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Art Historians

Pernice, Erich

Full Name: Pernice, Erich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1864

Date Died: 1945

Place Born: Greifswald, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): archaeology


Overview

Professor of Archaeology at the University of Greifswald 1903-1934.


Selected Bibliography

Die hellenistische Kunst in Pompeji,1925. Gefäße und Geräte aus Bronze, 1932. Pavimente und figürliche Mosaiken, 1938. Die Kunst des Altertums von W. Lübke, vollständig neu bearbeitet von E. Pernice, (16th edition of the original work) Esslingen, 1924.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 156-157.




Citation

"Pernice, Erich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pernicee/.


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Professor of Archaeology at the University of Greifswald 1903-1934.

Perkins, Frederick Mason

Full Name: Perkins, Frederick Mason

Other Names:

  • F. Mason Perkins

Gender: male

Date Born: 1874

Date Died: 1955

Place Born: Shanghai, Shanghai, China

Place Died: Assisi, Perugia, Umbria, Italy

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Collector and scholar of early Italian renaissance art; protégé of Berenson. Perkins’ parents were American missionaries in China where Perkins was raised, and although protestant was educated by Jesuits. As a young man he studied piano with Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915) in Vienna. He moved to Florence in the 1890s, then Assisi and finally Siena where he purchased Sassoforte, above Lastra Signa. There he met the expatriate English-speaking community studying in Italy and living inexpensively. These included R. Langton Douglas, then the Anglican chaplain, the historian William Heywood, and art historians Robert H. Hobart Cust Edward Hutton and Charles Fairfax Murray. In 1898 he met Bernard Berenson and became one of Berenson’s earliest disciples. In 1902 Perkins issued his a book on Giotto, which, though he later repudiated it, influenced much of subsequent art history. Berenson later claimed that Mary Berenson, his wife, was the actual author Perkins’ first article on Andrea del Castano for the Burlington Magazine as well as much of Perkins’ 1902 book on Giotto. The truth at least was that in later years Mary greatly favored Perkins’s wife, Lucy Olcott, against the philandering Perkins. Perkins married Olcott, who was working with Heywood on the Guide to Siena, in 1903. Perkins wrote the comments on the artwork to the Guide. Perkins began contributing to the Milanese art periodical Rassegna d’Arte, founded in 1901, liberally. Lucy Perkins an employee at the Metropolitan, and later an art dealer, became Berenson’s personal secretary for 1909-1910 at Mary’s suggestion. At about the same time, Mason Perkins had been retained by Berenson to do the initial dealing with Italian picture dealers for Berenson’s clients in the United States. Perkins was also engaged in writing annotation to the new De Vere translation of Vasari’s Vite. But Perkins was unable to finish the project. Only his annotated volume of Vasari’s life of Pietro Lorenzetti appeared in 1912. In 1928 Mason Perkins joined the Roman Catholic church, adding “Francis” to his name. After Lucy Olcott’s death, Perkins married the Britisher Irene Vavasour Elder. The two moved from Florence to Assisi where they purchased a house in the Piazza Vescovado. During World War II, Irene and Mason Perkins were interned in Perugia, and upon release, hosted Allied soldiers in the months following the war. Perkins died in 1955 and is buried in the Camposanto of Assisi. He willed his personal collection to the Sacro Convento of Sanfrancesco Assisi at his death. He retained his United States citizenship his entire life, where his kept a small fortune in American banks, redirected to the poor of Assisi. Perkins’ Giotto book weighed in on the Rucellai Madonna debate ascribing it to a follower of Duccio. In later years he repudiated much of his thought on Giotto. His conclusions, including that none of the upper and lower frescos of the church at Assisi were by the master, was to have been incorporated in his edition of Vasari, which never appeared.


Selected Bibliography

Giotto. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1902. [unpublished essays on Giotto and the Assisi chapel] Appendix. Hutton, Edward. Assisi and Umbria Revisited. 1953.Pope-Hennessy: “In writing this volume I have had one supreme advantage, the friendship and advice of Mr. F. Mason Perkins. With the greatest generosity he has allowed me to draw on his unexampled knowledge of Sienese painting…. This book as a whole owes much to Mr. Perkins’s encouragement and inspiration…. Among those to whom I have applied for advice on questions of varying importance I must thank particularly Capt. Langton Douglas.” [John Pope-Hennessy, Giovanni di Paola, Chatto and Windus, London, 1937, pp. vii-viii]To Mr. F. Mason Perkins, who has perhaps a more intimate knowledge of, and a greater intuitive sympathy for, Sassetta’s style than any other living critic…I also owe much…. In the nature of things it is impossible to record here individually the many other scholars and officials whose help I have received, but I must nevertheless recall the name of…Captain Langton Douglas. [John Pope-Hennessy, Sassetta, Chatto and Windus, London, 1939, unpaged vii]


Sources

Douglas, Claire, and [reply] Pope-Hennessy, John. “On R. Langton Douglas.” New York Review of Books 34 no. 12 (July 16, 1987): ; Simpson, Colin. Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen. New York: Macmillan, 1986; Zeri, Federico. La collezione Federico Mason Perkins. Turin: U. Allemandi, 1988; Samuels, Ernst. Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoiseur. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979, p. 311; [obituary:] Hutton, Edward. “F. Mason Perkins.” Burlington Magazine 97 (December 1955): 391-92.




Citation

"Perkins, Frederick Mason." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/perkinsf/.


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Collector and scholar of early Italian renaissance art; protégé of Berenson. Perkins’ parents were American missionaries in China where Perkins was raised, and although protestant was educated by Jesuits. As a young man he studied piano with Theod

Perkins, Charles C.

Full Name: Perkins, Charles C.

Other Names:

  • Charles Callahan Perkins

Gender: male

Date Born: 1823

Date Died: 1886

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and sculpture (visual works)

Institution(s): Boston Art Club


Overview

His book, Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture (1883) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.





Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Perkins, Charles C.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/perkinsc/.


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His book, Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture (1883) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E.

Full Name: Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E.

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Spain


Overview

He collaborated with Eleanor Sayre on the 1989 exhibition “Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment.”






Citation

"Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/perezsancheza/.


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He collaborated with Eleanor Sayre on the 1989 exhibition “Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment.”

Pepper, D. Stephen

Full Name: Pepper, D. Stephen

Other Names:

  • David Jonathan Stephen Pepper

Gender: male

Date Born: 1937

Date Died: 2000

Place Died: Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Scholar of the Italian baroque and especially Guido Reni; collector. Pepper studied at Columbia University under Howard Hibbard. Interested in the contemporary art scene, Pepper met the rising African-American figurative expressionist painter, Bob Thompson. He and Thompson traveled together on the Queen Elizabeth ship to Paris in 1961. It may have been Pepper who introduced Thompson to baroque painting imagery which the artist later used in his work. Pepper opened a small gallery of modern art, the Friendly Art Store, on the top floor of a three-story building on West 100th Street and Broadway in NY, for the 1962-1963 year. He wrote his master’s thesis at Columbia on Guido Reni in 1962 and his dissertation on the same subject, submitted in 1969, both under Rudolf Wittkower. He married Geraldina Ramos. As a young scholar he made the acquaintance of the collector and art historian Denis Mahon with whom he subsequently collaborated on several books. In 1971 Pepper wrote an article for the Art Quarterly on the psychological approach to Guido Reni, one of the artists on whom his fame would rest. In 1984 his monograph and catalogue raisonné on the artist became the standard. Another monograph on Reni appeared only in Italian in 1988. Pepper outlined Reni’s technique of reusing standard poses for figures throughout his painting. As an artist much admired in his how time, it fell to Pepper to distinguish autograph works by Reni from his many influenced colleagues. In later years Pepper focused on Annibale Carracci’s production of rapid portrait sketches on paper. He was working on a book about these when he succumbed to a heart attack at age 63. He is buried in Mt. Hebron Cemetery, NY.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Guido Reni’s Activity in Rome and Bologna, 1595-1614. Columbia University, 1969; The Baroque Era in Europe and Spanish America: Paintings, Sculpture. Washington, DC: Osuna Gallery, 1983; Bob Jones University Collection of Religious Art: Italian Painting. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University, 1984; Guido Reni: a Complete Catalogue of his Works with an Introductory Text. New York: New York University Press, 1984; “Caravaggio and Guido Reni: Contrasts in Attitudes.” Art Quarterly 34 no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 325-44; “Bacchus and Adriadne in the Los Angeles County Museum: the scherzo as artistic mode.” Burlington Magazine 125 (February 1983): 68-75; “Rediscovered painting by Guido Reni.” Apollo 90 (September 1969): 208-13.


Sources

Golden, Thelma. Bob Thompson. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/University of California Press, 1998, p. 79 note 196; [obituaries:] Mahon, Denis. “D. Stephen Pepper 1937-2000.” Art On Paper 5 no. 4 (March/April 2001): 28-9; (Deaths notices) “Pepper, David Stephen.” New York Times December 17, 2000, p. 64.




Citation

"Pepper, D. Stephen." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pepperd/.


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Scholar of the Italian baroque and especially Guido Reni; collector. Pepper studied at Columbia University under Howard Hibbard. Interested in the contemporary art scene, Pepper met the rising African-American figurative ex

Penrose, Roland, Sir

Full Name: Penrose, Roland, Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir Roland Algernon Penrose

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1984

Place Born: St. John's Wood, London, England, UK

Place Died: Farley Farm, Chiddingly, East Sussex, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Career(s): art collectors and painters (artists)


Overview

Painter, collector and modernist art historian. Penrose was born to James Doyle Penrose, and Irish portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover (Penrose). His mother was the daughter Lord Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. The younger Penrose was raised in the Quaker faith at the family’s home, Oxhey Grange, near Watford, and attended Leighton Park School, Reading. He graduated from Queen’s College, Cambridge in 1922. The Bloomsbury art historian and critic Roger Fry persuaded Penrose to study studio art in Paris. Penrose lived and painted there until 1934. While in Paris he married the Surrealist poet Valentine Boué in 1925. At the same time, Penrose began collecting Cubist and Surrealist works of art, largely through contact with Max Ernst. Through the poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952), he met Picasso in 1934. This was the beginning of a long association with the painter, which would culminate in both exhibitions and books. In 1936 Penrose organized the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. The show, which contained many works from Penrose’s collection, helped establish understanding of this movement in England. During World War II, he was a lecturer to the Home Guard (1940-42) and a camouflage painter in the army (1943-45). Together with Herbert Read, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1947. The same year he married his second wife, the photographer and surrealist model Lee Miller (1907-77). He remained the ICA chair until 1969. The Institute launched many early exhibitions of modern art in the United Kingdom, shows containing works drawn form Penrose’s own collections. “Forty Years of Modern Art” and its companion exhibition, “Forty Thousand Years of Modern Art,” the latter which emphasized the relationship between ancient art and modern, created positive acceptance among the public for modernist art works in Britain. Penrose published Picasso: His Life and Work in 1958, one of the most comprehensive accounts of the artist in English. In 1959 he was named a trustee of the Tate Museum (served until 1966). In this capacity, he organized innovative exhibitions using ICA artwork for the Tate. His 1960 Picasso exhibition at that museum broke all previous records. Penrose followed this with monographs on Max Ernst (1962), Joan Miro (1964) and Picasso Sculpture (1967). In 1966 he was given a knighthood. Paintings by Penrose are held by the Tate.


Selected Bibliography

Picasso. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1960; Picasso: His Life and Work. New York: Harper 1959; Portrait of Picasso. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957; The Sculpture of Picasso. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967; and Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry, and Golding, John. Picasso in Retrospect. New York: Harper & Row, 1973; and Read, Herbert. Wonder and Horror of the Human Head: an Anthology. London: Lund, Humphries, 1953.


Sources

Penrose, Antony. The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Their Circle at Farley Farm. London: Frances Lincoln, 2001; Penrose, Antony. Roland Penrose: the Friendly Surrealist. New York: Prestel, 2001; Penrose, Roland. Scrap Book: 1900-1981. New York: Rizzoli, 1981; The Catalogue of an Exhibition of Cubist and Surrealist Paintings, 1903-1938: from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Roland Penrose. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1954; Buck, Louisa. Dictionary of Art 24: 368-69; [obituary:] The Times [London], April 25, 1984, p. 18.




Citation

"Penrose, Roland, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/penroser/.


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Painter, collector and modernist art historian. Penrose was born to James Doyle Penrose, and Irish portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover (Penrose). His mother was the daughter Lord Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. The younger Penros

Penrose, Francis Cranmer

Full Name: Penrose, Francis Cranmer

Gender: male

Date Born: 1817

Date Died: 1903

Place Born: Bracebridge, Lincolnshire, England, UK

Place Died: Wimbledon, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architectural historian of the buildings of classical Greece. Penrose was the son of John Penrose, the local vicar of Bracebridge. He attended Wincester College and afterward worked briefly for an architectural firm. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge University, as an undergraduate, studying astronomy among other subjects and completing this degree in 1842. Under the Cambridge designation as travelling bachelor[sic], he traveled throughout Europe between 1842 and 1845, studying gothic and other architectural monuments. At Rome in 1843, based upon observation alone, Penrose found fault with the pitch of the roof of pediment of the Pantheon. Subsequent research vindicated his observation: the angle had been changed from the original design. In Greece, he studied the classical monuments, taking care to measure them and record his findings. Penrose was one of the first to the entasis of the Parthenon and the intentional curvature of the steps and entablature. The Society of Dilettanti, fascinated by his findings and those of John Pennethorne who had come to much the same conclusion in 1844, sent him back to Greece to confirm his findings. The Society published Anomalies in the Construction of the Parthenon in 1847. However Penrose’s 1851 Principles of Athenian Architecture was the first complete publication on the subject. An enlarged edition appearing in 1888. Penrose was appointed surveyor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1852, specifically charged to complete the interior of the church according to Wren’s design. His disagreements with the committee’s in charge led to his intentions being modified. In 1856 he married Harriette Gibbes. Penrose was also an amateur astronomer and published a work on Saturn in1869. He combined interests to study how astronomical phenomenon determined the design of ancient buildings, such as Stonehenge. A practicing architect, he designed a number of buildings in Cambridge University and the building of the present British School at Athens, the latter without fee. A portrait of him at the Royal Insititute of British Architects was painted by John Singer Sargent.


Selected Bibliography

An Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture; or, The Results of a Survey conducted Chiefly with Reference to the Optical Refinements Exhibited in the Construction of the Ancient Buildings at Athens. London: Macmillan, 1851, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1888; On a Method of Predicting by Graphical Construction Occultations of Stars by the Moon and Solar Eclipses for Any Given Place, together with more Rigorous Methods of Reduction for the Accurate Calculation of Longitude. London: Macmillan & Co., 1869; Two letters from Athens. London: Published for the Society of Dilettanti, 1847; On the Orientation of Greek Temples, being the Results of some Observations taken in Greece and Sicily in the Month of May, 1898. Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 65. London: Harrison and Sons, 1900.


Sources

de Grummond, W. W. “Penrose, Francis Cranmer.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 872-3; Dictionary of National Biography Supplement 1 (1901-1911): 101-103.




Citation

"Penrose, Francis Cranmer." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/penrosef/.


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Architectural historian of the buildings of classical Greece. Penrose was the son of John Penrose, the local vicar of Bracebridge. He attended Wincester College and afterward worked briefly for an architectural firm. He attended Magdalene College,

Penny, Nicholas

Full Name: Penny, Nicholas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1949

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Institution(s): The National Gallery


Overview



Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 416



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Penny, Nicholas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pennyn/.


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Pennethorne, John

Full Name: Pennethorne, John

Gender: male

Date Born: 1808

Date Died: 1888

Place Born: Worcester, Worcestershire, England, UK

Place Died: Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architect and mathematician; first to suggest entasis in Greek buildings. Pennethorne was the son of Thomas Pennethorne. He joined the architectural firm of John Nash (1752-1835) where he quickly became Nash’s favorite pupil. In 1830 he toured Europe in order to study the architectural monuments. While in Athens in 1832 he observed that the lines of the Parthenon were not the strict rectilinear ones, but were in fact bent to make the building appear more even from a distance. He observed similar configurations at a temple in Thebes. He mad wax impressions of the Parthenon ornaments on a return trip to Athens in 1834. Another trip to Greece in 1837 confirmed his suspicions about the entasis of the building. However, Joseph Hoffer in a book by Christian F. L. Föster, Allgemeines Bauzeitung (1838), published the finding before Pennethorne could. There is no doubt that Hoffer’s measurements, quoted from research done by the Prussian collector Eduard Gustav Schaubert (1804-1860), were made after Pennethorne’s. In 1844 Pennethorne published his findings in a pamphlet, The Elements and Mathematical Principles of the Greek Architects. Quoting Plato and other sources, Pennethorne showed the intentionality of the Greek temple design. Pennethorne’s publication spurred on Francis Cranmer Penrose to publish a more substantial account of Greek architecture, funded by the Society of Dilettanti, in 1851. In 1878 Pennethorne published his own treatise on the ancients, The Geometry and Optics of the Ancient Architecture.


Selected Bibliography

The Geometry and Optics of Ancient Architecture illustrated by examples from Thebes, Athens and Rome. London: Williams and Norgate, 1878.


Sources

Tyack, Geoffrey. Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Dictionary of National Biography15: 774-75.




Citation

"Pennethorne, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pennethornej/.


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Architect and mathematician; first to suggest entasis in Greek buildings. Pennethorne was the son of Thomas Pennethorne. He joined the architectural firm of John Nash (1752-1835) where he quickly became Nash’s favorite pupil. In 1830 he toured Eur

Pemberton, Murdock

Full Name: Pemberton, Murdock

Other Names:

  • Murdock Pemberton

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Place Born: Emporia, Lyon, KS, USA

Place Died: Valatie, Columbia, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): art critics

Institution(s): The New Yorker


Overview

First art critic for the New Yorker magazine.  Pemberton joined The Emporia Gazette (Emporia, KS) as a reporter, moving to the The Kansas City Star and eventually The Philadelphia North American before coming to New York where his brother lived.  He joined The New Yorker in June 1925, at the magazine’s founding, as their first art critic. He remained at the magazine for seven years.  Mr. Pemberton soon developed opinionated views on the New York art scene. In 1928 he charged in another magazine, Creative Art, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the ”discourager of art in America.” In 1932 he left The New Yorker, but returned to the magazine again in the 1950’s. According to Pemberton, he inadvertently began the literary lunch tradition at the Algonquin Hotel. Permberton had taken the press agent John Peter Toohey to lunch with the drama critic Alexander Woollcott in the 1920s. That meeting, he asserted, evolved into the famous Round Table at the hotel, attended by George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert Benchley and Woollcott. 

His brother, Brock Pemberton, was a play producer who produced ”Harvey” on Broadway.



Sources

[obituary:]  New York Times. “Pemberton Murdock, was First Critic for the New Yorker.” August 21, 1982, Section 1, Page 28; Pemberton, Sally.  Portrait of Murdock Pemberton: the New Yorker’s First Art Critic. Enfield, NH: Picture Book Press, 2011.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Pemberton, Murdock." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pembertonm/.


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First art critic for the New Yorker magazine.  Pemberton joined The Emporia Gazette (Emporia, KS) as a reporter, moving to the The Kansas City Star and eventually The Philadelphia North American before coming to