Art Historians

Smith, H. R. W.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smith, H. R. W.

Other Names:

Henry Roy William Smith

Gender: male

Date Born: 1891

Date Died: 1971

Place Died: Berkeley, Alameda, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), Classical, Greek pottery styles, Greek vase painting styles, pottery (visual works), vase paintings (visual works), and vases

Overview

Berkeley professor of Latin and Classical Archaeology and authority on Greek vase painting; author of several Corpus Vasorum Antiquarum for California. Smith attended St. Paul’s School, London, and Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1914 he was appointed Associate Professor of Classics at St. Francis Xavier. Shortly thereafter, Britain entered World War I and Smith joined the British Army, and was wounded at Salonika. He returned to St. Francis Xavier after the war. He went to Princeton University, first as Instructor and advancing to Assistant Professor of Classics. In 1928 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, to become Assistant Professor of Latin. A vase in the Berkeley’s collection resulted in important monograph on the Lewis Painter, New Aspects of the Menon Painter (1929), a book that launched a new series, the University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology. He made further major contributions to this series in 1932, 1944, 1951, and 1959. Smith rose to Associate Professor in 1930 and Professor of Latin and Classical Archaeology in 1931. He began issuing important fascicules of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, dealing with the collections of Berkeley and San Francisco in 1936. Smith maintained a strong friendship with the vase scholar J. D. Beazley. Beazley’s Development of Attic Black-Figure is dedicated to Smith. In 1939 he published the volume on the Lewis painter for the prestigious Bilder griechischer Vasen series edited by J. D. Beazley and Paul Jacobsthal. He secured a fellowship for Beazley student Dietrich von Bothmer at California, working under Smith, in 1940. Smith was instrumental in securing Beazley’s appointment of the Sather Professorship in 1951. In 1958 he retired as Emeritus Associate Curator of Classical Archaeology. After his retirement he studied the collection of South Italian artifacts in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Neapolitnan dowry of the last Empress of Brazil. His students included Darrell A. Amyx, W. G. Rabinowitz, and J. K. Anderson. Smith represented that generation of classical archaeologists from the first half of the twentieth century who, distinguished themselves in the study of Greek and Latin literature before focusing on ancient art. His work on Greek vase painting is among his most important. His discussions of vases were not limited to the vases themselves, but examine such topics as Greek siege warfare and infant burial. Smith held a celebrated disagreement with Andreas Rumpf in an article on “The Origin of Chalcidian Ware.” He received honorary membership in the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). He was for many years the Advisory Editor for the American Journal of Archaeology.

Selected Bibliography

Corpus vasorum antiquorum. United States of America. University of California. Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. fasc. 5; Corpus vasorum antiquorum. United States of America. M. H. De Young Memorial Museum and California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. fasc. 10; and Anderson, J. K., editor. Funerary Symbolism in Apulian Vase-Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976; The Hearst Hydria: an Attic Footnote to Corinthian History. University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology 1, no. 10. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944; New Aspects of the Menon Painter. University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology 1, no. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929; The Origin of Chalcidian Ware. University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology 1, no. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932; Problems Historical and Numismatic in the Reign of Augustus. University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology 2, no. 4. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951; and Maule, Quentin. Votive Religion at Caere: Prolegomena. University of California Publications in Classical Archaeology 4, no. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959; Der Lewismaler (Polygnotos II). Bilder griechischer Vasen 13. Leipzig: Keller, 1939.

Sources

“1974, University of California: In Memoriam.” http://dynaweb.oac.cdlib.org:8088/dynaweb/uchist/public/inmemoriam/inmemoriam1974/@Generic__BookTextView/1962

Berkeley professor of Latin and Classical Archaeology and authority on Greek vase painting; author of several Corpus Vasorum Antiquarum for California. Smith attended St. Paul’s School, London, and Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1914 he was

Smith, E. Baldwin

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smith, E. Baldwin

Other Names:

E. Baldwin Smith

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1956

Place Born: Topsham, Sagadahoc, ME, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Christianity and Early Christian

Career(s): educators

Overview

Scholar of early Christian art; Princeton University professor and chair of the department. Smith graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1906 and received his A. B. and Bowdoin College in 1911. He moved to Princeton University studying under Charles Rufus Morey and Howard Crosby Butler, where he earned his M. A. in 1912 and his Ph.D. in 1915. His dissertation topic was Early Christian Iconography and the School of Provence. Smith joined the faculty at Princeton the following year and advance rapidly through the academics ranks. He married Ruth Preble Hall. During World War I, he joined the army, rising to captain in the 312th infantry. His dissertation appeared as a Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology shortly before he was gravely wounded at the battle of Grand Pés in 1918. He returned to Princeton where he was made an assistant professor in 1919. Smith worked closely with Butler during these years. He was named associate professor in 1923 and was appointed full professor in 1926. After Butler’s death in 1922, Smith set about organizing Butler’s unpublished notes into a book on Syrian churches. Early Churches in Syria,1929, though the research is Butler’s, are imbued with the style and methodological strategy that is purely Smith’s. Smith’s first wife died in 1930 and Smith remarried Helen H. “Nancy” Hough, daughter of a federal judge the same year. In 1931, Smith was named the first Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture. Smith was part of a committee that launched Princeton’s “Four-Course plan” requiring only four courses the junior and senior year, but stipulating independent research courses for all upperclassmen. In 1936 he became director of the American Institute for Iranian Art and Archaeology, which he held until 1940. Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression, 1938, was Butler’s first book written solely under his own direction. During World War II, Smith served as faculty at the Naval Air Combat Intelligence School in Quonset, Rhode Island. In 1945 he became Chairman, Department of Art and Archaeology, which he held until 1954. In later years, Smith devoted his publishing efforts to broad questions of conceptual scholarship. Most notable among these is his study, The Dome (1950) which examines the architectural component throughout a wide range of history. He wrote volume 30 of the Princeton Monographs in Art and Architecture, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages, in 1956. He retired from the department shortly before his death the same year. Methodologically, Smith helped develop the emerging field of iconography which Princeton had forged, together with his teacher and colleague Morey. As early as 1917 he suggested an Alexandrian origin to the Chair of Maximianus based upon its iconography. His dissertation became the basis for the Index of Christian Art, the image collection founded a Princeton by Morey (Robb and Tatum). Erwin Panofsky cited Smith’s work on Christian ivories in Provence as one of serveral “very good art-historical books” with which European scholars such as himself were familiar before World War II. Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression (1938) hallmark’s Smith’s approach to architecture: architectural shapes are “embodiments of social needs, conventions and aspirations.” He was among the first architectural historians to use evidence from many disciplines, numismatics, theology and geography. His lectures, cigarette-in-holder ubiquitously in hand, were famous for their eloquence.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Early Christian Iconography and the School of Provence. Princeton, 1915, published under the same title, Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 6, 1918; [edited and completed] Butler, Howard Crosby. Early Churches in Syria, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University, 1929; Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression. New York: Appleton-Century, 1938; The Dome, a Study in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956; The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.

Sources

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953 p. 87, mentioned; 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, pp. 58, 67; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 63 mentioned; [obituaries:] Erik Sjoqvist, [E. Baldwin Smith] American Journal of Archaeology 60 (1956): 285-86; Kurt Weitzmann, Speculum 32 (July 1957): 647-8; “Prof. E. B. Smith, Educator, Dead.” New York Times March 8, 1956, p. 29; Robb, David M. and Tatum, George B. “Earl Baldwin Smith 1888-1956.” College Art Journal 16, no. 3 (Spring, 1957): 239-242.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Smith, A. H.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smith, A. H.

Other Names:

Arthur Hamilton Smith

Gender: male

Date Born: 1860

Date Died: 1941

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Weybridge, Surrey, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), Classical, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

Sources

Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 276-7.

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

Smirnov, Iakov Ivanovich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smirnov, Iakov Ivanovich

Other Names:

Jacob Ivanovich Smirnov

Gender: male

Date Born: 1869

Date Died: 1918

Place Born: St. Petersburg, Russia

Place Died: St. Petersburg, Russia

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Medieval (European)

Overview

Russian archaeologist and medievalist art historian. Smirnov was born in Petrograd, Russia, which is present-day St. Petersburg, Russia. He graduated from the University in St. Petersburg in 1891 with a degree in philology. He taught as a Privatdozent in St. Petersburg. In 1899 his work on Syrian silver, published with D. A. Khvol’son appeared and he accepted the position in the medieval and renaissance department at the State Hermitage Museum. His research trips to the Balkans, the Crimea, and Palestine resulted in detailed reports on ancient and medieval monuments, including carved stone steles and images, known as vishapy. In 1903 he contributed the section on churches to the large inventory of Asia Minor, edited by Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski. He became a professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1917. He also participated in the excavations at Jericho and Armenia. His main work, Vostochnoye serebro, is a catalogue of Central Asian metalwork found in Russia, identifying Sogdian, Khorezmian and other traditions in the work. His students included André Grabar. He died in Petrograd, USSR, which is present-day St. Petersburg, Russia.

Selected Bibliography

and Chubinashvili, Georgii Nikolaevich. Die Kirche in Zromi und ihr Mosaik. Massaufnahmen des Architekten Severov. volume 2 of Georgische Baukunst. Tiflis: Verlag des Museums der bildenden Künste “Metechi”, 1934; Der Schatz von Achalgori. Tiflis: Verlag des Georgischen Museums, 1934; and Crowfoot, J. W. Kleinasien: ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte [etc.] Stryzgowski, Josef, ed. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903; and Khvol’son, Daniil Avraamovich. Serebrianoe Siriiskoe bliudo: naidonnoe v Permskom kraie. St. Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1899; and Marr, Nikolai IAkovlevich. Vishapy. Leningrad: OGIZ, 1931; Vostochnoe serebro. Atlas drevnei serebrianoi i zolotoi posudy. St. Petersburg: s.n., 1909.

Sources

Petrukhin, V. YA. “Smirnov, Yakov.” Dictionary of Art.

Smiles, Janie

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smiles, Janie

Gender: female

Date Born: 1929

Date Died: 1998

Place Born: Madison, WI, USA

Place Died: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, Classical, Gender identity, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), Roman sculpture styles, sculpture (visual works), and women (female humans)Women

Overview

Specialist in ancient art, particularly appearance of women in ancient Roman sculpture. Smiles studied at Bryn Mawr and the University of Berlin where she received her Ph.D. in 1954 from the Semitic scholar Nesnores Eel (1907-1985). Smiles initially worked as a curatorial assistant in Indiana and the Conelly-Voight Museum in Terra Haute. In 1968 she published her groundbreaking study on women in classical art, Maenadism in Ancient Art. Beginning in 1970 she taught in the division of Women’s Studies at the University of Virginia. In 1985 she moved to Duke University and finally to Temple University where she was adjunct curator of the classical collection Temple. In 1998 she was stabbed by an irate student and died. Smiles developed thelarchical theory of women in art history. Her controversial theory asserted that voluptuous women, particularly breast size, represented in Roman art were used in rites of auto-arousal by male priest. Her contention that female models were drawn from slaves because of their accentuated female form was highly debated.

Selected Bibliography

Maenadism in Ancient Art. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin for the Institute of Fine Arts, 1969; “Nymphs and the Selection of Males.” Ancient Studies in the Science and Arts. Edited by Hedley Rhys. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961; The Appearance of the Nymph. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 61 (footnote); “Temple Professsor Slain over Grade dispute, authority on sex in classical art.” Philadelphia Inquirer February 19, 1998, p. 1.

Smeyers, Maurits

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Smeyers, Maurits

Other Names:

Maurice Smeyers

Gender: male

Date Born: 1937

Date Died: 1999

Place Died: Lisbon, Portugal

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Subject Area(s): Flemish (culture or style) and manuscripts (documents)

Institution(s): Catholic University of Leuven

Overview

Art History Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (1985-99); founder of the Centre for the Study of Flemish Illuminators. Smeyers grew up in Louvain, Belgium. Like his father, Andreas Smeyers, who published on historic Louvain and the nearby Vlierbeek Abbey, he was particularly interested in local history. He attended high school at St. Peter’s College in Louvain and went on as a history student at the Catholic University in the same city. After his graduation, in 1961, he accepted a position as high school teacher at the College of Our Lady in Boom, to the north of Brussels. In this early period he wrote a study on the excavations of the Vlierbeek Abbey, Vlierbeeks bouwwerf, which was awarded the “De Rees prize” by the Davidsfonds in 1964. In the same year he began his career at the Catholic University of Louvain, first as assistant under Professor Jan Karel Steppe at the Department of Archaeology and Art History. In 1967 he obtained a second degree in Medieval Studies, followed three years later by a doctorate, which he earned with a dissertation on the Turin-Milan Book of Hours, Het Turijns-Milanees getijdenboek. Bijdrage tot de van Eyck-studie (1970). For this study the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences, Letters and the Fine Arts of Belgium proclaimed him laureate of the Fine Arts section. He was appointed associate professor in 1985 and full professor in 1989. In his university teaching Smeyers covered iconology, book illumination, mediaeval art, Spanish art, and auxiliary sciences, such as heraldry. In 1983 he founded the Centre for the Study of Flemish Illuminators (now Illuminare: Centre for the Study of the Illuminated Manuscript). Under the Center’s direction Smeyers published the first nine volumes of Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts series. In 1993, both the sixth volume, Vlaamse miniaturen voor Van Eyck (ca. 1380 – ca. 1420) Catalogus, and Flanders in a European Perspective. Manuscript Illumination Around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad appeared. A 1996 exhibition, Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts 1475-1550 traveled to St. Petersburg, Florence, and Antwerp. In 1998 Smeyers organized three exhibitions on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of the building of Louvain’s famous Town Hall, Het Leuvense Stadhuis. Pronkjuweel van de Brabantse gotiek, Life in Louvain in the Late Middle Ages, and Dirk Bouts (c. 1410-1475), a Flemish Primitive in Louvain. A year before his death, a monograph on Dirk Bouts and Vlaamse miniaturen van de 8ste tot het midden van de 16de eeuw. De middeleeuwse wereld op perkament appeared. The latter, his magnum opus, is the standard work on Flemish miniatures. In April 1999 while participating in a congress in Lisbon, Portugal, he died unexpectedly. Smeyers’ daughter, Katharina, was also an art historian and an academic associate at the Centre for the Study of Flemish Illuminators from 1990 to 2003. His research in the field of manuscript illumination became a dominant factor in his scholarly life.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Smeyers, Katharina. “Bibliography of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers” in, “Als Ich Can”. Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers. Louvain: Peeters, 2002: pp. xxiii-xxxix; ed., Archivum Artis Lovaniense. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van de kunst in de Nederlanden. Opgedragen aan Prof. Em. J.K. Steppe. Louvain: Peeters, 1981; Vlaamse miniaturen voor Van Eyck (ca. 1380 – ca. 1420). Louvain: Peeters, 1993; and Cardon, Bert, eds. Flanders in a European Perspective. Manuscript Illumination Around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad. Proceedings of the International Colloquium Leuven 1993. Louvain: Peeters,1995; and Van der Stock, Jan, eds. Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts 1475-1550. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1996; Dirk Bouts: schilder van de stilte. Louvain: Davidsfonds, 1998; ed. Het Leuvense Stadhuis. Pronkjuweel van de Brabantse gotiek: tentoonstellingscatalogus. Louvain: Peeters, 1998; ed. Dirk Bouts (ca. 1410-1475, een Vlaams primitief te Leuven. Louvain: Peeters, 1998; Vlaamse miniaturen van de 8ste tot het midden van de 16de eeuw. De middeleeuwse wereld op perkament. Louvain: Davidsfonds, 1998, English, Flemish Miniatures from the 8th to the mid-16th Century. The Medieval World on Parchment. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.

Sources

Smeyers, Jozef. “‘Als Ich Can.’ Een leven in het teken van de kunst en de geschiedenis.” in Cardon, Bert, and Van der Stock, Jan, and Vanwijnsberghe, Dominique, eds. “Als Ich Can”. Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers. Louvain: Peeters, 2002.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Sloane, Joseph C.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sloane, Joseph C.

Other Names:

Joseph Curtis Sloane

Gender: male

Date Born: 1909

Date Died: 1998

Place Born: Pottstown, Montgomery, PA, USA

Place Died: Chapel Hill, Orange, NC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): educators

Overview

Professor and chair of the Art Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1950-1974). Sloane was born to Joseph Curtis and Julia Moss (Sloane). He was raised in Pasadena, CA, and attended Princeton University, receiving his B. A. in 1931, and M.F.A. in 1934 (Princeton’s highest art-history degree at the time). The same year he married Marjorie Merrill. Sloane taught at Princeton and Rutgers Universities before joining the faculty of Bryn Mawr, succeeding Georgiana Goddard King as Department Chair in 1938. During World War II, Sloane served with the United States Navy in the Pacific theater, 1943-1946, rising to lieutenant commander. He wrote his dissertation under the distinguished medievalist Charles Rufus Morey in 1949, French Painting, 1848-1870: Artists, Critics and Traditions. In 1950 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recruited him to establish a department of art history of national rank. This he did, increasing the faculty from seven to twenty during his tenure. In 1951 his dissertation was published as a book by Princeton University Press. In 1952 he was awarded a senior Fulbright research grant. Sloane was elected president of the College Art Association in 1956. He became the director of the Ackland Museum of Art, the art gallery at the University, in 1958. In 1962 he was appointed as a trustee of the North Carolina Museum of Art. He retired as chair of the art department in 1974 and as director of the museum in 1978. He died at Carol Wood Retirement Community, Chapel Hill, at age 89. Sloane’s papers reside at the University of North Carolina Library, Southern History Collection. The UNC art library is named in his honor, a named professorship was established in his honor in 1998. Sloane is credited for taking a small art history department and building it into a faculty of national reputation. He raised funds for the buildings that house the present art complex (Hanes Art Center) and the art library which bears his name. As an art historian, he wrote the text used in many classes documenting Realism and Impressionism. In later years his work was overtaken and criticized by social art historians, Albert Boime among others, as ignoring academic artists and reducing their accomplishments to stereotype.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation] French Painting, 1848-1870: Artists, Critics and Traditions. Princeton University, 1949, revised and published as, French Painting Between the Past and the Present. Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 27. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951; French Nineteenth Century Oil Sketches, David to Degas: an Exhibition in Honor of the Retirement of Joseph Curtis Sloane Chapel Hill, NC: The William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, 1978; Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard: Artist of 1848. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962; “On the Resources of Non-objective Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19 no. 4 (Summer 1961) 419-24; “Delacroix’s Cleopatra.” Art Quarterly 24 no. 2 (Summer 1961): 124-8; “David, Robespierre, and ‘The Death of Bara’.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6 no. v74 (September 1969): 143-60; “Paradoxes of Monet [paintings in the Musée Marmottan, Paris] Apollo 103 (June 1976): 494-501; “Religious Influences on the Art of Jean-Louis Forain.” The Art Bulletin 23 (September 1941) 199-206; “Paul Chenavard’s Cartoons for Mural Decoration of the Pantheon.” The Art Bulletin 33 (December 1951): 240-58.

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. 59 mentioned; “New President of the College Art Association.” Art Journal 15 no. 3 (1956): 254-5; [obituaries:] Southeastern College Art Conference Review 13 no. 3 (1998): 219-220; Corbin, Julia. “Joseph Curtis Sloane, 89, Art Historian Emeritus.” News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) April 14, 1998, p. B6.

Slive, Seymour

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Slive, Seymour

Other Names:

Seymour Slive

Gender: male

Date Born: 15 September 1920

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Dutch (culture or style), museums (institutions), and Northern Renaissance

Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors

Overview

Dutch art and Rembrandt scholar; Director, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1975-1991. Slive was born to Daniel Slive and Sonia Rapoport (Slive). He attended the University of Chicago for all his degrees, gaining his A.B., in 1943. He served in the Naval Reserve during World War II and in active duty in the Pacific Theater, 1942-1946. Following the War, he married Zoya Gregorevna Sandomirsky in 1946. Slive returned to the University of Chicago to complete his Ph.D., wrting a dissertation under Ulrich Middeldorf in 1952 on the topic of Rembrandt’s contemporary critics. His initial teaching positions were at Oberlin College, 1950-1951 and then Pomona College, Claremont, CA, where he was assistant professor of art and chair of department, 1952-1954. During that time his dissertation appeared as the book, Rembrandt and His Critics, 1630-1730, 1953. In 1954 he joined the faculty at Harvard University, advancing to associate professor in 1957 and professor of fine arts in 1961. Slive and his Harvard colleague Jakob Rosenberg and Delft University professor E. H. ter Kuile were commissioned by Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner to write the Pelican History of Art volume for Dutch art and architecture, which appeared in 1966. He was appointed chair of the Department of Fine Arts in 1968 (through 1971). Slive issued the first volume of his catalogue raissoné on Frans Hals in 1970, published under the auspices of the Kress Foundation. He lectured as Slade Professor at Oxford University for the 1972-1973 academic year. In 1973 Slive received the appointment of Gleason Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard and Director of the Fogg Art Museum in 1975. Among his accomplishments as director were the founding of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum to house Harvard’s collections of ancient, Asian, Islamic, and (later) Indian art in 1985. In October 1989, Slive and Christopher Brown, deputy keeper at the National Gallery, London, mounted the first comprehensive exhibition of Frans Hals’ work outside the Netherlands, at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Slive reissued the Pelican History volume on Dutch painting, now exclusively on that medium and under his sole authorship. He retired emeritus from Harvard in 1991 as the Elizabeth and John Moore Cabot Founding Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. In 2001 he set out his second catalogue raissoné on a Dutch master, Jacob van Ruisdael. Slive’s students included Ann Jensen Adams, Alice Davies, Susan Kuretsky, William Robinson, Frank Robinson, Walter S. Gibson and Arthur Wheelock. Despite being known as a specialist himself, Slive encouraged broad knowledge among his students, remarking on occasion that “only donkeys have fields.” His methodology was strongly that of connoisseurship–as opposed to iconography prevalent in Dutch art-historical scholarship–and he frequently admonished iconographers for over-interpretation of pictorial symbolism. Perhaps for that reason, his Dutch Painting 1600-1800 volume gave lesser attention to (and came under criticism for giving short shrift to) the Dutch Mannerists such as Goltzius and Bloemaert (Liedtke, 2000). His reissue of the book in 1995 found competition as a university text with the shorter and less connoisseurship-driven works by Madlyn M. Kahr, Svetlana Alpers, and Mariët Westermann. Slive also retained a strong appreciation for reception theory, noting in his dissertation and book that, ultimate understanding of the formal stylistic elements of an artist’s oeuvre is impossible without knowing how it was viewed by his contemporaries. Slive was the first American-trained art historian to specialize in the history of Netherlands Baroque art.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography to 1995:] Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: Presented on his Seventy-fifth Birthday. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995, pp.17-21; [dissertation:] Rembrandt and His Critics, 1630-1730. University of Chicago, 1952, published as same, Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1953; and Rosenberg, Jakob. Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600 to 1800. Pelican History of Art 7. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966, revised, ed., (solely Slive) Dutch Painting 1600-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; Frans Hals. 3 vols. London: Phaidon, 1970-1974; Frans Hals. Munich: Prestel, 1989; Jacob van Ruisdael. New York: Abbeville Press, 1981; Jacob van Ruisdael: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

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. 48 mentioned; University of Chicago Alumni Association page, http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030529/alumni-award.shtml; Liedtke, Walter. “The Study of Dutch Art in America.” Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 41 (2000): 207-220; [personal correspondence, Walter Liedtke, February 2013].

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Six, Jan, Jhr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Six, Jan, Jhr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1926

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): aesthetics

Overview

Professor of general art history at the Amsterdam Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten (1890-1917); first professor extraordinarius (1896-1916) and first ordinarius professor of aesthetics and art history at Amsterdam University (1916-1926). Six was born to an old patrician family and was a descendant of the famous art collector and Amsterdam mayor Jan Six (1618-1700). His father, Jhr. Jan Pieter Six (1824-1899), was a numismatist. The younger Six attended the Gymnasium in Amsterdam and studied classics at Amsterdam University between 1875 and 1883. His curriculum included aesthetics and classical art history, taught by Allard Pierson. He also studied painting and sculpture at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Six continued study in Bonn, Germany, specializing in classical archaeology. In 1885 he obtained his doctorate at Amsterdam University under Pierson with a dissertation on the history of the appearance of the Gorgon in mythology and art, De Gorgone. The following years he traveled to Greece and Italy and published several archaeological studies. In 1889 he obtained a teaching position as privaatdocent of classical art history at Amsterdam University. The following year he was additionally appointed professor of general art history at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, succeeding J. A. Alberdingk Thijm. Six held this position until 1917. Soon after his appointment, he married Hieronyma Maria Antonia Fortunata Bosch Reitz (1867-?). In 1896 Six became professor extraordinarius of aesthetics and art history at Amsterdam University, succeeding Pierson. In his inaugural lecture, De geschiedenis der kunst van Grieken en Romeinen en hare plaats onder de akademische wetenschappen, he defended the position of art history in academic disciplines. From 1900 he broadened the curriculum at Amsterdam University to include contemporary art, leading to the appointment of Willem Vogelsang as privaatdocent for modern art history. He regularly published articles on various topics, including a number of studies on Rembrandt. In 1906, the three hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt’s birthday, Amsterdam University, on Six’s initiative, awarded honorary doctorates to several Rembrandt scholars, including Jan Veth, Abraham Bredius, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Wilhelm Bode, and Émile Michel. In the same year, Six was elected member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. In 1908, the Six family sold to the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum Johannes Vermeer’s De melkmeid (The Milkmaid, ca 1658-1660). Six wrote an article on Vermeer’s painting technique in hopes of preventing an overcleaning of the painting’s surface. When in 1917 Six obtained a full professorship at Amsterdam University, Elisabeth Neurdenburg became privaatdocent under him. In 1919 Six was elected Rector Magnificus of Amsterdam University. Throughout his career, Six also was active in the Dutch museum world. His work as a member of the Rijkscommissie voor het Museumwezen, established in 1919, was typical of his work with museums. In 1921 he donated his collection of Greek vases and pottery fragments to his Alma Mater; now part of the Allard Pierson Museum. The same year he also established the Six-foundation to maintain the Six family portrait collection housed in the family house in Amsterdam, a group including the famous portrait of Jan Six, painted by Rembrandt in 1654. In 1922 Amsterdam University appointed Willem van der Pluym, who had previously succeeded Six in 1918 at the Rijksacademie, as privaatdocent of the history of architecture. In 1924, Ferrand Whaley Hudig became privaatdocent of Italian art history. Six died two years later. He was succeeded by Hudig in 1928, who then obtained the position of extraordinarius professor of art history (excluding the classical period). Six was an advocate for learning by seeing, instead of learning from handbooks. His approach was associative and imaginative (Haspels, 1979). Six was among the first art professors to be given the official responsibilities of “art history.” Six was the first professor extraordinarius (1896-1916) of art history (Amsterdam). Willem Vogelsang was the first ordinarius professor of art history at Utrecht, while Wilhelm Martin was the first extraordinarius art history professor at Leiden, both serving the same years, 1907-1946.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] [Specimen literarium inaugurale] de Gorgone. Amsterdam: R. Kröber-Bakels, 1885; [complete bibliography:] Bibliographie der Geschriften van Jhr. Dr. Jan Six. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap, 1933, and Boissevain, U. Ph. “Lijst der Geschriften van Jhr. Dr. Jan Six.” Jaarboek der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen 1928-1929. Amsterdam, 1929, pp. 47-68; [inaugural lecture Amsterdam University:] De geschiedenis der kunst van Grieken en Romeinen en hare plaats onder de akademische wetenschappen. Haarlem: Enschedé, 1896; “De techniek van Vermeer in ‘Een meyd die melk uytgiet.'” Bulletin Nederlandschen Oudheidkundigen Bond, tweede serie 1 (1908): 1-5.

Sources

Boissevain, U. Ph. “Levensbericht van Jhr. Dr. Jan Six.” Jaarboek der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen 1928-1929. Amsterdam, 1929, pp. 1-47; Van Hoorn, G. “Levensbericht van Prof. Jhr. Dr. J. Six 1857-1926.” Handelingen van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden en Levensberichten harer afgestorven Medeleden 1927-1928. Leiden, 1928, pp. 129-144; F. W. Hudig in Brugmans, H., et al. Gedenkboek van het Athenaeum en de Universiteit van Amsterdam 1632-1932. Amsterdam: stadsdrukkerij, 1932, pp. 676-677; Haspels, C. H. E. in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979; Hoogenboom, Annemieke. “De introductie van kunstgeschiedenis aan de Nederlandse universiteiten: de voorgeschiedenis van de leerstoel van Willem Vogelsang.” in Bevers, Ton, et al. De Kunstwereld. Produktie, distributie en receptie in de wereld van kunst en cultuur. Hilversum: Verloren, 1993, pp. 88-89; Du Mortier, Bianca. Aristocratic Attire. The Donation of the Six Family. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000, p. 5; Marcus-de Groot, Yvette. Kunsthistorische vrouwen van weleer. De eerste generatie in Nederland vóór 1921. Hilversum: Verloren, 2003, pp. 49-56.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Sitwell, Sacheverell Reresby, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sitwell, Sacheverell Reresby, Sir

Other Names:

"Sachie"

Gender: male

Date Born: 15 November 1897

Date Died: 01 October 1988

Place Born: Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Towcester, Northamptonshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Baroque, Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Modern (style or period), and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Art critic, esthete and exponent of modernist and Italian baroque painting in England. Sitwell was the son of Sir George Reresby (fourth baronet of) Sitwell (1860-1943), a writer on gardens, and Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison (Sitwell) (c. 1869-1937). His family was distracted by legal issues resulting in his mother’s debts for which she was eventually imprisoned. Sitwell chose the life of an aesthete at age 17, adopting his mother’s spending habits for books, pottery, and Japanese prints. He also began writing poems, a pursuit he would follow his whole life. Sitwell attended Eton College (until 1916) joining the 5th Reserve Battalion, the Grenadier Guards at Chelsea Barracks, London for war service. Discharged in 1919, Sitwell briefly attended Balliol College, Oxford University, but never graduated. Instead, he moved to London with his older brother, Osbert (1892-1969). In 1919 he and Osbert organized the Exhibition of Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s Department Store. The show which introduced Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani to the public in England, came under praise from many modernist critics, including Roger Fry, who nine years before had introduced the Post-Impressionists to Britain in the same manner. Sitwell’s Southern Baroque Art, a work of prose privately published and essentially non-art historical, first appeared in 1924 and secured for him a reputation as a writer and art historian. It examined the arts (including music) of Italy and Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, unlike his earlier publications of poetry, was well received. In 1925 he married a Canadian debutante, Georgia Doble (1905/6-1980), whom he met in London. He established the Magnasco Society, a foundation devoted to the Italian art of the 17th and 18th centuries in the 1920s. Sitwell followed his first art book with German Baroque Art in 1927 and The Gothick North in 1929. He turned his attention to composers in the 1930s, writing biographies of Mozart (1932), Liszt (1934), and Scarlatti (1935). During this time his wife had a brief affair with Matisse scholar Georges Duthuit. In 1945, Sitwell returned to art with British Architects and Craftsmen. Among the office consonant with his family’s peerage that he held were justice of the peace, 1943, and high sheriff of Northamptonshire, 1948-1949. He wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) for ten months in 1950. Sitwell avoided social situations, which his socialite wife deeply missed; they both had affairs, but remained together throughout their lives. He became the sixth baronet in 1969 with the death of Osbert, who, distrusting Sacheverell’s extravagance, left the bulk of the estate to Sacheverells’ son, Reresby (b. 1927). For most of his life, the Sitwells lived in the family home, Weston Hall, in Northamptonshire, though the Sitwell’s owned a remodelled medieval castle near Florence, Montegufoni, left to them by their father. His sister was the writer and poet Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964). The bulk of his papers reside at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. In 1994, the National Portrait Gallery, London, held an exhibition of the art they influenced. Sitwell’s art writing, the best of which is on architecture, owes much to his skill as a prose writer. Together with Denis Mahon, Tancred Borenius and Anthony Blunt, he brought an interest to Italian baroque art to England, an art epoch which had been viewed as decadent by much of the British art establishment. Southern Baroque, in particular brought an appreciation to Rococo architecture which had been despised by the English-speaking public.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Ritchie, Neil. Sacheverell Sitwell: an Annotated and Descriptive Bibliography, 1916-1986. Florence: Giardo Press, 1987; Narrative Pictures: a Survey of English Genre and its Painters. New York: Scribner’s, 1938; Conversation Pieces: a Survey of English Domestic Portraits and their Painters. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1937; Southern Baroque Art: a Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th & 18th Centuries. New York: Knopf, 1924; Spanish Baroque Art, with Buildings in Portugal, Mexico, and Other Colonies. London: Duckworth, 1931; The Gothick North: a Study of Mediaeval Life, Art, and Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929; Canons of Giant Art: Twenty Torsos in Heroic Landscapes. London: Faber and Faber, 1933; Southern Baroque Revisited. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967.

Sources

Pearson, John. The Sitwells: a Family’s Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979; Mégroz, Rudolphe L. The Three Sitwells: a Biographical and Critical Study. London: Richards Press, 1927; Lehmann, John. A Nest of Tigers: the Sitwells in their Time. Boston: Little, Brown1968; Skipwith, Joanna. The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1994; Bradford, Sarah. Splendours and Miseries: a Life of Sacheverell Sitwell. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993; Parker, Derek, ed. Sacheverell Sitwell: a Symposium. London: B. Rota, 1975; Lees-Milne, James. “Sacheverell Sitwell.” in Fourteen Friends. London: John Murray, 1996; [autobiographies] All Summer in a Day: an Autobiographical Fantasia. London: Duckworth, 1926, Dance of the Quick and the Dead: an Entertainment of the Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1936, For Want of a Golden City. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973, Splendours and Miseries. London: Faber and Faber, 1943; Sitwell, Osbert. The Scarlet Tree, being the Second Volume of Left Hand, Right Hand! An Autobiography. London: Macmillan & Co., 1946; [obituaries:] “Sir Sacheverell Sitwell Dies at 90, Last of Trio of Literary Eccentrics.” New York Times October 3, 1988, p. B6; Lees-Milne, James. The Independent (London) October 3, 1988, p. 27.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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