Art Historians

Rickert, Margaret

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rickert, Margaret

Other Names:

Margaret Josephine Rickert

Gender: female

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1973

Place Born: La Grange, Brown, IL, USA

Place Died: Grinell, Poweshiek, IA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): British (modern), British Isles Medieval styles, Medieval (European), Medieval styles and periods, and Northern European Medieval styles

Career(s): educators

Overview

University of Chicago medievalist; authored the Pelican History of Art volume on medieval art in Britain. Rickert was the daughter of Francis E. Rickert and Josephine Newburgh (Rickert). At the death of her mother, her older sister and later medieval literary scholar, [Martha] Edith Rickert (1871-1838) helped raise Margaret. The younger Rickert graduated from Grinell College, Iowa, in 1910 becoming a high school principal in Greene, Iowa. She made an initial trip to Europe in 1914 which consolidated her interest in art history. After another teaching stint in Hillsboro, OR, she joined the photographic department of the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. Edith was now faculty at the University of Chicago and in 1923 Margaret made a second trip to England assisting her with her book on Chaucer. She remained in Europe, spending four years at the Villa I Tatti principally with Mary Berenson revising the regional renaissance art books written by Berenson’s husband, Bernard Berenson, which eventually appeared as Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1930. The elder Berenson was engaged at the time in writing an article for Monty James on medieval art; Rickert developed a methodology akin to Berenson’s during this time. She returned to Chicago in 1928 and the University were she continued to assist her sister and earn a master’s degree in art history in 1933. She published her first article (incongruously enough, on a Greek stele) in the American Journal of Archaeology the same year. In 1938 she received her Ph.D. from Chicago with a thesis on the reconstruction of an English Carmelite missal. She joined the art history department at the University the same year, replacing, in a sense, her sister who died also in 1938. During World War II, she moved to Washgington, D. C., to work as a code breaker for the U. S. Army Signal Corps until 1944. In 1948 she published a memorial volume of her sister’s work. About this time, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner contacted her to write a volume on medieval painting in Britain for the Pelican History of Art series. Pevsner was attracted to maverick art historians for the medieval; he was in the process of commissioning another untested scholar, Lawrence Stone, to write the volume on medieval sculpture in England. Rickert accepted the assignment, likely suggested by her British colleague Francis Wormald, and became both the only woman and only American to author a volume in the initial Pelican set. She researched the volume for most of her years at Chicago. She retired from the University in 1953 and the volume appeared in 1954. Rickert returned to teach at the University of Chicago between 1958 and 1960 during which time she published a facsimile edition and commentary, La miniature anglaise. Rickert mover to a retirement home in Grinell, IA in 1963 and worked on a second edition to the Painting volume, which appeared in 1965. After the flooding in Florence in 1966, she returned to Italy to assist in the restoration of art works. However, she suffered a stroke and return to Chicago and then Grinell. She died in 1973 and willed her body to the University of Iowa Medical School. Rickert employed a stylistic analysis methodology developed during the years spent at I Tatti. Her Painting in Britain monograph was remarkable for the breath of objects considered, everything from mural painting to manuscript illumination to stained glass and embroidery. C. R. Dodwell complained in his review of her lack of attention to iconography. The work has been largely replaced today by more specific studies on medieval painting.

Selected Bibliography

[master’s thesis:] A New Method of Analysis Applied to the Study of Manuscript Illumination. A.M., University of Chicago, 1933; [dissertation:] The Reconstruction and Study of an English Carmelite Missal. Chicago, 1938, published as The Reconstructed Carmelite Missal: an English Manuscript of the Late XIV Century in the British Museum (Additional 29704-5, 44892). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; Painting in Britain: the Middle Ages. Pelican History of Art 5. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books 1954; La miniature anglaise. 2 vols. Milan: Electa Editrice,1959-61; and Dean, Mabel, and McIntosh, Helen, Manly, John Matthews (editor). The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of all Known Manuscripts. 8 vols. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1940.

Sources

Stanton, Anne Rudloff. “Margaret Rickert (1888-1973) Art Historian.” in, Chance, Jane, ed. Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 285-294.

University of Chicago medievalist; authored the Pelican History of Art volume on medieval art in Britain. Rickert was the daughter of Francis E. Rickert and Josephine Newburgh (Rickert). At the death of her mother, her older sister and la

Richter, Louise Marie Schwaab

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richter, Louise Marie Schwaab

Other Names:

Louise Marie Schwaab Richter

Gender: female

Date Born: 1852

Date Died: 1938

Place Born: Bursa, Turkey

Place Died: Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Art historian and translator; novelist; wife of art historian Jean Paul Richter and mother to art historian G. M. A. Richter. Born in Broussa, Turkey which is present-day Bursa, Turkey. Schwaab’s father was a silk manufacturer and American Consul, stationed principally in Broussa (modern Bursa, Turkey). She traveled extensively with her family as a child, much of it in Asia minor. She came to London with her sister where she met and married the art historian Jean Paul Richter in 1878. Her knowledge of languages and the art-historical environment in which she lived spurred her to translate the early works of German art history into English as well as write volumes of her own. She and her husband had two daughters, both of whom became art historians as well, Irma A. Richter, born in 1876, and Gisela M. A. Richter born in 1886. In 1883 she translated one of the most important works of art methodology, the connoissuership manual and manifesto of Giovanni Morelli, thereby bringing Morelli’s method to English readers. In 1901 she issued a small volume in the series on “art cities” of Siena. She issued another translation of Hermann Knackfuss’ Rubens in 1904. Her survey of the art of Chantilly appeared in 1913. In 1931 she moved to Lugano where she died shortly after her husband.

Selected Bibliography

Chantilly in History and Art. London: J. Murray, 1913; Siena. Berühmte Kunststätten 9. Leipzig: Berlin, E. A. Seemann, 1901; [Translations:] Knackfuss, Hermann. Rubens. Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1904; Morelli, Giovanni. Italian Masters in German Galleries. A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1883.

Sources

Richter, Jean Paul. Diaries, 1873-1932. Duke University Special Collections Library; Who Was Who Among English and European Authors, 1931-1949. vol. 3. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978, p. 1195; [obituary:] “Mrs. Richter.” The Times (London) January 13, 1938, p. 14.

Richter, Jean Paul

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richter, Jean Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1847

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)

Career(s): art dealers

Overview

Dealer and historian of Italian art; documentary scholar on Leonardo. Richter’s father was the distinguished Lutheran clergyman Karl Edmund Richter. The younger Richter also studied theology, school at Leipzig and acting as the tutor to the Landgrave Alexander Friedrich of Hesse. These student years afforded him much travel throughout Europe and the East. His knowledge of sites and travel brought him work writing for Karl Baedecker, the publisher of the famous travel guides. Richter discovered an interest in early Christian art and archaeology in 1869 during a trip to Italy. In 1876 he met the connoisseur-art historian Giovanni Morelli, who became a major influence on his career. Richter’s first publication, in 1878, on the mosaics of Ravenna established his authority in the field. The same year he married the daughter of an American Consul, Louise Marie Schwaab Richter, who would also write art history. Richter then turned to the Italian Renaissance–and particularly Morelli’s approach to it–the area which would be the majority of his scholarly efforts. Morelli provided letters of introduction for Richter when he moved from Leipzig to London in 1877. Richter wasted no time in furthering his scholarly profile. In the early 1880s he published catalogs for the collections of Dulwich College Gallery and the National Gallery (Italian schools). In 1883 Richter issued his magnum opus, Literary Works of Leonardo, which constituted a re-examination and scholarly translation of Leonardo’s writings. Before Richter, the contents of Leonardo’s notebooks were virtually unknown; it was Richter’s accomplishment to publish these first in Italian and then in German- and English-language editions (Gilbert). His friendships among influential art historians included Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake and Ralph Nicholson Wornum of the National Gallery. Richter maintained a residence in Italy as well. In 1880 Richter introduced the young American art historian Bernard Berenson to Morelli, thus facilitating one of the more famous relationships in art history. Richter continue to write books on art. His The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art, 1904, written in conjunction with Alicia Cameron Taylor, focused on the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore. Richter retired to Lugano, Switzerland, where he and his daughter, Irma A. Richter, edited a second edition of the Literary Works of Leonardo. It appeared shortly after his death.

Richter’s daughters also became art historians. In addition to Irma, a Leonardo scholar, Gisela M. A. Richter became a prominent scholar of classical sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The less scholarly world knew Richter as a highly successful art dealer and collector. Through his business, based in Florence, Richter made several important discoveries and attributions including a Giorgioni painting. His collecting style for his personal collection was to own only one of an artist: when he purchased a better example, he would sell the lesser. As a dealer, Richter developed private collections for a number of important British patrons, as well as the Hertz Collection, now at the Palazzo Venezia, Rome and the collection of Henry W. Cannon, Jr., now Princeton University Art Musuem. He was among the growing number of art dealers willing to travel to auctions throughout Europe (as opposed to the more traditional practice of being offered works by potential sellers) to find the most important works. But the business ultimately tarnished some of Richter’s respect. In 1889 he rescinded an offer to sell a Palma Vecchio to the National Gallery in order to offer it to his long-time client, Ludwig Mond (1839-1909). Although the Mond collection eventually ended up in the museum, the powerful administrators of the Gallery, Frederic William Burton and Austen Henry Layard, never forgave him. Controversy continued to hound him, particularly shortly before his death when his 1935 publication of a manuscript by Battistella proved to be a fake. John Pope-Hennessy described Richter as “A good scholar but never a top-ranking connoisseur,” especially compared to Morelli (On Artists and Art Historians 328).

Selected Bibliography

Die Mosaiken von Ravenna. Beitrag zu einer kritischen Geschichte der altchristlichen Malerei. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1878; Catalogue of the Pictures in the Dulwich College Gallery, with Biographical Notices of the Painters. London: Spottiswoode, 1880; Italian Art in the National Gallery. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1883; edited, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883; Quellen der byzandtinischen Kunstgeschichte ausgewählte Texte über die Kirchen, Klöster, Paläste, Staatsgebäude und andere Bauten von Konstantinopel. Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, neue Folge ; Volume VIII. Vienna: C. Graeser, 1897; and Mond, Robert. La Collezione Hertz e gli affreschi di Giulio Romano nel palazzo Zuccari. Leipzig: Poeschel & Trepte, 1928; and Taylor, A. Cameron. The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art. London: Duckworth and Co., 1904; [manuscript diaries, 1868?-1884,] Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Watson Library link

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 33; Simpson, Colin. Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen. New York: Macmillan, 1986, p. 54; Pope-Hennessy, John. “Morelli and Richter.” In, On Artists and Art Historians: Selected Book Reviews of John Pope-Hennessy. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994, pp. 327-29; Dictionary of Art 26: 358; Gilbert, Creighton E. “Introduction.” The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. xx; :Seybold, Dietrich. Das Schlaraffenleben Der Kunst: Eine Biografie Des Kunstkenners Und Leonardo Da Vinci-Forschers Jean Paul Richter (1847-1937). Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014; [obituary:] “Dr. J. P. Richter – Italian Art.” Times (London) September 8, 1937, p. 14.

Richter, Irma A.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richter, Irma A.

Other Names:

Irma Richter

Gender: female

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1956

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

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Leonardo scholar; artist and translator; sister of and collaborator with art historian Gisela M. A. Richter. Richter was the daughter of art historian Jean Paul Richter. She studied at the Slade School of art, Oxford and in Paris. Although principally an artist, her knowledge of (and interest in) art history and languages led her to translations and writing about Leonardo and, with her sister, Gisela M. A. Richter, the curator of Greek art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, books on Greek sculpture. She taught (studio) art in Greenwich, CT, and in London. Her painting exhibitions included the Beaux-arts Gallery in London, 1909-28; the Salon in Paris; Goupil Gallery, London; the New English Art Club and the National Portrait Society.

Selected Bibliography

“Re-discovered painting by Pietro da Cortona.” Apollo 14 (November 1931): 285-7; “Proportions of the Apollo in New York.” Metropolitan Museum Studies 5 (June 1934): 51-4; “Earliest reference to the Leonardo drawings in the English royal collection.” Burlington Magazine 71 (September 1937): 139-40; Rhythmic Form in Art: an Investigation of the Principles of Composition in the Works of the Great Masters. London: John Lanev, 1932; [Translated and edited:] and Richter, Jean Paul. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1939; Leonardo da Vinci. Paragone: a Comparison of the Arts. London: Oxford University Press, 1949; Richter, Jean Paul, and Morelli, Giovanni. Italienische Malerei der Renaissance: im Briefwechsel von Giovanni Morelli und Jean Paul Richter, 1876-1891 Baden-Baden: Grimm, 1960; and Richter, G. M. A. Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths: a Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.

Sources

Petteys, Chris. Dictionary of Women Artists. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985, p. 597; [obituary:] Revue Archeologique 48 no. 6 (July 1956): 71.

Leonardo scholar; artist and translator; sister of and collaborator with art historian Gisela M. A. Richter. Richter was the daughter of art historian Jean Paul Richter. She studied at the Slade Scho

Richter, Gisela M. A.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richter, Gisela M. A.

Other Names:

Gisela Marie Augusta Richter

Gender: female

Date Born: 1882

Date Died: 1972

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical

Career(s): curators

Overview

Author and curator of Greek art, Metropolitan Museum, 1929-1952. Richter was the daughter of the eminent art historian Jean Paul Richter and Louise Marie Schwaab Richter, also an art historian. After settling for a time in London, the Richters lived in Rome and Florence before moving back to London in 1892. Gisela Richter attended the prestigious Maida Vale School for women. Lectures by Emanuel Löwy during study at the University of Rome around 1896 convinced her to study classical art. Richter was admitted to Girton College, Cambridge University, in 1901 where her don, Katherine Jex-Blake (1860-1951), along with Eugénie Sellers Strong, was the translator of elder Piny’s passages on the history of art. Forbidden to be degreed by Cambridge because she was a woman, Richter continued study at the British School at Athens, 1904-1905. Richter’s intelligence and learning attracted the attention of the School’s director, Robert Carr Bosanquet (1871-1935), and the American archaeologist Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871-1945). Hawes, as the first woman to direct an archaeological excavation, clearly understood the difficulties for a female to break into classical studies. Richter, who had not even been allowed to live at the British School in Athens, had published an article in the Annual of the British School at Athens (1905). Boyd moved to Boston in 1905 and convinced Richter her career lay there as well. There Richter met Edward Robinson, then director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. When Robinson moved to become the Assistant Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, he hired Richter for a temporary assignment to produce the catalog the newly acquired Greek vases. In 1906 the position was made permanent. Robinson and his agent John Marshall (1862-1928) added heavily to the ancient collection, aided with the newly established Rogers Fund. Richter was elevated to assistant curator in 1910, and began a publishing career on which her current fame is based. Using a strong connoisseur approach, Richter issued Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes in 1915. Unlike her colleagues, the books she wrote were not principally catalogs but surveys of the period. She became an American citizen in 1917. In 1921 she was part of a group to found the American Archaeological Club. She was made full curator in 1925, the first woman to hold the rank at the Metropolitan. In 1929 she issued Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, which saw numerous revisions and set her fame as an art historian. As full curator in charge of acquisitions, Richter added some of the most famous pieces of classical art to the Metropolitan. These included the Kleitias stand and Lydos krater, both in 1931, the famous “Metropolitan” (“New York”) kouros, 1932, the Landsdowne Amazon, 1932, a portrait of Caracalla, 1941, and a Hellenistic Sleeping Eros, 1943. Her 1942 book Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths and Korai: Archaic Greek Maidens, 1968, remain her most consulted work. Her sister, Irma A. Richter, an artist and art historian collaborated with her on several books. G. M. A. Richter also published on vase painting, jewelry and furniture. While subsequent scholarship has altered her dating somewhat, her chronology of work has not been seriously challenged. In 1946 she hired the young Dietrich von Bothmer. She retired from the museum in 1948 and held the title Honorary Curator until 1952, when she was named emerita. That year she moved with Irma to Rome where she continued to publish and revise her other books. The Engraved Gems of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans (1968-1971); a third edition of Kouroi (1970); Perspective in Greek and Roman Art (1970) and a fourth edition of Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (1970) all date from her retirement years. In 1961 she taught–her only formal teaching position–at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She left her personal papers to the American Academy in Rome; the documents of her years at the Metropolitan remain at that Institution. Richter, like her father, was strongly influenced by the work of Giovanni Morelli. His connoisseurship-style analyzed how particular artist’s rendered anatomical and costume drapery. Her approach to sculpture was to group objects stylistically together and, with the use of external documents and even vase painting, date them. In Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, Richter limited her conclusions to those based upon classical texts and observation, rejecting the Roman copy attributions. Overall, she saw the development of Greek sculpture as a progression from stylized to verisimilitude, for which she developed a precise, if not always accurate, chronology. Richter’s technique opened herself to acquiring forgeries. Between 1915-231 she acquired the so-called Etruscan warrior for the museum, which, despite an article by Massimo Pallottino debunking the eight foot soldier as a forgery from the Riccardi family of Oriveto, Italy, Richter remained unconvinced. The forgery were proven in 1961 by Harold W. Parsons.

Selected Bibliography

Korai: Archaic Greek Maidens: A Study of the Development of the Kore Type in Greek Sculpture. London: Phaidon, 1968; Kourai: A Study in the Development of the Greek Kouros from the Late Seventh to the Early Fifth Century B.C.. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon, 1960; The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks. 1st ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. 4th ed. 1970; “The Department of Greek and Roman Art: Triumphs and Tribulations.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 3 (1970): 73-95; The Engraved Gems of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans 2 vols. 1968-1971; Perspective in Greek and Roman Art New York: Phaidon, 1970.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 72; 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. 46 mentioned; Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 256-7; Richter, Gisela. My Memoirs: Recollections of an Archaeologist’s Life. Rome: privately printed, 1972; Crawford, John Stephens. “Gisela Maria Augusta Richter.” American National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Ingrid E. M. Edlund. “Gisela Marie Augusta Richter (1882-1972): Scholar of Classical Art and Museum Archaeologist,” In Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979. Claire R. Sherman, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 275-300; Allsebrook, Mary, and Allsebrook, Annie. Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1992; Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 123-128; [obituary:] Vermeule, Cornelius C. “Gisela M. Richter.” The Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 329.

Author and curator of Greek art, Metropolitan Museum, 1929-1952. Richter was the daughter of the eminent art historian Jean Paul Richter and Louise Marie Schwaab Richter, also an art historian. After

Richardson, Ted

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richardson, Ted

Other Names:

Ted Richardson
E. P. Richardson
Edgar Preston Richardson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1985

Place Born: Glens Falls, Warren, NY, USA

Place Died: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American)

Overview

Americanist art historian and director of the Detroit Institute of Art, 1945-1962. Richardson was the son of George Lynde Richardson and Grace Belcher (Richardson). He graduated from Williams College cum laude in 1925, studying further at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts between 1925-1928. In 1930 he joined the Detroit Institute of Art in its education department. He married Constance Coleman the following year. Richardson was appointed assistant director of the Institute in 1933, effectively running the institution while its director, Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner, lived in his native Germany. He joined the Art Quarterly as its editor in 1938 (remaining until 1967). His first book, The Way of Western Art, appeared in 1939. He followed this by American Romantic Painting in 1944. In 1945 Richardson succeeded Valentiner as director. His first honorary doctorate was awarded from Williams College in 1947. A monograph on Washington Alston appeared in 1948. While researching American art, Richardson noted the difficulty in finding the support documents to American painting, such as artists’ diaries, contracts, letters and other information. In 1954 he convinced the Detroit businessman and collector Lawrence A. Fleischman (1925-1997) to fund a collection center for this material, named the Archives of American Art. The Archives became the major center for primary-source support material of American art. Richardson published his landmark book on American Art: the Story of 450 Years in 1956. The book was one of the first synthetic treatments of American art and set the foundation for the study of the subject. In 1962 Richardson left the DIA to become the director of the Henry Francis Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Another survey of American art, A Short History of American Painting, was published in 1963. That year, too, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Delaware and became chairman of the Smithsonian Art Commission (to 1966). He remained at the Winterthur until 1966. During this time he met John D. Rockefeller III (1906-1978) and became the millionaire’s art advisor until Rockefeller’s death. In 1970 the Smithsonian Institution assumed responsibility for the Archives of American Art. The same year he joined the advisory committee for the American Art Journal. In 1982 he authored the catalog entries for the National Gallery of Art exhibition on Charles Wilson Peale along with Lillian B. Miller. He suffered a series of strokes in the retirement home and died at age 82. Nearly all of his books were enlarged and reissued by himself. Richardson’s Painting in American has largely been superseded by later books which incorporate women, minority and non-Western-tradition art. However, his book stands among the first to seriously look at documentary evidence for American art as a principal of evaluation.

Selected Bibliography

Washington Allston: A Study of the Romantic Artist in America. Chicago: 1948;
American Romantic Painting. New York: E. Weyhe c1944;
and Sellers, Coleman, and Miller, Lillian B. and Hindle, Brooke. Charles Willson Peale and his World. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983;
Painting in America: the Story of 450 Years. New York: Crowell, 1956;
The Way of Western Art, 1776-1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.

Sources

[obituaries:] McGill, Douglas. C. “Edgar Richardson, 82, Dies;
Art Historian and Archivist.” New York Times, March 29, 1985, p. A20;
McCoy, Garnett. “Edgar P. Richardson: An Appreciation.” Archives of American Art Journal 25, no. 1/2 (1985): 2;
“In Memoriam: Edgar Preston Richardson (1902-1985).” American Art Journal 17, no. 2 (Spring, 1985): 92-93.
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.

Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder

Gender: male

Date Born: 1665

Date Died: 1745

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Bloomsbury, Camden, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship

Career(s): art collectors, art critics, and artists (visual artists)

Overview

Collector, artist and art writer; first to use the term “connoisseur.” Richardson’s principal vocation was as a portrait painter. His early writing focused on art theory, such as An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). It is today considered the first important treatise on the subject by an English writer. In 1719 he wrote An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting and an Argument in Behalf of the Science of the Connoisseur. Richardson’s son, also named Jonathan (1694-1771), traveled to Italy in 1721 where he made copious and careful notes of the monuments he saw. The elder Richardson compiled these into a major early art history and travel guide, useful for much of the English speaking world taking the “grand tour”: An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Picture in Italy (1722). The treatise was republished with other works by the Richardsons in a French language edition in 1728. Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the painter theorist Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) mention it as an inspirational work. The work became so popular among the wealthy class that it virtually function as a “wish list” for those assembling collections. The Richardson’s demonstrated the value of common-sense attitude toward art. In terms of classical sculpture, the correctly surmised that multiple copies of ancient work indicated, not an original among copies, but that all were copies of a lost original. They sensed that originals might be gleaned from coinage and recognized, for example, the Knidian Aphrodite of the Belvedere was in fact the well-known statue of Praxiteles appearing on a coin of the reign of Caracalla. They were true connoisseurs, whose eyes told them as much about the truth of classical art as the known history.

Selected Bibliography

“The Connoisseur.” In The Works of Mr. Jonathan Richardson. London: T. Davies, 1773. Facsimile, The Works. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969. Two Discourses. London: W. Churchill, 1719.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 47; The Dictionary of Art 26: 345-6; Wood, C. Gibson. Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (Disseration, Warburg Institute, 1982); Dictionary of National Biography 16: 1122-24; Haskell, Francis, and Penny, Nicholas. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 99-100; Gibson-Wood, Carol. Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art /Yale University Press, 2000.

Richardson, John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richardson, John

Other Names:

John Richardson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist, Cubist, Expressionist (style), and Post-Impressionist

Overview

Picasso scholar and biographer, partner of the art historian Douglas Cooper. Richardson’s father was Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., who served as Quarter-Master General in the Boer War and later founder of the famous Army & Navy Stores of England. Independently wealthy the younger Richardson at first considered becoming an artist. He made friends with both Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, Oxford, but at the outbreak of World War II, became ill and was excused from miliatry service to recuperate at this family home in London. Richardson worked as a designer writing art reviews for The New Observer until that became a full-time position. In 1949/1950 he met the art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, who was moving to a French chateau near Picasso with his art collection. Richard became Cooper’s significant other for the next fifteen years in France. By1960 Richardson and Cooper had split and Richardson moved to New York. His knowledge of Braque and Picasso and well as his entre into the workings of the art world helped him launched a Picasso retrospective in 1962 and a Braque retrospective in 1964. He was appointed by Christie’s auction house to found its New York office. Richardson worked at Christie’s until 1973 when he joined M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as Vice President in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting. Eventually he became Managing Director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art. In 1980, Richardson set out to write an art-historical biography of Picasso, securing the assistance of Marilyn McCully. The first volume of his A Life of Picasso was published in 1991, covering until 1906. It was nearly universally acclaimed as one of the most balanced biographies of the artist and won the Whitbread Award. Richardson was elected to the British Academy in 1993. He was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, his brief alma mater, in 1995. The second volume of the biography appeared in 1996, treating the seminal years of Cubism, 1907-1916. Volume three was published in 2007, ending with 1932.

Selected Bibliography

and McCully, Marilyn. A Life of Picasso. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991-2007.

Sources

Richardson, John. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:A Decade of Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. New York: Knopf, 1999;

Richardson, Emeline Hurd Hill

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richardson, Emeline Hurd Hill

Other Names:

Emeline H. Hill Richardson

Gender: female

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1999

Place Born: Buffalo, Erie, NY, USA

Place Died: Durham, NC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Antique, the, bronzes (visual works), Classical, Etruscan (culture or style), and metalwork (visual works)

Overview

Etruscan bronzes scholar; professor University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1968-1979. Hill was the daughter of William Hurd Hill and Emeleen Carlisle (Hill). Her mother’s reading to her of a juvenile version of the Odyssey captured the girl’s imagination for classical studies. She entered Radcliffe College, where she would obtain all her degrees, receiving an A.B. (in geology), in 1932. After graduation, she went to Athens and the American School of Classical Studies, but a virulent case of amoebic dysentery forced an evacuation to Rome in 1933. She resumed study at Radcliffe, receiving her A.M in 1935. During the 1935-1936 year she studied with Bernard Ashmole at the University of London. Ashmole suggested she study Etruscan votive bronzes, a topic she concentrated on for the rest of her life. Hill received her Ph.D. from Radcliffe in 1939, writing her dissertation on Etruscan bronzes, supervised by George Henry Chase and George M. A. Hanfmann, the latter a recent exile from Germany. In 1941 she accepted a position at Wheaton College, Norton, MA. She left in 1949 upon winning a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome where she eventually joined the excavation of Cosa in central Etruria. Her published Cosa reports described both temples on the arx and the buildings of the forum. At the Corsa dig she met fellow classicist Lawrence Richardson, Jr. whom she married in 1952, changing her name to Richardson. Returning to the United States in 1955, Richardson taught in the departments of classics and history of art at Yale University and in 1962 was visiting professor in the department of classics at Stanford University. Her husband was appointed to Duke University in 1966. After a year as a lecturer at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 1967, she settled as Professor of Classical Archaeology at the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1968. Richardson was Norton Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America for the 1976-1977 year. She retired from UNC in 1979 and appointed director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers at the American Academy in Rome for that year. Her two-volume work, Etruscan Votive Bronzes: Geometric, Orientalizing, Archaic, a definitive work on the subject, appeared in 1983. She was awarded a centennial medal of the American Academy in Rome and of the gold medal of the Archaeological Institute of America, both in 1994. Richardson was at work on a catalog of bronzes of the Classical period at the time of her death.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Etruscan Small Bronzes of the Archaic Period. Radcliffe College, 1939;

Sources

[obituary:] Richardson, Lawrence, Jr. “Emelne Hill Richardson, 1910-1999.” American Journal of Archaeology 104, no. 1 (January 2000): 125

Richardson, A. E., Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Richardson, A. E., Sir

Other Names:

Sir Albert Edward Richardson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1880

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Ampthill, Bedfordshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Architectural historian and architect. Richardson was the son of Albert Edmund Richardson, a printer, and Mary Ann Richardson (maiden name, unrelated). After attending the Boys British School, Highgate (north London), he was apprenticed in 1895 to the architect/engineer Thomas Page (1803-1877), joining the offices of Evelyn Hellicar (1898-1902), Leonard Stokes (1902-3), and Frank T. Verity (1903-6). He married Elizabeth Byers (1882/3-1958) in 1904. His architectural work Richardson combined “an enthusiastic devotion to the architecture of the past, especially the then neglected history of English domestic classicism from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth.” (Summerson). The publisher Harry Batsford suggested his first book on architectural history, written in collaboration with his architectural partner, Charles Lovett Gill (1880-1960), London Houses from 1660 to 1820, in 1911. The book was an early appreciation of the simplicity of Georgian urban design. In 1914 he issued his Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries a folio-sized history beginning with the Palladian movement through the mid-Victorian. In 1916 Richardson served as a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, stationed at the school of military aeronautics at Reading. Following the war, he succeeded Frederick Moore Simpson (1855-1928).as chair of architecture at the Bartlett school of architecture, University College, London. He remained in this position for twenty-seven years. As a lecturer, he was noted for his distaste of modern art and architecture in favor of the classical and Renaissance architecture, resulting in the Bartlett School architectural student’s designing in this style nearly exclusively. His private practice with C. L. Gill grew in the 1920s and 1930s. He was elected ARA in 1936. He continued to reject the continental Modern Movement (e.g., Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier). His 1938 The Art of Architecture co-authored with Hector O. Corfiato was a reactionary last-ditch effort to espouse traditional architectural principles. His partnership with Gill ended with the onset of World War II. Richardson moved with the Bartlett School to its temporary quarters at Cambridge, where he rose to full academician in 1944 in the Royal Academy. He became a professor emeritus in 1946. In the post-war years, he embraced preservationist movements. He was president of the Royal Academy of Architects in 1954 and in 1956 he was appointed KCVO. Restoration and repair of war-damaged buildings followed in a new architectural partnership with his son-in-law. Richardson died at his home, a late eighteenth-century house. He is buried in the churchyard at Millbrook, Bedfordshire. Richardson’s amateur status as an architectural historian frequently led to poor historical practices. Architectural historians of his era frequently attributed buildings directly to the few named architects known to be of that period. Richardson was the chief offender of this practice. He frequently signed certificates of authentication which hung in churches and country houses throughout England. The work of the more scholarly Howard Montagu Colvin brought this practice to an end.

Selected Bibliography

The Old Inns of England. London: B. T. Batsford, 1935; Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland: during the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries. London: Batsford, 1914; London Houses from 1660 to 1820: a Consideration of their Architecture and Detail. London: B.T. Batsford, 1911; The English Inn, Past and Present. Philadelphia & London, J.B. Lippincott,1926; The Art of Architecture. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956; Regional Architecture of the West of England. London: E. Benn, 1924; The Significance of the Fine Arts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.

Sources

Stamp, Gavin. “Richardson, Albert E.” Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects. vol 3, p. 556-57; Houfe, Simon. Sir Albert Richardson: the Professor. Luton: White Crescent Press, 1980; Summerson, John, revised Gordon, Catherine. “Richardson, Sir Albert Edward (1880-1964).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004; Hewlings, Richard. “[Howard Colvin] Architectural historian whose biographical dictionaries laid a foundation for all other scholars in his field .” Independent (London), January 1, 2008, p. 34.

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