Art Historians

Rich, Daniel Catton

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rich, Daniel Catton

Other Names:

Daniel Catton Rich

Gender: male

Date Born: 16 April 1904

Date Died: 15 October 1976

Place Born: South Bend, Saint Joseph, IN, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Art education reformer and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1938-58. Rich’s father, also Daniel Rich, was a lawyer, and his Martha Cotton (?) (Rich) a homemaker. Rich was admitted to the University of Chicago in 1922 where he received his bachelor of arts degree (English) in 1926. He moved to Harvard, where he was granted graduate degrees in English and art history, attending the classes of Paul J. Sachs at the Fogg Museum the following year. That year, too, he married Bertha Ten Eyck James (d. 1968) and accepted a job as editor of the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, the musuem’s house organ. His close working relationship with the museum’s director, Robert B. Harshe (1879-1938) led to his 1928 promotion to assistant curator of painting and sculpture in the museum. Rich organized exhibitions of the museum’s collections and wrote the catalogs, including “Paintings, Pastels, and Drawings by Odilon Redon,” (his first) in 1928. His position was reconfigured and retitled Associate Curator in 1930. When the museum received the important collections of Arthur Jerome Eddy, L. L. Coburn, and Martin A. Ryerson Collection, it was Rich’s job to research and promote these. He served on the depression era Federal art projects committee. Rich was placed in charge of the monumental loan exhibition of art to accompany the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition (World’s Fair). The massive exhibition of over 1,000 objects loaned from American museums required Rich’s skill both as an art administrator and researcher. His 1935 study of one of the most important pieces in the Art Institute, Seurat’s “La Grand Jatte” remains one of the most important studies of the artist and that work. Rich stood up for lesser-known artists as well. When the annual Logan prize was offered to an Ash-can style artist, Doris Lee, the donor of the prize objected to the lack of verisimilitude in the painting forming the “Sanity in Art Movement.” Rich defended the artist and the award, subsequently elevating the profile of Ms Lee. When Harshe died in 1938, Rich was appointed director of the Art Institute. Rich’s dual skills as art administrator and scholar led his to reorganize the Institute, forming new departments and hiring additional curators to staff them as well as reorganizing the existing departments. Sensitive to the museum’s mission to the city that supported it, he reorganized the Department of Museum Education to be a part of the museum’s curatorial decisions. Rich was convinced that the collector/historian Douglas Cooper plagiarized his book on Douanier Rousseau (1942), in an article Cooper had written on the artist in the Burlington Magazine, for which he publicly took Cooper to task. In one of his many astute hires, Rich offered a foundering Chicago dealer of modern art, Katharine Kuh, a position running the museum’s public-relations office while its personnel were on wartime duty. Her talents helped public acceptance of modern art in Chicago. She and Rich conducted an affair which lasted the rest of their lives. After the war, Rich mounted several shows of German art discovered in the salt mines in Germany where they had been housed for safekeeping. In 1947 Rich was again the center of an anti-modernist attack. Michigan Congressman George A. Dondero (1883-1968) denouced Rich as a Communist in 1947, contending that Rich encouraged “international art thugs” bent on destroying American art and culture. Rich’s acquisitions for the Institute included Picasso’s Portrait of D. H. Kahnweiler and Matisse’s Bathers by a River. In 1952 he authored the volume on Degas for the Abrams series on artists, Library of Great Painters (renamed, Great Art of the Ages for the 1969 edition). In 1958, perhaps because of criticism not to exhibit Winston Churchill’s paintings at the Art Institute, whom Rich termed “amateurish”, Rich left the Art Institute to become the director of the Worcester Art Museum, in Worcester, Massachusetts. As he had done in Chicago, Rich doubled the size of the education department, added to holdings of twentieth-century art, and created a photography collection. This doubled the museum’s membership. After his wife’s death in 1968, Rich retired from the Worcester museum in 1970 and moved to New York City, where Kuh, now lived, and they resumed their relationship. He died there of cancer in 1976.

Selected Bibliography

and Morgan, Charles H. George Bellows: Painter of America. New York: Reynal, 1965; edited. McBride, Henry. The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms of Henry McBride. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1975; Edgar-Hilaire-Germain Degas. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1952; and Herbert, Robert L. [Georges Seurat] Paintings and Drawings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958; Henri Rousseau. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 1946; and Schmid, F. Paintings, Drawings and Prints: the Art of Goya. Chicago: The Art institute of Chicago, 1941; Seurat and the Evolution of “La Grande Jatte.” Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935; Catalogue of a Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, 1934. Chicago: The Art institute of Chicago, 1934. The Etchings and Lithographs of Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1929.

Sources

“The Nervous Profession: Daniel Catton Rich and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1927-1958.” The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 19 no. 1 (1993): 58-79.; Shone, Richard. “Douglas Cooper: Unpublished Letters to the Editor.” The Burlington Magazine 128, No. 1000. (July 1986): 482; Smith, John W. “Rich, Daniel Catton.” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000; [obituary:] Dugan, George. “Daniel Catton Rich, an Ex-Director Of Museums of Art, Is Dead at 72.” New York Times October 18, 1976, p. 31; Kuh, Katherine. My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator. New York: Arcade, 2006, pp. xxi-xxii.

Rice, Tamara Talbot

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rice, Tamara Talbot

Other Names:

Tamara Talbot-Rice

Gender: female

Date Born: 19 June 1904

Date Died: 24 September 1993

Place Born: St. Petersburg, Russia

Place Died: Gloucester, Essex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style) and Russian (culture or style)

Overview

Scholar of Russian and Byzantine art; wife of art historian David Talbot Rice. Abelson was the daughter of Israel Boris Abelevich Abelson, a businessman and finance officer to the czar, and Louisa Elizabeth (“Lifa”) Vilenkin (Abelson) (d. 1954). Raised in privilege by governesses and (she was a god-daughter to Leo Tolstoy), she attended the Tagantzeva Girls’ School in St. Petersburg until the Revolution in 1917 forced her family to flee, she and her mother to Finland and eventually to London and Paris. In England, she briefly attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College and St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1921 before transferring to the Society of Oxford Home Students (now St. Anne’s College). Abelson met many young Oxford scholars through the salon of Herbert E. ”Doggins” Counsell, M. D. (1863-1946), including David Talbot Rice, her future husband, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and Harold Acton (1904-1994) both of whom she would remains friends. This group all formed to some degree the personalities for Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Her closest women friends were Christine Trew (1900-1980), later wife of sixth Earl of Longford, and Elizabeth Winifred “Jane” Martin (1902-1976), who later married the art historian Kenneth Clark. These women were the first generation of post-World War I female Oxfordites, disparagingly known as ”undergraduettes.” Abelson failed the Oxford Home Students and was dismissed in 1924. After returning to her now impoverished family in Paris, she worked variously as a film extra, journalist, and traveled to New York where she was employed as a researcher for Professor Carlton Hayes of Columbia University. In 1927 she married Rice. The couple spent the next three years in Paris, where David Talbot Rice was studying under the great Byzantinist Gabriel Millet. She traveled with him to Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Persia, and Turkey on his excavations. Some of the digs she supervised personally. She contributed to the exhibition catalog on Russian art held at Belgrave Square, London, 1935 in conjunction with her husband and Tancred Borenius. The co-written book The Icons of Cyprus was published in 1937. During World War II, Talbot-Rice worked in the Ministry of Information in London in the Turkish division. After the war, she resumed publishing, with The Scythians in 1957, The Seljuks in Asia Minor in1961, and Everyday Life in Byzantium in 1967. Her final book, in 1970, was biography, Elizabeth Petrovna, empress of Russia, the first full biography of the ruler in English (and notable for its unusually positive view). After her husband’s death in 1972 she began memoirs (published in fragmentary form in 1996 by her daughter). She died at the Talbot-Rice home in Gloucester.

Selected Bibliography

and Rice, David Talbot. The Icons of Cyprus. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1937; and Rice, David Talbot. Icons and their Dating: a Comprehensive Study of their Chronology and Provenance. London : Thames and Hudson, 1974; Icons. London: Batchworth Press, 1959; Ancient Arts of Central Asia. New York: Praeger, 1965; A Concise History of Russian Art. New York: Praeger, 1963; Czars and Czarinas of Russia. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1968; and Borenius, Tancred, and Rice, David Talbot. Russian Art. London: Gurney and Jackson, 1935; The Scythians. New York: F.A. Praeger, 1957; The Seljuks in Asia Minor. New York: Praeger 1961; and Rice, David Talbot. Icons: the Natasha Allen Collection. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1968;

Sources

Talbot-Rice, Elizabeth, ed. Tamara: Memoirs of St. Petersburg, Paris, Oxford and Byzantium. London: Murray, 1996; Waugh, Evelyn. A Little Learning: the First Volume of an Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964; Powell, Anthony. Infants of the Spring. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976; Tarr, Roger. “Talbot-Rice, (Elena) Tamara.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; [obituaries:] Knox, James. The Independent September 29, 1993; Ballance, Selina. The Guardian October 2, 1993; The Times (London) October 14, 1993.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Rice, David Talbot

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rice, David Talbot

Other Names:

David Talbot Rice

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 July 1903

Date Died: 12 March 1972

Place Born: Gloucestershire, England, UK

Place Died: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style) and Medieval (European)

Overview

Byzantinist and University of Edinburgh professor art. Born to Henry Charles Talbot-Rice (1862-1931) and Cecil Mary Lloyd (d. 1940) a landed family, Rice attended Eton before studying archaeology and anthropology at Christ Church, Oxford University. Talbot-Rice formed part of the salon of Herbert E. ”Doggins” Counsell, M.D., (1863-1946), where members of the Oxford University Dramatic Society met for cocoa on most days of the week. Through Counsell Talbot Rice met Tamara Talbot Rice, a Russian-born Oxford archaeology student, and Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. This circle formed the original inspiration for Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Talbot Rice graduated in 1925 and joined the Oxford Field Museum excavation at Kish, Iraq. He first visited Mount Athos with the art critic and amateur Byzantinist Robert Byron (1905-1941) in 1926, whose account Bryon chronicled in his book, The Station (1926). Rice married Abelson in 1927. The same year he joined the British Academy excavation of the Hippodrome and the “Great Palace” of Constantinople, cementing a life-long fascination to Byzantine studies. His visit to Trebizond, initially in 1928, would lead to his monograph on the topic, Byzantine Painting at Trebizond, eight years later. He studied with Gabriel Millet at the Collège de France. In 1930, he published The Birth of Western Painting with Byron. A pioneering study of Byzantine glazed pottery with the same title, was his first sole publication. When Samuel Courtauld endowed the art history institute which bears his name at the University of London, Rice was one of the first to be appointed a lecturer in 1932. That year, too, he co-directed with Gerald Reitlinger the Oxford excavations at Hira (modern Iraq). In 1934 he was appointed Watson Gordon professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University, succeeding Herbert Read, though only thirty-one. He remained at Edinburgh for thirty-seven years, maintaining his Courtauld Institute appointment until 1938. In 1934 the Talbot-Rices traveled across Persia preceded Byron and Christopher Sykes (1907-86) which Byron commemorated in his The Road to Oxiana. In 1935 Rice brought out his Byzantine Art, a primer on the topic still used in survey courses today. The same year he contributed to an exhibition catalog (later published as a book) on Russian art with Tamara and Tancred Borenius. During World War II, Rice served as head of the Near East Section of military intelligence as a colonel. Returning to Scotland after the war, he established an Honors degree at Edinburgh in art history and studio art combined. Between 1967-1971 he was Vice Principal of the University. He assisted in restoring the church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, which was his last book before his death. A gentleman academic, he bred cattle until academic duties consumed too much of his time. Often described as an “amateur” in the great English sense of the term, Rice was devoted to the discipline art history without the competitive instinct of many academics.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975, pp. 317-325; and Byron, Robert. The Birth of Western Painting: a History of Colour, Form, and Iconography Illustrated from the Paintings of Mistra and Mount Athos, of Giotto and Duccio, and of El Greco. London: G. Routledge, 1930; and Rostovtzeff, Michael Ivanovitch, and Rice, Tamara Talbot. Caravan Cities. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932; Byzantine Art. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1935; and Borenius, Tancred, and Rice, Tamara Talbot. Russian Art. London: Gurney and Jackson, 1935; and Millet, Gabriel. Byzantine Painting at Trebizond. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1936; and Rice, Tamara. The Icons of Cyprus. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1937; revised, Lethaby, William R. Medieval Art, from the Peace of the Church to the Eve of the Renaissance, 312-1350. 2nd ed. New York: Nelson, 1949; English Art, 871-1100. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; Yugoslavia: Mediaeval Frescoes. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1955; The Beginnings of Christian Art. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1957; ed., The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors. Second Report. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1958: 52-104; Icons: the Natasha Allen Collection. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1968; The Art of Byzantium. London: Thames and Hudson, 1959; Byzantine Icons. London: Faber and Faber, 1959; Constantinople from Byzantium to Istanbul. New York: Stein and Day, 1965; Dark Ages: the Making of European Civilization. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965, [published in the United States as] The Dawn of European Civilization: the Dark Ages. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966; Byzantine Painting: the Last Phase. New York: Dial Press, 1968; The Church of Haghia Sophia at Trebizond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Russell Trust, 1968; Byzantine Art. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1968; Icons and their Dating: a Comprehensive Study of their Chronology and Provenance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.

Sources

[unpaginated i-ix]; Byron, Robert. The Station, Athos: Treasures and Men. New York: Knopf, 1928; Waugh, Eveyln. A Little Learning. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964, pp.198, 200; Roberton, Giles. “David Talbot Rice as Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art.” Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975; [obituaries:] “Prof David Talbot Rice, An Authority on Byzantine Art.” The Times [London] March 15, 1972, p. 16; Runciman, Steven. “David Talbot Rice.” The Burlington Magazine 114 no. 832. (July 1972): 481.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Ricci, Seymour de

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ricci, Seymour de

Other Names:

Seymour Montefiore Robert Rosso de Ricci

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1942

Place Born: Twickenham, Richmond upon Thames, Greater London, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), Frankish (culture or style), Merovingian (culture or style), papyrology, and tapestries

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Bibliographer, papyrologist, collector, and historian of Merovingian tapestries. De Ricci was the son of James Herman de Ricci (1847-1900), a lawyer and one-time colonial judge, and Helen Montefiore (c.1860-1931). His parents divorced in 1890, de Ricci being raised in Paris by his mother. He was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly between 1890 and 1898 and admitted to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne, gaining his bachelier ès lettres in 1897 and his licence in 1901. In 1897 he published an inventory of the Roman inscriptions in Côtes-du-Nord, Brittany. There he met Émile Guimet (1836-1918), and Salomon Reinach. He and Reinach, the director of the Musée National des Antiquités, founder of the École du Louvre and a member of the Institut de France became close friends, Reinach introducing the young Ricci to social-scholarly world of continental Europe. In 1901 de Ricci became a French citizen. After being turned down for a post in the museum of antiquities in Alexandria in 1902, he turned to the life of a private scholar. He married Jenny Gabrielle Thérèse Dreyfus (c.1886-c.1938) during this time. Until the 1920s, most of de Ricci’s scholarly work was in Egyptology and epigraphy. Already, however, his interest in bibliography was blossoming. He suggested in 1906 the creation of a corpus and inventory of editions of the early English printer John Caxton to the Bibliographical Society of Oxford (published 1909). In 1911 a similar catalogue raisonné of the copies of Mayence (1445-1467) appeared. He wrote the sixth edition revision of the Guide de l’amateur de livres à gravures du XVIIIe siècle of Henry Cohen (1806-1880) in 1912. Throughout his life, de Ricci demonstrated that he could use iconography creatively to date and catalog objects. His Twenty Renaissance Tapestries from the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection (1913) established a chronology of the Merovingian weavings through the head-dress of the women depicted. In the 1920’s de Ricci began cataloging medieval and renaissance manuscripts, which his fame today is based. He was commissioned to write the catalog of the Musée Cognacq-Jay, which purportedly took him only several weeks to write, in 1929. That year, too, de Ricci delivered the Sandars lectures (in bibliography) at Cambridge on “English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, 1530-1930, and their Marks of Ownership” published in 1930. de Ricci attempted an international art magazine, Art in Europe, appearing in 1914. After only three issues it was pre-empted by World War I. As a French citizen de Ricci was assigned a second-class chasseur à pied in the French army; he later also acted as an interpreter for the British. He divorced after the war, remarrying in 1920 Delphine Levy Feher (c.1886-c.1977). de Ricci visited the United States as part of a group led by Reinach’s brother, Théodore (1860-1928), a classical scholar and numismatist during the early post-war years. de Ricci made excellent contacts in the states and thereafter made visits nearly every year to catalog the private collections there. These included John Clawson’s collection early English printed books, published 1924, and the collections of Mortimer Schiff (1877-1931), (both his Italian maiolica, 1927, and his French bookbindings, 1935). de Ricci continued his book personal book collecting and selling. His bilingualism and art knowledge made him an ideal correspondent for the New York Herald between 1929-32. His Handlist of Manuscripts in the Library of the Earl of Leicester, at Holkham Hall appeared in 1932. A second corpus, the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada was launched by de Ricci though the auspices of American Council of Learned Societies, taken over by the Library of Congress in 1929. In 1934 he adopted a similar inventory of manuscripts for Britain, sponsored by the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. With completion in sight, including the contents of the British Museum, he was once again pre-empted by war. In 1935 he donated his Voltaire letters to the Bibliothèque Nationale his Voltaire papers. The same year he was appointed an officer of the Légion d’honneur. de Ricci, in Paris for the fall of the city to the Nazis in 1940, secured his personal collection of manuscripts and letters in the Bibliothèque Nationale the same year. He died in Suresnes, on the perimeter of Paris, in 1942 and is buried at Père Lachaise in Paris. His art was willed to the éunion des Musées Nationaux, and the remained of his books and manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Ricci’s inventory of British manuscripts remains, now in the Palaeography Room of the University of London Library, and in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. de Ricci’s auction sale catalogs were one of the largest private collections to be donated. Among his many art-historical friends and correspondents were Louis Réau and Bernard Berenson. de Ricci’s books on the provenance of rare books are still consulted todya. He created three reference books of manuscripts and rare books: Catalogue raisonné des premières impressions de Mayence, 1445-1467, Guide de l’amateur de livres à gravures du XVIIIe siècle, and Census of Medieval Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. de Ricci’s industry was amazing. TheCensus of Medieval Manuscript, amounting to three volumes and organizing 15,000 books, letters, and charters from a total of 494 libraries, took only eight years, beginning in 1935 (1937, and 1940).

Selected Bibliography

[excluding most book inventories]: and Davies, Norman de Garis, and Martin, Geoffrey Thorndike. The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna. Archaeological survey of Egypt (series). London, Boston: Offices of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1903-08; Catalogue of a Collection of Germanic Antiquities Belonging to J. Pierpont Morgan. Paris: Imp. de l’art, C. Berger, 1910; Samuel H. Kress Collection of Renaissance Bronzes. Flushing, NY: Paul A. Stroock, 1960; Catalogue raisonné des premières impressions de Mayence (1445-1467); avec une plance en phototypie. Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1911; Louis XIV and Regency Furniture and Decoration. New York: W. Helburn, 1929; Catalogue of Twenty Renaissance Tapestries from the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection. Paris: P. Renouard, 1913; edited, Cohen, Henry. Guide de l’amateur de livres à gravures du XVIIIe siècle. 2 vols. 6th edition. Paris: A. Rouquette, 1912; A Catalogue of Early Italian Majolica in the Collection of Mortimer L. Schiff. New York: s .l.,1927; A Census of Caxtons. Oxford: Bibliographical Society/Oxford University Press, 1909.

Sources

The Dictionary of Art; Ramsay, Nigel. “Ricci, Seymour Montefiore Robert Rosso de (1881-1942).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Gibbs, J. “Seymour de Ricci’s ‘Bibliotheca Britannica Manuscripta.'” Calligraphy and Palaeography: Essays Presented to Alfred Fairbank. London: Faber & Faber, 1965, pp. 81-91; [obituaries:] Goldschmidt, E. P. “Seymour de Ricci, 1881-1942.” The Library, 4th ser., 24 no. 1-2 (June-Sept 1943): 187-94; Porcher, Jean. “à la Bibliothèque Nationale: le legs Seymour de Ricci.” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 105 (1944): 229-33; éau, Louis. “Seymour de Ricci.” Beaux-Arts (January 20, 1943): 16; Adhémar, Jean. “Pour les historiens d’art: avec le legs Seymour de Ricci entre au Cabinet des Estampes une documentation pécieuse sur les artistes anciens et moderne.” Arts (9 March 1945): 1, 3.

Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker and Lee Sorensen

Ricci, Corrado

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ricci, Corrado

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1934

Place Born: Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): archaeology and museums (institutions)

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

Overview

Art museum director, administrator, art historian and archaeologist. Ricci initially studied painting but eventually received a law degree from Bologna in 1882. He worked briefly in library positions before accepting succeeding assignments in the Italian art administration system. These included director of Galleria Nazionale, Parma in 1893, director of the art gallery in Modena in 1894, superintendent of monuments in Ravenna in 1897 for two years before becoming director of the Brera museum in Milan in 1899. In 1903 he was elevated to director of galleries and museum in Florence, remaining there until he received the assignment of Consiglio Superiore di Belle Arti (director-general of antiquities and fine arts) in Italy, 1906-19. Ricci’s tenure as director included some of the most important archaeological excavations of the time. These included excavations of the Foro Romano (1898-1925) directed by Giacomo Boni (1859-1925), and the Baths of Diocletian. In 1911 Ricci was responsible the restoration and preservation of the imperial fora in Rome through his capacity as vice president of the committee. Though the archaeological finds were significant, Ricci was forced to destroy some of the fabric to allow for the Via dell’Impero. Ostensibly retired from public life, Ricci was elected the first president of the Istituto di archeologia Roma in 1922. Throughout his career, he issued many of his works in English first. Other works published in Italian were quickly translated in English and other languages. His publications enjoyed a strong following in Britain and the United States.

Selected Bibliography

Art in Northern Italy. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1911; L’architettura romanica in Italia. Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann Editore, 1925, English, Romanesque Architecture in Italy. London: W. Heinemann, ltd., 1925; Correggio. New York: F. Warne 1930; Pintoricchio (Bernardino di Betto of Perugia) his Life, Work, and Time. Philadelphia: W. Heinemann, 1892; Architecture and Decorative Sculpture of the High and Late Renaissance in Italy. New York: Brentano’s; Romanesque Architecture in Italy. New York: Brentano’s 1925; Antonio Allegri da Correggio: his Life, his Friends, and his Time. New York: Scribner, 1896; Baroque Architecture and Sculpture in Italy. London: W. Heinemann, 1912; Italian, Architettura barocca in Italia. Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1928; and Colini, Antonio Maria, and Mariani, Valerio. Via dell’impero. Rome: La Libreria dello stato, a. XI E.F. 1933; and Malaguzzi Valeri, Francesco. Catalogo della R. Pinacoteca di Brera. Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1908.

Sources

Ridley, R. T. “Ricci, Corrado.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 956; D’Onofrio, Mario. “Ricci, Corrado.” Dictionary of Art.

Rheims, Maurice

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rheims, Maurice

Other Names:

Maurice Rheims

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 January 1910

Date Died: 06 March 2003

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

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

Home Country/ies: France

Career(s): art collectors, art critics, and auctioneers

Overview

Auctioneer, art collector and writer on art. Rheims hailed from an Alsatian Jewish family. His father Léon Rheims, was a general in the French army, a close friend of Marshal Philippe Pétain, and a hero who suffered a gassing at Douaumont and was wounded at the battle of Verdun. His son, Maurice, rebelled against this accomplishment, failing to obtain a bachot (baccalauréat degree) at the lycée Janson de Sailly in six tries. He subsequently received degrees at the École du Louvre et de l’École des hautes etudes (Sorbonne). He began collecting at age 14 when he he bought a sculptured 15th-century oak pulpit canopy. He worked for several auction houses as an appraiser and auctioneer, joining the firm Hôtel Drouot in 1932. He met the art collector Nubar Gulbenkian who helped Rheims in his career. He was placed in charge of the 1941 dispersal of the important Gentilo de Giuseppe collection. Rheims, a Jew, had a particular aversion to the Nazis; an insult to an SS officer landed him in the camp in Drancy headed for the extermination camp at Belsen. Marshall Pétain, an old army friend of his father’s, released him. Unable to work at Drouot because he was a Jew, Rheims joined the Resistance smuggling Jews and Communists from France to Switzerland. He joined the Free French commando regiment of paratroopers commanding a parachutists group in Algeria. After the War, he married Lili Krahmer (1930-1996) in 1951. He returned to the Hôtel Drouot where one of his first assignments was to dispose of the estate of the Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring (1893-1946). He published La Vie Etrange des Objets, his first book, in 1960. In 1964 Rheims wrote one of the most synthetic books on fin-de-siecle art and the Art Nouveau, which he called L’art 1900, ou le style Jules Verne. It was quickly translated into English. The product of his fascination with the decorative arts, it remains a popular survey of the eccentricities of the style in all its numerous manifestations, decorative arts, fine arts and architecture. It was the only comprehensive book on the art style for twenty years. He founded the art magazine Connaissance des Arts in 1965.The following year Rheims, together with Giulio Bolaffi, launched a yearbook of modern art, Catalogue Bolaffi d’art moderne which lasted for only one issue. He retired from Drouot in 1972 and was elected to the Académie française in 1976. He divorced in 1980. In 1985 he returned to his tour de force topic of the art nouveau with a similar book, this time on the art nouveau architect of the métro stations in Paris, Hector Guimard (1867-1942). He also wrote a number of novels and a dictionary of coarse language, Les mots sauvages. In 1995 he surprised his countrymen and fellow French auctioneers by using Sotheby’s in New York to sell his Toulouse-Lautrec. His published memoirs appeared in 1997. Rheims’ work often focuses on the sensational issues of art. His Flowering of the the Art Nouveau, while superficial, remained the most comprehensive volume on this style of art for decades. As an auctioneer he was respected but had enemies and made blunders. The critic Renaud Matignon called him a “second-hand junk dealer in the ephemeral!” (Kirkup); his mis-identifying Poussin’s “Olympios and Marsias” as a work of the ‘school of Carache’ to the Louvre became a scandal, litagated for more than 30 years. Rheims, who spoke no English, lost a deal to buy the New York salesroom of Parke-Bernet because of that reason. In his lifetime he amassed a larger personal collection of art.

Selected Bibliography

La Vie Etrange des Objets, Paris: Plon, 1959, English, The Strange Life of Objects: 35 Centuries of Art Collecting & Collectors. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1961 (British title) Art on the Market: Thirty-five Centuries of Collecting and Collectors from Midas to Paul Getty. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961; L’Objet 1900. Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1964; L’art 1900, ou le style Jules Verne. Paris: Arts et metiers graphiques, 1965, English, The Flowering of Art Nouveau. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966 (British title:) Age of Art Nouveau. London: Thames & Hudson, 1966; [edited magazine] Catalogue Bolaffi d’art moderne. Paris: F. Hazan, 1966; La sculpture au XIXe siècle. Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1972. English, 19th Century Sculpture. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977; The Glorious Obsession. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980; Hector Guimard, archte. Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 1985, revised English, Hector Guimard. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1988; Greniers de Sienne: roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1987; and Barbarant, Olivier; and Mével, Jean-Pierre. Les mots sauvages: dictionnaire des mots inconnus des dictionnaires: écrivains des 19e et 20e siècles. Paris: Larousse, 1989.

Sources

Une mémoire vagabonde: la péhistoire que nous vivons. Paris: Gallimard, 1997; [obituary] Kirkup, James. “Maurice Rheims: Voltairean Writer and Auctioneer.” The Independent (London) March 10, 2003.

Reznicek, E. K. J.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Reznicek, E. K. J.

Other Names:

Emil Karel Josef Reznicek

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Poděbrady, Středočeský, Czechoslovakia

Home Country/ies: Czechoslovakia

Subject Area(s): Dutch (culture or style), Dutch Golden Age, Northern Renaissance, and prints (visual works)

Overview

Goltzius scholar; Professor of art history at Utrecht University. Reznicek attended high school at Nymburk and studied, between 1945 and 1948, history at the Univerzita Karlova (Charles University) in Prague. In 1948 he fled to West-Germany, from where he then moved to The Netherlands. At Utrecht University, he studied art history, from 1948 to 1953, under J. G. van Gelder, William S. Heckscher, Murk Daniël Ozinga, and G. J. Hoogewerff. While he was a student, he worked as an intern at the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Mauritshuis and at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, RKD), both in The Hague. In the latter institution he organized, in 1952, an exhibition of seventeenth-century drawings. In the same year, he became the head of the department of documentation and reproduction in the Institute of Art History at Utrecht University. In 1958 he was responsible for the Rotterdam-Haarlem exhibition catalog Hendrik Goltzius als tekenaar (Hendrik Goltzius as Draughtsman). In the same year he obtained a teaching position at the Institute. In 1961, he earned the doctor’s degree with his dissertation, Hendrick Goltzius als Zeichner. His adviser was J. G. van Gelder. Reznicek incorporated this study on Goltzius as a draughtsman in his 1961 two-volume illustrated monograph, Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius. This monumental work includes an introductory essay on Goltzius’ style, the iconography and the art theoretical aspects of his oeuvre, and its historiography, as well as the catalogue raisonné of 449 Goltzius’ drawings. In 1964, he was appointed lector of art history at Utrecht University. His inaugural lecture dealt with the recent reform of the art history curriculum. In 1966, after Van Gelder’s departure, Reznicek was appointed full professor. He was responsible for general art history after 1400, excluding architecture. He was a teacher of impressive scholarship. A connoisseur of drawing, he gave his students the opportunity to practice in cataloging and describing drawings in public and private collections. He regularly published in Dutch as well as in foreign periodicals. In addition to his tasks as a teacher and researcher, Reznicek increasingly became involved in administrative duties. He retired in 1985. His Festschrift, Was getekend. Tekenkunst door de eeuwen heen, appeared as the 1987 issue of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. It consists of ca. 40 papers in Reznicek’s field of specialization. To the 1991-1992 issue of the same serial, Goltzius-studies: Hendrick Goltzius 1558-1617, Reznicek contributed a survey of thirty years’ research on Goltzius. This included a preview of his own research on the drawings of this master rediscovered since his 1961 publication. In 1993, he published his new findings on more than 60 drawings in Master Drawings. In studying the diverse aspects of Goltzius’ oeuvre, Reznicek paid attention to cultural circumstances and the intellectual milieu of the artist. This reflects the scholarly approach of his mentor, J. G. van Gelder. Reznicek died in 2002. Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617). Drawings, Prints, and Paintings, the catalog that accompanied the 2003-2004 Goltzius exhibition (Amsterdam, New York and Toledo, Ohio), is dedicated to his memory.

Selected Bibliography

[For a complete list, see:] “Bibliografie E.K.J. Reznicek” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38 (1987): 11-13; [dissertation:] Hendrick Goltzius als Zeichner. Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1961; “Bij de vierhonderdste verjaardag van Hendrick Goltzius.” Hendrik Goltzius als tekenaar. Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-Haarlem: Teylers Museum, 1958, pp. 6-9; “Het begin van Goltzius’ loopbaan als schilder.” Oud Holland 75 (1960): 30-49; Mostra di disegni fiamminghi e olandesi. Catalogo a cura di E. K. J. Reznicek. Galeria degli Uffizi. Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1964; Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius. 2 vols. Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1961; [Inaugural lecture, Utrecht University, December 2, 1964:] Quo vadimus? Splitsing of synthese bij het kunsthistorisch onderzoek. Utrecht, 1964; KHI addio: Utrechtse kunstgeschiedenis, herinneringen aan haar prominenten. Utrecht: Stichting Vrienden van het Kunsthistorisch Instituut der Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1986; “Hendrik Goltzius 1961-1991 – een overzicht van dertig jaar onderzoek.” in Falkenburg, Reindert, Filedt Kok, Jan Piet, and Leeflang, Huigen (eds.) Goltzius-Studies: Hendrik Goltzius 1558-1617. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42/43 (1991-1992): 121-144; Hendrick Goltzius. Drawings Rediscovered 1962-1992. Supplement to Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius (1961). New York: Master Drawings Association, 1993; “Drawings by Hendrick Goltzius, Thirty Years Later. Supplement to the 1961 Catalogue raisonné.” Master Drawings 31, 3 (1993); “Hendrik Goltzius” Dictionary of Art 12 (1996): p. 881.

Sources

“Addio Rez.” “Addio Rez.” “Was getekend… Tekenkunst door de eeuwen heen.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38 (1987): 7-10; Leeflang, Huigen, Luijten, Ger, and others. Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617). Drawings, Prints, and Paintings. Zwolle: Waanders, 2003.

Reynolds, Graham

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Reynolds, Graham

Other Names:

Arthur Graham Reynolds

Gender: male

Date Born: 1914

Place Born: Highgate, Kent, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): miniature painting, miniatures (paintings), painting (visual works), and portraits

Overview

Scholar of John Constable and portrait miniatures. Reynolds was educated at Highgate School and Queens’ College, Cambridge. He joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1937. During World War II he served in Ministry of Home Security (1939-1945) and there met the painter and engraver Daphne Dent (1918-2002), whom he married in 1943. Reynolds joined the Victoria and Albert Museum after the war, issuing a catalog on Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver in 1947. His knowledge of British period dress resulted in a volume for the Costume of the Western World series in 1951. The second of his lifelong interests, miniature painting, manifested itself in his 1952 English Portrait Miniatures. He was promoted to Keeper (curator) of the Department of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (concomitantly with Engraving, Illustration and Design) in 1959, then of Prints and Drawings in 1961. Reynolds spent his career at the V&A studying and writing on the excellent collection of paintings by John Constable. His Catalogue of the Constable Collection, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, appeared in 1960 (with a revised edition in 1973). This was followed by Constable, the Natural Painter in 1965. He was a visiting professor at Yale University in 1968. Reynolds was a founding member of the International Advisory Committee of Keepers of Public Collection of Graphic Arts, instigated by Karel G. Boon in 1970. In 1974 he retired, accepting a position as a member of the advisory council of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1977-84. During that time, he selected the Constable works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Constable’s England” in 1983. The following year he published the first of his catalogues raisonnés on Constable, The Latter Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. A revised edition of his English Portrait Miniatures was issued in 1988. He was named an Honorary Keeper of Portrait Miniatures at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1994. Under the auspices of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at Yale University, Reynolds issued the second of his Constable catalogue raisonné, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable in 1996. He was knighted for his service to the royal collection in 2000. Reynolds was one of a number of curators who publicly opposed the “new art history” of the 1970s and 1980s that followed a closer (essentially Marxist-derived) political reading of art. His own writing in catalogs and texts avoids analysis in favor of documenting the works themselves.

Selected Bibliography

Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1947; Thomas Bewick: a Resume of his Life and Work. London: Art and Technics, 1949; Elizabethan and Jacobean [Costume]1558-1625. Costume of the Western World (series). London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1951; British Watercolours. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1951; English Portrait Miniatures. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1952; Painters of the Victorian Scene. London: B. T. Batsford, 1953; Catalogue of the Constable Collection. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1960; Constable, the Natural Painter. London: Cory, Adams and Mackay, 1965; Turner. Thames and Hudson, 1969; A Concise History of Watercolours. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971; Catalogue of Portrait Miniatures. London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1980; Constable’s England. New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983; The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 1984; Art in Context: a Selection by Graham Reynolds from the Ipswich Borough Council Museums & Galleries Collection. Ipswich: Ipswich Borough Council, 1992; The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art /Yale University Press, 1996; European Miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996; British Portrait Miniatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Miniatures in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen. London: Royal Collection, 1999; The Latter Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. 2 vols. Yale University Press, 1984; [book review] “The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt.” Apollo 124 (December 1986): 568; [book review:] “The New Art History.” Apollo 124 (October 1986): 376-7.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 515; Hodge, Gavin A. “Daphne Reynolds: Painter/Printmaker who Helped Revive the Mezzotint.” Independent (London), December 23, 2002, p. 12, 1203 ; Who’s Who in Art, 31st ed. 2004; and Andrews, Kieth, and Gere, Johan, and Magandrew, Hugh. “Keepership of Prints and Drawings.” The Burlington Magazine 115, No. 844 (July 1973): 469; Laing, Alastair, and Pointon, Marcia. “[Letters:] Labelling Mulready at the V. & A.” The Burlington Magazine 129, No. 1006 (January 1987): 28-29; “Profile: Graham Reynolds.” Apollo 80 (July 1964): 74.

Reymond, Marcel

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Reymond, Marcel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1981

Home Country/ies: Switzerland

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

Institution(s): Université de Genève

Overview

Italian Baroque

Selected Bibliography

Michel-Ange à Tiepolo. 1912.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 pp. 186, 405

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Italian Baroque

Rey, Robert

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rey, Robert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1964

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): French (culture or style) and Modern (style or period)

Overview

Eurator of the musée national d’Art moderne; professor at the école du Louvre; Seurat scholar.

Selected Bibliography

La Peinture français à la fin du XIXe siècle – La renaissance du sentiment classique.

Sources

Bazin 492; Secretan, Thierry, ed. 1914-1918, le temps de nous aimer: Robert, Denise et Victor, courriers de guerre. Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2012
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Eurator of the musée national d’Art moderne; professor at the école du Louvre; Seurat scholar.

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