Curator of the Luxembourg Museum and first director of the Musée Rodin.
Selected Bibliography
Catalogue sommaire des oeuvres d’Auguste Rodin et autres oeuvres d’art de la Donation Rodin, expose´s à l’hôtel Biron. Paris: Impr. Beresniak, 1922; Dezarrois, Andre´, ed. The´odore Chasse´riau: sa vie et son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris: Les E´ditions Braun, 1931; Les Beaux-arts et les arts de´coratifs: Exposition universelle de 1900. Paris: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1900?; L’oeuvre lithographique de Fantin-Latour. Paris: L. Delteil, 1907; L’Art au XIXe siècle, 1800-1900. Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1905, English, Great painters of the XIXth century and their paintings. London: Sir I. Pitman and sons, 1910.
Place Born: Andernach, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): art theory, media (artists' materials), and media (information storage)
Overview
Professor for Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany. Belting studied Art History, Archaeology and History at the universities of Mainz and Rome. He completing his dissertation in 1959 in Mainz. He was a Visiting Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washgington, D. C. where he studied under Ernst Kitzinger. Belting returned to Germany where he taught as assistant professor at the University of Hamburg in 1966. He was promoted to Professor for Art History at Heidelberg in 1970. He remained there until 1980 when he moved to accept the chair in art history at Munich, a position once occupied by Heinrich Wölfflin and Hans Sedlmayr. Belting was again at Harvard in 1984 as a Visiting Professor and then the Meyer Schapiro Visiting Professor at Columbia University for the academic year 1989-90. He left Munich in 1992 to launch the Kunstwissenschaft and Medientheorie Ph.D. program for the newly-founded Hochschule für Gestaltung (School for New Media) at Karlsruhe, in association with the Center for Art and Media Technologies (ZKM) also in Karlsruhe. In 2002 he was a Getty Institute Visiting Professor in Buenos Aires. Belting was the European Chair of the Collège de France at Paris for 2002-2003 and an Honorary Chair at the University of Heidelberg. He joined Northwestern University as the Mary Jane Crowe professor in retirement. Belting was awarded an Honorary Degree (D.lit.) from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, in 2003. Although trained as a Byzaninist, Belting has recently written on art methodology, employing his approach to a range of art topics including Max Beckmann.
Selected Bibliography
Beiträge zu Kunst und Medientheorie: Projekte und Forschungen an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2000; Die Basilica dei SS. Martiri in Cimitile und ihr frühmittelalterlicher Freskenzyklus. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1962; Die Bibel des Niketas: ein Werk der höfischen Buchkunst in Byzanz und sein antikes Vorbild. Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1979; Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. Munich: W. Fink, 2001; Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990; Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion. Berlin: Mann, 1981; Giovanni Bellini, Pieta: Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985; Identität im Zweifel: Ansichten der deutschen Kunst. Cologne: DuMont, 1999; Beiträge zu Kunst und Medientheorie: Projekte und Forschungen an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2000; Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. Munich: W. Fink, 2001; Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990; Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983, second edition, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995, 3rd edition, retranslated and retitled, Art History After Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Il Medio Oriente e l’Occidente nell’arte del XIII secolo. Bologna: CLUEB, 1982; and Naumann, Rudolf. Die Euphemia-Kirche am Hippodrom zu Istanbul und ihre Fresken. Berlin: Mann, 1966; Qu’est-ce qu’un chef-d’œuvre? Paris: Gallimard, 2000; Bill Viola: the Passions. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum/National Gallery, London, 2003; Der zweite Blick: Bildgeschichte und Bildreflexion. Munich: Fink, 2000; and Mango, Cyril, and Mouriki, Doula. The Mosaics and Frescoes of St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii) at Istanbul. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 15 (1978); “Place of reflection or place of sensation?” in The Discursive Museum. Peter Noever, ed.Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001.
Professor for Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany. Belting studied Art History, Archaeology and History at the universities of Mainz and Rome. He completing his dissertation in 1959 in Mainz. He was a Visiti
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Overview
Historian of the trecento Italian Renaissance. Bellosi was the son of Enrico Bellosi and Maria Cuccuini (Bellosi). His father worked as a gardener and his mother in domestic service. The younger Bellosi attended the University of Florence where he wrote his dissertation under Roberto Longhi in 1963 on the trecento artist Lorenzo Monaco. After a year in the Italian military, 1963-1964, he worked under the Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze, 1969 to 1979. Bellosi was awarded the Premio Viareggio (award) in 1974. He joined the University of Siena in in 1979 as professor of Medieval Art History, heading the department 1983-1986. He retired from the University in 2002. His essay on the young Bellini, “Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna,” in Mantegna in 1431-1506, appeared in the catalog of the exhibition in 2008. Among his other techniques, Bellosi used costume history to redate many of the paintings of the Italian Trecento.
Selected Bibliography
and Matteoli, Anna. Mostra d’arte sacra della diocesi di San Miniato, 1969. San Miniato: Stampato a cura della Cassa di risparmio,1969; and Cantelli, Giuseppe, and Lenzini Moriondo, Margherita. Arte in Valdichiana dal XIII al XVIII secolo. Cortona: s.n., 1970; Buffalmacco e il Trinfo della Morte. Turin: Einaudi, 1974; Giotto. London: Constable, 1981; La Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna. 2 vols. Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio, 1983; and Lotti, Dilvo, Simone Martini: atti del convegno. Florence: Centro Di, 1988; edited, Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani: da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri: nell edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1986; Giotto: Complete Works. New York: Riverside, 1993; Duccio: la Maestà. Milan: Electa, 1998, English, Duccio: the Maestà. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999; Cimabue. Milan: Federico Motta, 1998, English, Cimabue. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998; “The Function of the Rucellai Madonna in the Church of Santa Maria Novella.” in, Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 2002; and Tartuferi, Angelo, and Parenti, Daniela. Lorenzo Monaco: a Bridge from Giotto’s Heritage to the Renaissance. Florence: Firenze musei, 2006.
Sources
[cited] Previtali, Giovanni. “The Periodization of Italian Art History.” History of Italian Art. vol. 2 Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 17, note 20; [obituary:] “Morto Bellosi, Attribui’Cristo Ligneo a Buonarroti Ansa.” Notiziario Generale in Italiano, April 27, 2011
Historian of the trecento Italian Renaissance. Bellosi was the son of Enrico Bellosi and Maria Cuccuini (Bellosi). His father worked as a gardener and his mother in domestic service. The younger Bellosi attended the University of Florence where he
Antiquarian, art theorist and biographer in the tradition of Vasari; Librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden, and curator for Pope Clement X. Bellori was raised by his uncle, the antiquarian Francesco Angeloni (1559-1652). He studied from Angeloni’s private archaeological collection and drawings by Annibale Carracci, and painting (perhaps with Domenichino) though few artworks by Bellori are known. Bellori became Angeloni’s heir at Angeloni’s death in 1652. He assembled his own collection of paintings, including those by Titian, Tintoretto, [Annibale] Carracci, as well as coins and medals. He assisted on several scholarly publications, including Le Gemme antiche figurate (1657) of Leonardo Agostini. Beginning in 1670 he acted as curator (Commissario dell’Antichità) to the classical collection of Pope Clement X. The following year he became rector (secretary) of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. At the Accedemia he fostered debate on art theory and strengthened the connections with the Académie de France, Rome. Inspired by the biography of artists Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scuttori e architetti of Giorgio Vasari (1550, 1568) and Le vite de’ pittori, scultori & architetti, 1642, of Giovanni Baglione, Bellori compiled his own biographical collection, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (1672) with a theoretical preface which been delivered earlier as a lecture in 1664. Bellor borrowed material from the Baglione’s work, whom Bellori wrote was the “Prometheus of Images” (O’Neil). But Bellori’s motivation was a much jealousy of Baglione, who he privately accused of having the work ghostwritten by the antiquarian Ottavio Tronsarelli (d. 1646). Bellori’s work would then “correct” Baglione’s work, which he said was written out of spite. Bellori acted as librarian and antiquary to the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden in Rome after 1680. He was honorary member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1689. At his death in 1690, Bellori was buried in San Isidoro, Rome. Bellori’s Vite focuses on twelve artists, Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Domenico Fontana, Federico Barocci, Caravaggio, Rubens, van Dyck, Francesco Duquesnoy, Domenichino, Giovanni Lanfranco, Alessandro Algardi and Poussin. His preference for the Bolognese and classical-influenced artists, Annibale, Domenichino and Poussin, is apparent by the length of their biographies. Only two sculptors, Algardi and Duquesnoy, were included. Caravaggio and van Dyck received the scantest treatment and somewhat surprisingly, Bernini not at all. The Vite is noted for its rich description of the individual works of art, something missing in earlier art-historical accounts. Bellori’s planned sequel never appeared, but he completed the entries for Guido Reni, Andrea Sacchi and Carlo Maratti. Maratti (1625-1713) contributed funds for the posthumous publication of Bellori’s Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte de Raffaelle d’Urbino (1696), which describe Raphael’s Vatican Stanze frescos and the Cupid and Psyche cycle in the Villa Farnesina. Bellori’s theorietical section of the Vite is a compilation of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, drawn from Renaissance authors such as Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570-1632) and Franciscus Junius. He sought to find middle ground between the Mannerists and the naturalism of Caravaggio. This was embodies in Classical antiquity and the paintings of Raphael, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Poussin. Poussin’s friendship with Bellori likely influenced the author’s writings.
Selected Bibliography
Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni. Rome: Per il succeso, al Mascardi,1672, English, Montanari, Tomaso, and Wohl, Helmut, eds. Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Admiranda romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae vestigia anaglyphico opere elaborata, [etc.] Rome: sumptibus, ac typis edita à Ioanne Iacobo de Rubeis, 1693 [sic, before 1692]; Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte da Rafaelle D’Urbino, nelle camere del Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano. Rome: Gio. Giacomo Komarek Boëmo, 1695; Le pitture antiche delle grotte di Roma, e del sepolcro de’ Nasonj: disegnate, & intagliate alla similitudine degli antichi originali da Pietro Santi Bartoli, e Francesco Bartoli, suo figliuolo. Rome: Nuova stamparia di G. degli Zenobj, avanti il Seminario romano, 1706.
Sources
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 53; Donahue, Kenneth. “The Ingenious Bellori.” Marsyas 3 (1945): 107-38; Schlosser, Julius. La letteratura artistica: Manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte moderna. Revised and edited by Otto Kurz. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964, pp. 465 ff.; Pace, Clare. “Bellori, Giovanni Pietro.” Dictionary of Art; Cropper, Elizabeth. “Bellori, Giovanni.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 140-42; O’Neil, Maryvelma Smith. Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.182-183; Montanari, Tomaso. “Introduction.” Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1-39.
Citation
"Bellori, Giovanni Pietro." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bellosil/.
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Antiquarian, art theorist and biographer in the tradition of Vasari; Librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden, and curator for Pope Clement X. Bellori was raised by his uncle, the antiquarian Francesco Angeloni (1559-1652). He studied from Angeloni’
Career(s): artists (visual artists), authors, and biographers
Overview
Artist, author and Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975. Son of Clive Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf. His papers are housed at the University of Sussex.
Artist, author and Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975. Son of Clive Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf. His papers are housed at the University of Sussex.
First curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and assistant director, Pennsylvania Museum of Art (later Philadelphia Museum of Art). Bell’s father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927). He was distantly related on his mother’s side to Edward Burne-Jones and the writer Rudyard Kipling. Poynter, Bell’s uncle, married Agnes Macdonald, a sister of Burne-Jones’s wife; she was in turn aunt of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). The younger Bell studied studio art at the Slade School of Art in London and under his uncle, Edward John Poynter, later president of the Royal Academy in London and director of the National Gallery. In 1885 Bell moved to the United States where he worked as a landscape and building architect. In 1895 he created the decoration for Biltmore, the mansion in the hills of Asheville, North Carolina for George W. Vanderbilt (1865-1914). In the twentieth century Bell was the art director for the New Theater in New York. Bell wrote the introductory catalog for the inaugural exhibition of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916. In 1917, when Langdon Warner director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (later Philadelphia Museum of Art), was given leave to travel to Japan for research, Bell replaced him. He concurrently held the position of Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, left by the Philadelphia lawyer (1841-1917) to the city at his death the same year. Bell was administrator of both the collection and the Museum until his death. His principal research interest was not in the Italian renaissance art, the bulk of the Johnson collection, but Asian art; he spent much of his time compiling a catalog (never published) of oriental works of art in private in Japanese and European collections. After his death, he was succeeded at the Johnson Collection (and Philadelphia Museum) by Henri Moreau (q.v.). His brother was Charles F. Bell, the first Keeper of the Fine Art Department, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Selected Bibliography
Catalogue of the Inaugural Exhibition; June 6-September 20, 1916. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916.
Sources
Strehlke, Carl Brandon. Italian Paintings, 1250-1450 in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004, p. 9, and 19, note 39; personal correspondence, Jon Whiteley, August 2009; [obituaries:] “Necrology.” The Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin 24 no. 127 (April 1929): 31; “Obituary.” New York Times March 30, 1929, p. 10.
First curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and assistant director, Pennsylvania Museum of Art (later Philadelphia Museum of Art). Bell’s father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927). He
Place Born: East Shefford, West Berkshire, England, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): art theory
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Art critic and Bloomsbury theorist. Bell was son of William Heward Bell (1849-1927), a civil engineer, and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850-1942). He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899 studying history. There he was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore’s philosophy. He was awared a Earl of Derby studentship in 1902 to study in Paris which he instead spend looking at art. Upon his return, he joined the “Thursday evenings” at the Gordon Square home of Thoby Stephen (1880-1906), whom he had met at Cambridge. Others in this group were Thoby’s brother, Adrian, and their sisters, Vanessa and Virginia (the future Virginia Woolf). These evenings formed the basis for the British esthetic movement Bloomsbury. Bell married Vanessa Stephen in 1907 and became a major figure in the group. The Bell’s second son was Quentin Bell, who also became an art writer. In 1910 Bell met the art historian Roger Fry. Together Bell and Fry mounted the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912. Bell adopted many of the ideas Fry had written about and publish a simplified version of the esthetic, Art, in 1914. The book was responsible for popularizing the term “significant form.” Bell’s numerous affairs with women ranging from his sister-in-law, Virginia (before she married Leonard Woolf) to others, seemed to affect Vanessa little. She simply lived from 1915 with her soul mate, Duncan Grant, whose child, Angelica Bell (b. 1918), she bore. Clive Bell joined the pacifist movement in World War I, issuing a pamphlet Peace at Once, which was confiscated by the Lord Mayor of London in 1916. Other writings followed, including On British Freedom (1923) criticizing British taste as “genteel servitude.” He followed this with a survey of Impressionism, Landmarks in Nineteenth-century Painting, in 1927. His book on Proust published in, 1928, was Britain’s first book on the French writer. The same year he issued Civilization, arguing the necessity of a leisured élite for the maintenance of civilization. A memoir, Old Friends: Personal Recollections, was published in 1956. Bell’s book, Art was highly influential. It went through numerous editions and established the Bloomsbury art-for-art’s sake esthetic, “significant form” condoning form, independent of content, as most significant aspect of a work of art. As such, Bell could link the art of different periods together through their form, such as works from the renaissance and modern eras. He capitalized on the burgeoning interest in Italian renaissance so-called “primitives” by writing, “go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit tht if the greatest name in European painting is not Cézanne, it is Giotto.”
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Laing, Donald. Clive Bell: An Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings. New York: Garland, 1983; Art. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913; Old Friends: Personal Recollections. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956; Civilization: an Essay. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928; Landmarks in Nineteenth-century Painting. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927; Since Cézanne. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922; An Account of French Painting. New York: Harcourt, 1931; Enjoying Pictures: Meditations in the National Gallery and Elsewhere. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934; Second Post-impressionist Exhibition: Re-arrangement. London: Grafton Galleries/Ballantyne, 1913; Warmongers. London: Peace Pledge Union, 1938.
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. 7; Spaulding, Frances. Dictionary of Art; Egbert, Donald Drew. “English Art Critics and Modern Social Radicalism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 26 no. 1 (1967-8): 29-46; Shone, Richard. Bloomsbury Portraits 2nd. ed. London: Phaidon, 1993; Watney, Simon. English Post-Impressionism. London: Studio Vista, 1980; Beechey, James. Clive Bell. London: John Murray, 1999; Harris, Martha Johnson. Clive Bell’s Formalism in Historical Perspective. Ph.D. thesis, University of Georgia, 1985;
Art critic and Bloomsbury theorist. Bell was son of William Heward Bell (1849-1927), a civil engineer, and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850-1942). He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899 studying history. There he was greatly influenced by G. E. Moo
Place Born: Richmond, North Yorkshire, England, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): curators
Overview
First Keeper of the Fine Art Department, Ashmolean Museum, 1909-1931. Bell’s father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927), whose brother was Edward John Poynter, a director of the National Gallery. He was distantly related on his mother’s side to Edward Burne-Jones and the writer Rudyard Kipling. Poynter, Bell’s uncle, married Agnes Macdonald, a sister of Burne-Jones’s wife; she was in turn aunt of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Bell was educated privately. In 1896, a family friend recommended him to C. Drury Fortum, who in turn suggested to Arthur J. Evans that he assist in the great Renaissance collection that Fortnum planned to bequeath to the University art gallery. Bell became Assistant Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum in 1896. It was around this time that he met the Renaissance art scholar Bernard Berenson. At that time, the collections of the Ashmolean were yet ungrouped, having been recently been moved into their new location. Bell organized and cataloged the collection on a very meager budget while Evans spent much time excavating in the middle east with Bell largely in administrative control of the Museum. The Ashmolean and the Art Gallery were amalgamated in 1908 at Evans’ retirement and Bell was made first Keeper of Fine Art in the new institution on 1 January 1909. Bell rehung the collection, creating one of the most attractive museums in Britain. He took a scholarly interest the portrait paintings held at Oxford, providing advice to Rachel E. Lane Poole (d. 1937), compiling a catalog of the collection. Bell was appointed secretary to the committee responsible for organizing the first of a series of exhibitions of Oxford historic portraits. He wrote other works on English portraiture quickly becoming an authority on the subject. In 1910 he was invited to succeed Lionel Cust as director of the National Portrait Gallery, but Bell declined, remaining at the Ashmolean the rest of his career. In 1911, he helped found the Walpole Society with Alexander J. Finberg (1866-1939) and Cust. Lane Poole’s catalog of portraits, 1912, became the standard in the field. Bell also became interested in medieval ceramics and drawings, of which the Ashmolean had a strong collection. Among his many acquaintances were T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) (1888-1935) who brought fragments of pottery into the Ashmolean for identification. Bell and Lawrence frequently discussed medieval art and architecture. Lawrence had intended to donate the contemporary drawings included in his famous Seven Pillars of Wisdom to the Ashmolean, but Bell’s interest in contemporary art for the Ashmolean was limited. In 1922 he met the Oxford student Kenneth Clark, whose career Bell carefully shaped. He suggested Clark write a B.Litt thesis on the Gothic revival in architecture, (though Clark was a Renaissance scholar) under Bell’s supervision and from his notes. Clark never completed this as a thesis (somewhat to Bell’s annoyance) but later urged by Clark’s wife, Clark published it as his first book. In Italy, Bell introduced the young Clark to Berenson, now the scion of Renaissance art historians, though Bell held him in less esteem than art historians did. In later years, Bell also fostered the education and career of Cambridge student Francis John Bagott Watson, eventually director of the Wallace Collection. He retired in 1931 and was succeeded by Clark. After Bell’s retirement, two drawings from Lawrence’s book, Augustus John’s oil portrait of Feisal and charcoal sketch of D. G. Hogarth were presented to the Museum. He willed his personal library to Watson. His older brother, Edward Hamilton Bell, was the first curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and assistant director, Pennsylvania Museum of Art. A homosexual connected in the larger circle of the famous Oxford esthetes, Bell published relatively little given his expertise. Colleagues remarked that the fastidious Bell preferred to have others publish his notes, as in the case of Clark’s book on the Gothic revival, “so that others could take the blame” (Secrest). Some indication of his accomplishment lies in the dedication of books to him, which, in addition to Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1929), included Osbert Sitwell’s Winters of Content (1932). “He was a died-in-the-wool documentary art historian who disliked poetic effusion and admired those who attempted to put art history onto a scientific footing” (Whiteley). Geoffrey de Bellaigue wrote that Bell was a “fierce and acerbic art historian of great breadth of learning who set himself and others standards of perfection which few could achieve, let alone maintain.” He was once observed kicking an exhibition catalog that he thought poorly written across his library floor.
Selected Bibliography
Annals of Thomas Banks, Sculptor, Royal Academician, with some letters from Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.B.A., to Banks’s Daughter. Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press, 1938; Exhibition Illustrative of Early English Portraiture. London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1909; and Devonshire, Victor Christian William Cavendish, Duke of, and Simpson, Percy. Designs by Inigo Jones for Masques & Plays at Court: A Descriptive Catalogue of Drawings for Scenery and Costumes Mainly in the Collection of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G.. Oxford: Walpole and Malone Societies at the University Press, 1924.
Sources
Simpson, Colin. Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen. New York: Macmillan, 1986, p. 53; Secrest, Meryle. Kenneth Clark: a Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985, pp. 54-59, 69; de Bellaigue, Geoffrey. “Francis John Bagott Watson.” Proceedings of the British Academy 84 (1994): 567; personal correspondence, Jon Whiteley, August 2009; [obituaries] “Mr. C. F. Bell Transforming The Ashmolean.” The Times [London] April 5, 1966, p. 12; Watson, Francis. “Charles Francis Bell, 1871-1966.” Walpole Society [journal] 41 (1966-1968): ix-x.
Citation
"Bell, Charles F.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bellcf/.
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First Keeper of the Fine Art Department, Ashmolean Museum, 1909-1931. Bell’s father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927), whose brother was Edward John Poynter, a dir
Subject Area(s): American (North American), architecture (object genre), and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Americanist art historian and architect. Belknap came to art history comparatively late in his career. His father, of the same name (1873-1943), was a vice president of Bankers Trust. His mother was Rey Sealy Hutchings Belknap (1885-1960). Belknap graduated magna cum laude at St. Paul’s School, Concord, NH, in 1916 and attended Harvard University. Although his college years were interrupted by war service, he nevertheless graduated with his class in 1920. Following his father’s profession, he worked in various finance and investment firms in New York and London until 1928. He then returned to school studying architecture at Harvard University. He graduated from the School of Architecture in 1933, establishing himself in Boston where he worked on his own. Belknap designed residential houses for ten years, producing undistinguished mansions for a traditional clientele. In 1943, at the height of World War II, he was called to active service again in the army, although 44 years of age. He served briefly in England with the Eighth Army Air Force Intelligence before poor health forced his discharge with the rank of captain. Back in Boston and not robust enough to maintain his architectural practice, Belknap turned to his hobby, American colonial painting. Spurred in part by an article by James Thomas Flexner in 1946, Belknap wrote his one and only published article in art history. “The Identity of Robert Feke,” Art Bulletin,1947, demonstrated through historical documents that several paintings by artists named “Robert Feke” in colonial America were executed by the same person. Belknap continued research early American art. In 1949 Belknap discovered that, contrary to popular belief, American portrait painters borrowed their compositions and even personal accoutrements from British prints, mostly mezzotints, which artists collected in ‘sample books’ for their patrons to select. Americanist art historians had fervently maintained that early American portraitists had created their work independently, miraculously parallel with British fashion. Late in 1949 Belknap traveled to the British Museum and Courtauld Institute in London, where his theory was conclusively confirmed. For all this, Belknap was reticent to publish his findings. He declined to teach a research seminar on the grounds that his work was not complete enough for dispersal. His plans to write a series of short articles which, when assembled, would form a conclusive treatment on the subject, were halted by his death at age 50. Some years before, Belknap had met John M. Phillips, Director of the Yale Art Gallery. Phillips publicized Belknap’s work at a 1952 meeting of the College Art Association. In 1959 his notes were published in book form as American Colonial Painting: Materials for a History. His mother donated a library in her son’s honor at Winterthur Museum, Wilmington, DE.
Selected Bibliography
American Colonial Painting: Materials for a History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959; The Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. Collection of Portraits and Silver, with a Note on the Discoveries of Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. Concerning the Influence of the English Mezzotint on Colonial Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955,”The Identity of Robert Feke,” Art Bulletin 29 no. 3 (September 1947): 201-7.
Sources
Winchester, Alice. Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. whose ideals of scholarship are perpetuated in the Belknap Press at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the establishment of a research library of American painting bearing his name at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956; Meschutt, David. “Waldron Phoenix Belknap.” American National Biography 2: 494-5; [obituary:] “Waldron P. Belknap.” New York Times December 15, 1949, p. 35.
Americanist art historian and architect. Belknap came to art history comparatively late in his career. His father, of the same name (1873-1943), was a vice president of Bankers Trust. His mother was Rey Sealy Hutchings Belknap (1885-1960). Belknap
