a commissioner of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England beginning in 1963 (to 1976). Colvin was made a Reader in Architectural History, Oxford University 1965. Building Accounts of King Henry III, which he edited, was published in 1971. He issued a second edition of his Dictionary in 1978, expanding it to include Scotland and the years 1600-1660, changing the title to A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840. He was President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain from 1979 through 1981. The sixth and final volume of his History of the King’s Works appeared in 1982. His Unbuilt Oxford appeared in 1983. Colvin became emeritus in 1987. A book, Architecture and the After-Life (1991) examined funerary buildings from Mesopotamia to Ireland. He received a knighthood in 1995. The same year, another revised edition of Biographical Dictionary of British Architects appeared. Colvin had nearly completed proof-reading the fourth version of this Dictionary at his death. His students included Giles Arthington Worsley, who, along with Colvin, were noted critics of John Newenham Summerson. Colvin’s documentary-style methodology as well as his intellectual model was Robert Willis, whose posthumously published Architectural History of the University of Cambridge (1886) used extensive documentation to solve the vexing issues of attribution of the University building’s architects. As a medievalist, he countered the view of scholars such as John James (b. 1931), who asserted gothic churches were not built by architects, proving through documentation that medieval architects were highly trained, skilled and valued for their expertise (Crossley). Both premier 20th-century architectural historians Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner and Summerson, though older, were indebted to him for the facts used in their histories (Hewlings). Colvin revised Summerson’s 1945 Georgian London in 2001, which Colvin found “factually careless.” This disparity of approach was reflected in that author’s estimation of Colvin as that of a connoisseur attempting to garner the lives and works of British architects (Whinney obituary). Oxford’s lack of other art historians to appreciate his work, meant his scholarship, though respected, was never rewarded with a chair. An amateur architect, he designed an extension to the Senior Common Room at St. John’s as well as his own house in north Oxford.

Selected Bibliography

[summary bibliography:] Colvin, Howard Montagu. “The Author’s Principal Writings on Architectural History.” In Essays in English Architectural History. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 298-302; A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1660-1840. London: J. Murray, 1954; The History of the King’s Works. 6 vols. London: H.M. Stationery Office/Ministry of Public Building and Works, 1963-1982; edited. Building Accounts of King Henry III. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.

Sources

Summerson, John. “Margaret Dickens Whinney, 1894-1975.” Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 640; Colvin, Howard Montagu. “Writing a Biographical Dictionary of British Architects.” In Essays in English Architectural History. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 1999, pp.292-297; Crossley, Paul. “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 26; [obituaries:] Hewlings, Richard. “Architectural historian whose biographical dictionaries laid a foundation for all other scholars in his field .” Independent (London), January 1, 2008, p. 34; “Sir Howard Colvin.” Times (London) January 1, 2008, p. 47.

Colnaghi, Dominic Ellis, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Colnaghi, Dominic Ellis, Sir

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), Florentine, and Italian (culture or style)

Overview

British Consul-General to Florence, wrote biographies of Florentine artists

Selected Bibliography

A Dictionary of Florentine Painters from the 13th to the 17th Centuries. Edited by P. G. Konody and Selwyn Brinton. London: John Lane, 1928.

Collins, Peter

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Collins, Peter

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Place Born: Leeds, Kent, England, UK

Place Died: Westmount, Quebec, Canada

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Institution(s): McGill Univrsity

Overview

architectural historian specializing in material of architectural approach

Selected Bibliography

Concrete: The Vision of a New Architectur; A Study of Auguste Perret and his Precursors. New York: Horizon Press, 1959.Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965.

Sources

KRG, 45, 159 mentioned; KMP, 103

Collignon, Maxime

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Collignon, Maxime

Other Names:

Léon-Maxime Collignon

Gender: male

Date Born: 08 November 1849

Date Died: 15 October 1917

Place Born: Verdun, Occitanie, France

Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, Greek sculpture styles, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Archaeologist and art historian of ancient Greek sculpture. Collignon studied in Paris at the École normale supérieure beginning in 1868 under Georges Perrot. He was appointed professor of rhetoric in 1872 at Chambery teaching French literature. In 1873 he was made a member of the École française d’Athènes (French School of Athens) under the direction of Albert Dumont. In 1876 he traveled with the Abbe [Louis] Duchesne (1843-1922), the future director of the French School of Rome, to Asia minor making notes and drawings. When he returned to France in 1876, the university at Bordeaux created a chair for him in Greek and Latin inscriptions. His report written the following year, “Rapport sur un voyage archéologique en Asie Mineure” was eventually published in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique in 1897. The same year, 1877 he published the essay “Essai sur les monuments grecs et romains.” He taught archaeology at Bordeaux beginning in 1877. Collignon was awarded his doctorate and appointed professor of Greek antiquities at the university at Bordeaux in 1879. French universities offered few classes in archaeology at that time. He accepted an invitation by the German government to examine the German model of archaeological pedagogy, which, as a discipline, existed in Germany even in the smallest universities in that country. The result was his “L’Enseignement de l’archéologie classique et les Collections de moulages dans les universités allemandes.” He issued his Manuel d’archéologie grecque in 1881 to standardize and teach the science of archaeology to French students. In 1883 he left Bordeaux to accept the chair in archaeology (created only in 1876) at the Sorbonne in Paris and a position of deputy to Perrot, head of the École normale supérieure in Paris. The same year he issued his Mythologie figurée de la Grèce. He began an association with the publishing series Maîtres de l’art, books intended for general readership, with Phidias in 1886. His works appeared in English translations with his Manuel d’archéologie grecque, in 1886 and the Mythologie, expanded and translated by the British classicist Jane Ellen Harrison into English in 1890 as Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art. The result was Collignon enjoyed a considerable readership in the English-speaking world. Between those years, Collignon took over the work left at the death of his colleague, Olivier Rayet, publishing their Histoire de la céramique grecque in 1888. A second on Greek sculpture, Histoire de la sculpture grecque: des origines au IVe siècle in 1892. Still only 45, he was admitted into the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1893. He was a member of the digs at Pergamon and Delphi, writing extensively on the finds. A skilled artist, he made pencil and watercolor “notes” on the objects. His memoirs of his travels to the east were published with these illustrations in 1897. In 1897, too, the second volume of his Histoire de la sculpture grecque, maîtres du cinquième siècle, le quatrième siècle, l’époque hellénistique, l’art grec après la conquête romaine, was issued. Collignon was promoted to professeur d’archéologie à la faculté des lettres in Paris in 1900 succeeding Perrot as chair. A monograph on Pergamon was issued the same year. In 1904 he was elected President of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. Together with Louis Couve he published the Catalogue des vases peints du Musée national d’Athènes in 1902 and 1903. Collignon rose to president of the l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1905. The second of his books in the “Masters of Art” serie, Lysippe appeared that same year and Scopas et Praxitèle in 1907. The same year while inspecting art objects in a storage vault of a provincial museum in Auxerre, France, he discovered one of the most important intact archaic Greek free-standing sculptures known today. Subsequently dubbed the “Lady of Auxerre,” no explanation of how the sculpture got to Auxerre has ever been determined, but Collignon brought the piece to the Louvre where it is one of the musuem’s masterworks. He produced a book on classical archaeology in general (1913) and on one the Parthenon (1914). At Perrot’s death in 1914, he succeeded him as director of Monuments Piot (Monuments et Mémoires publiés par l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres). Collignon, together with his mentor, Parrot, introduced archaeology as a discipline in French universities. He layed the foundations for this new science, having studied the techique from Duchesne in the field. Like Schliemann, he employed Greek mythology to interpret classical monuments. His Manual of Greek Archaeology (1882) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University. His l’Histoire de la sculpture grecque volumes used the latest excavational information, grouping the work into regional schools.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Quid de collegiis Epheborum apud Graecos, excepta Attica, ex titulis epigraphicis commentari liceat. Paris, 1877, published, Paris: E. Thorin, 1877; Essai sur les monuments grecs et romains relatifs au mythe de Psyché. Paris: E. Thorin, 1877; Manuel d’archéologie grecque. Paris: A. Quantin, 1881, English, A Manual of Greek Archæology. New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1886; Histoire de la sculpture grecque. vol. 1:Les origines, les primitifs, l’archaïsme avancé, l’époque des grands maîtres du cinquème siècle. vol. 2 L’influence des grands maîtres du cinquième siècle, le quatrième siècle, l’époque hellénistique, l’art grec après la conquête romaine. Paris: Firmin-Didot et cie, 1892-1897; “L’Enseignement de l’archéologie classique et les Collections de moulages dans les universités allemandes.” la Revue internationale de l’enseignement 3 (January-June 1882); Mythologie figurée de la Grèce. Paris: A. Quantin, 1883, English, and Harrison, Jane Ellen. Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art. London: H. Grevel, 1890; and Rayet, Olivier. Histoire de la céramique grecque. Paris: G. Decaux, 1888; La polychromie dans la sculpture grecque. Paris: Leroux, 1898; Pergame: restauration et description des monuments de l’acropole. Paris: L. H. May, 1900; and Rayet, Olivier. Histoire de la céramique grecque. 2 vols. Paris: G. Decaux, 1888; Lysippe. Paris:H. Laurens, 1904; Scopas et Praxitèle, la sculpture grecque au IVe siècle jusqu’au temps d’Alexandre. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1907; Les statues funéraires dans l’art grec. Paris: E. Leroux, 1911; Le Parthénon: l’histoire, l’architecture et la sculpture. Paris: Hachette et cie, 1914; Charle, Christophe, and Bruneau, Philippe, eds. Études d’archéologie grecque. Paris: Picard, 1992.

Sources

Charle, Christophe, ed. Dictionnaire biographique des universitaires aux XIXe et XXe siècles. vol. 2. Paris: Institut national de recherche pédagogique/Editions du CNRS, 1986, pp. 1909-1939; Wichmann, Sharon. “Collignon, Léon-Maxime.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 304; Bruneau, Philippe. “Précédé de L’Archéologie grecque en Sorbonne de 1876 à 1914.” in Charle, Christophe, and Bruneau, Philippe, eds. Études d’archéologie grecque. Paris: Picard, 1992; Therrien, Lyne. L’Histoire de l’art en France: Genèse d’une discipline universitaire. Paris: 1998, pp. 494-496; Gran-Aymerich, Ève. “Collignon, Maxime.” Dictionnaire biographique d’archéologie : 1798-1945. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2001, pp. 185-187; Martinez, Jean-Luc. La Dame d’Auxerre. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000; [obituaries:] Reinach, Salomon. Review Archéologique 4 (1917): 455-457; American Journal of Archaeology. 22 no. 3 (July-September 1918): 343.

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