Skip to content

M

Murray, Charles Fairfax

Full Name: Murray, Charles Fairfax

Gender: male

Date Born: 1849

Date Died: 1919

Place Born: Bow, London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship

Career(s): art dealers


Overview

Connoisseur and advisor to major art collections, painter and art dealer. Murray’s parents were James Dalton Murray (1808-1876), a linen-draper, and Elizabeth Scott (Draper) (1816-1853). He grew up in Sudbury, Suffolk. By age 13 he had already received art lessons, possibly from Richard Gainsborough Dupont, and had moved to London. Murray worked as an apprentice in the drawing office of Sir Samuel Morton Peto, the great Victorian railway builder. In 1866 Murray attracted the attention of John Ruskin who arranged for additional training as an assistant to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Murray also painted for William Morris and copied paintings for Rossetti. In 1871 he went to Italy to paint and to study, returning again in 1873 to copy the Botticelli frescos in the Sistine Chapel for Ruskin. There, in 1875, he married Angelica Collevichi, a sixteen-year old local Italian girl, settling in Florence. In Italy he was an agent for Frederic William Burton, the director of the National Gallery in London, selling him among other works Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Poor Clares in 1878. As a dealer and facilitator of deals, his clientele grew to include the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode and the British collectors Charles Butler (1822-1910), George Salting (1835-1909) and Robert Henry Benson (1850-1929). In 1886 Fairfax Murray, his reputation now as much a dealer and connoisseur as a portraitist, returned to London, though wife elected to remain in Italy for most of her time. He formed a liaison with a local woman, Blanche Richmond, fathering children by both her and his wife in 1888. Fairfax Murray had five more children by Richmond. After a period advising for Agnew’s, he became a partner. In 1891 he cataloged the collection for the Duke of Portland, one of the few books on art he would write, along with the 1893 catalog the Roscoe collection in Liverpool. His 1894 bid for the director position of the National Gallery was rejected in favor of Edward John Poynter, Burne-Jones’s brother-in-law. After retiring from painting in 1903 and selling his personal collections of works by his friends Rossetti, Madox Brown, Millais, Sandys and Burne-Jones, he compiled a collection of early books and illuminated manuscripts. In1908 he recommended his friend Sydney Cockerell to the Directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The following year he sold his personal collection of 1400 Old Master drawings J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913). He donated 46 paintings to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1911. Murray returned to Italy in 1914 with his early book collection. He suffered a series of strokes, the latter, in 1916 paralyzing him for almost six months. He returned to London in early 1919 to complete his will, and died there.Fairfax Murray was a great influence in the art market, advising to numerous private and public collections in Europe and the United States. Lockett Agnew described him as “the finest judge of art in the world.” He formed part of the British art historians lobbying against overpainting of Italian monuments in Venice and Siena. Edward Hutton claimed that during the late nineteenth century, Reniassance treasures were so plentiful that Murray would park himself on a cafe bench, and, pounding the bench with a stick, shout, “Bring out your Madonnas! Two hundred lire!”


Selected Bibliography

Catalogue of the Pictures Belonging to the Duke of Portland, at Welbeck Abbey, and in London. London: The Chiswick Press, 1894.


Sources

Elliott, David B. Charles Fairfax Murray: the Unknown Pre-Raphaelite. Lewes, Sussex: Book Guild, Ltd., 2000; Charles Fairfax Murray (website), http://www.fairfaxmurray.co.uk; Hutton, Edward. “F. Mason Perkins.” Burlington Magazine 97 (December 1955): 391; Elliott, David B. “Charles Fairfax Murray: Keeper of the Pre-Raphaelite Flame.” in, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum. Alexandria, VA: Art Services, 2004, pp. 42-51.




Citation

"Murray, Charles Fairfax." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrayc/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Connoisseur and advisor to major art collections, painter and art dealer. Murray’s parents were James Dalton Murray (1808-1876), a linen-draper, and Elizabeth Scott (Draper) (1816-1853). He grew up in Sudbury, Suffolk. By age 13 he had already rec

Murray, Linda, née Bramley

Full Name: Murray, Linda, née Bramley

Gender: female

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 2004

Place Born: Herne Bay, Kent, England, UK

Place Died: Farmoor, Oxfordshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Renaissance


Overview

Renaissance scholar. Bramley was the daughter of J. F. Bramley, an exporter, and Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa. She was educated principally by her mother, preferring to travel with them rather than attend boarding school. French and English were her native tongues; she rapidly learned Spanish and Italian. She studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. During World War II Bramley worked for the U.S. High Command in London where her skill as an artist was put to work drawing maps of the damage from bombing raids on the continent. She moved to Eisenhower’s staff engaged in intelligence. After the war she entered the Courtauld Institute where her classmates included Oliver Millar and Peter Murray. She married Murray in 1947. As Linda Murray, she began teaching in London University’s department of extramural studies in 1949. Although she taught a variety of subjects, her medieval architecture classes and tours were especially popular. In 1952 she and her husband, now a lecturer at the Courtauld, channeled their pedagogical energies into two support works of art history, a translation, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, by Heinrich Wölfflin, and the Dictionary of Art and Artists. The Dictionary established their collaborative working method: dividing the research and write up between them and then passing it to the other for revision. The Dictionary was an immediate success and pair became the most famous “art history couple” in the modern age. Another collaborative work, Art of the Renaissance was issued in 1963. She became a regular contributor for the Thames and Hudson series of introductory books on the history of art: The High Renaissance in 1967 and The Late Renaissance and Mannerism in 1967. In 1967, too, her husband took a permanent appointment at Birkbeck College, London, a school for adult and evening learners, as the chair of the new department of art history. She wrote a novel, based on Caravaggio’s life, The Dark Fire, published only in America, in 1977. While writing and revising she also renovated the Dulwich, south London, home where they lived. She retired from the extramural studies program (now part of Birkbeck), in 1979. In 1980 she published a Thames and Hudson primer on Michelangelo. The same year her husband retired from Birkbeck and the couple moved to the village of Farnborough, north of Oxford, near Banbury. There Murray issued her second book on MIchelangelo, Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times in 1984. Her husband died at Farnborough suddenly in 1992 in the midst of a collaborative book on Christian Iconography. Murray moved to Woodstock and saw The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture to completion in 1996. The couple’s dedication to adult-based education led her to established the Murray Bequest to Birkbeck College, donating their large collection of books to the library. Eventually she located to Oaken Holt House at Farmoor. Throughout her life, she suffered numerous illnesses which forced her to undergo 26 operations in her lifetime. Murray’s art history emphasized stylistic analysis, careful attribution and the search for reliable evidence about the authorship and provenance of works of art. She had little sympathy with the theoretical bias of the “new art history” of the 1970’s and 1980’s. She always insisted on the importance of direct experience, especially for architecture. (Draper)


Selected Bibliography

translated, with Murray, Peter. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. The Phaidon Press, 1952; and Murray, Peter. The Art of the Renaissance. New York : Oxford University Press , 1963; and Murray, Peter. The High Renaissance and Mannerism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967; The Dark Fire: a Novel. New York: Morrow, 1977; Michelangelo. New York : Oxford University Press, 1980; Michelangelo, his Life, Work and Times. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.


Sources

[obituary:] “Linda Murray, Scholar Who, with her Husband, Made the Art of the Renaissance Accessible in a Series of Bestselling Books.” The Times (London) November 19, 2004, p. 70; Draper, Peter. “Linda Murray: Historian who Popularised Renaissance Art.” The Guardian (London) November 24, 2004, p. 29.




Citation

"Murray, Linda, née Bramley." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrayl/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Renaissance scholar. Bramley was the daughter of J. F. Bramley, an exporter, and Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa. She was educated principally by her mother, preferring to travel with them rather than attend boarding school. French and English

Murray, Peter

Full Name: Murray, Peter

Other Names:

  • Peter John Murray

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Farnborough, Warwickshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Birkbeck College historian of the Italian Renaissance. Murray was the son of John Knowles Murray and Dorothy Catton (Murray), his father a successful agricultural business person of Scottish heritage. The younger Murray attended King Edward VI School, Birmingham, and Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, Scotland. Intent on becoming a painter, Murray next studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, and, in 1937 entered the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, graduating in 1940. After World War II, his interest moved to art history. He was admitted to the University’s Courtauld Institute of Art where he received a B.A. (with honors) in 1947. The same year he married a fellow Courtauld Institute student Linda née Bramley Murray, who would collaborate on many of his later texts. He taught as a lecturer at the Courtauld and Birkbeck College beginning in 1948, continuing to work on his Ph.D. Murray added the duties of Witt Librarian in 1952 [the Times says 1949], remaining in that position until 1964 [Times reporting 1967]. His fine italic handwriting can still be seen on the spines of many of the photograph boxes for Italian paintings. Murray’s gift for languages–particularly German and Italian–and a strong appreciation for historical literature, led to his first translation of what would be a number of seminal texts of art history, Klassische Kunst, by Heinrich Wölfflin in 1952. He received his Ph.D. from the Courtauld in 1956 with a dissertation on the textual sources of Giotto’s work, including in it an index of pre-Vasari Giotto attributions. Although Murray acknowledge the influence of Courtauld scholars Margaret Whinney and it’s director, Anthony Blunt, Murray did not get along with Blunt, and a professorship at the Courtauld was never a possibility. Murray embarked on a sub-career of reference books in 1959 with his immensely successful Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, co-authored with his wife, which was frequently updated and reissued. He was made Senior research fellow at the Courtauld in 1961. In 1963, two substantial introductory texts appeared, The Art of the Renaissance, co-authored with Linda, and what became a classic primer, The Architecture of the Renaissance. Shut out from a professorship at the Courtauld, he accepted the Chair of Art History at Birkbeck College, London, in 1967, succeeding Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner. The position, a newly-established professorship in History of Art for this adult-learning school, entailed setting up courses leading to the undergraduate degree in History of Art, paired with the disciplines of History, Philosophy, English, French, Italian or German. Murray appointed the medievalists Kit Galbraith, a specialist in English Romanesque Sculpture, and Peter Draper, whose area was English Gothic architecture, and the Renaissance art historian Francis Ames-Lewis. Murray became President Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1969 (through 1972). He delivered the third Walter Neurath memorial lecture on Piranesi in 1971. He acted as Chairman of the Walpole Society from 1978 until 1981. Murray retired as professor emeritus in 1980 from Birkbeck, succeeded by John Steer. In 1985, he brought a second art history translation to light, Die Geschichte der Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt. Murray’s expertise on the architect Bramante and his contention that the architect’s work explained most of 16th-century Italian architecture, led many to believe this would be his magnum opus. He never wrote the book (except for a printed piece, the resulted of a Charlton Lecture), preferring to focus his energies on lectures and translations. The Murrays were working together on a companion book to Christian iconography when he died suddenly. Throughout his life, Murray was a devout Roman Catholic. Murray’s art-history writing is today thought of primarily as introductory texts to art and (scholarly) art histories for the reading public. He did not pander to publicity like many focused on this readership, preferring lecturing and employing a simple, clear and relaxed manner. His editions of other art histories, such as his Burckardt book, made these foreign art historian’s work more accessible to the English reading public. Leopold D. Ettlinger characterized Murray as a fastidious scholar whose contributions to the history of art had always been original, filling gaps in the knowledge of fellow-scholars. As an architectural historian, he held the belief–stronger than most–that classical antiquity was the only way to understand and interpret Renaissance architecture, boldly asserting Bramante as the key to understanding the whole of Italian sixteenth-century architecture. He was one of the principal founder members of the Association of Art Historians. A devoted supporter of Birkbeck College’s particular role in adult (evening) education, it was particularly evident in the pedagogical nature of his writing.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation, partially reprinted as:] An Index of Attributions made in Tuscan Sources before Vasari. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1959; translated, with Murray, Linda. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. The Phaidon Press, 1952; A History of English Architecture. Part II. New York: Arco Pub. Co. 1963; and Murray, Linda. The Art of the Renaissance. New York : Oxford University Press , 1963; The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. London: Batsford,1963; and Murray, Linda. The High Renaissance and Mannerism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967; revised and edited, Burckhardt, Jacob. The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; “Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, 1902-1983.” Proceedings of the British Academy 70, p. 501-514.


Sources

[obituaries:] Wheeler, Michael. “A Diptych of Art Historians.” Guardian (London), May 9, 1992, p. 28; Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Professor Peter Murray.” Independent (London), April 25, 1992, p. 34; “Professor Peter Murray.” The Times (London), May 1, 1992.




Citation

"Murray, Peter." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrayp/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Birkbeck College historian of the Italian Renaissance. Murray was the son of John Knowles Murray and Dorothy Catton (Murray), his father a successful agricultural business person of Scottish heritage. The younger Murray attended King Edward VI Sch

Murray, S. Butler, Jr.

Full Name: Murray, S. Butler, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Steuben Butler Murray Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): educators


Overview

Founder of the Columbia University Department of Fine Arts; Chair to 1933. Murray taught as the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Wells College. In 1921 Murray was named assistant professor of Fine Arts at Columbia, where he had also been lecturing in the Department of Greek and Latin. Murray was the first professor to be called such and was given the task to organize a department of that title at Columbia.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Hellenistic Architecture in Syria. Princeton University, 1912, published, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917.


Sources

Dinsmoor, William Bell. “The Department of Fine Arts and Archaeology.” A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957, p. 257.




Citation

"Murray, S. Butler, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrays/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Founder of the Columbia University Department of Fine Arts; Chair to 1933. Murray taught as the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Wells College. In 1921 Murray was named assistant professor of Fine Arts at Columbia, where he had also been lec

Murrell, William

Full Name: Murrell, William

Other Names:

  • William Murrell

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 February 1889

Date Died: 07 December 1969

Place Born: England, UK

Place Died: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): American (North American), caricatures, comics (documents), and portraits


Overview

Historian of caricature and American artists; wrote an early survey of the graphic caricature art. Fisher was the son of William S. Fisher and Eva Murrell. In 1905, at age 15, Fisher emigrated with his younger brother to New York from Liverpool, his parents having gone before him. Even at this age, Fisher exhibited from some level of paralysis on his body and was throughout his life considered an invalid. The painter Alexander Brooke later described him as spastic. At eighteen he secured a job as a clerk a the Metropolitan Museum of Art where his duties included the administration of student lockers. He became a U.S. citizen the same year. By 1913 he was writing art reviews, including the famous Armory show for the journal Arts & Decoration. Fisher connected with many artists at this time (1915), including Marguerite and William Zorach and Ben and Valida Benn in the artists’ colony in Chappaqua, NY. He settled in Woodstock, NY in 1917, acting as curator of the Woodstock Art Association, though never relinquishing some duties at the Metropolitan Museum, and authoring articles in the socialist literary magazine Plowshares. An article on Georgia O’Keeffe appeared in Stieglitz’ Camera Work of the same year. Though drafted into World War I, he received a deferral due to his disability. Sometime during this time he married Gertrude Jean Deutsch (d. 1961). After the War, Fisher was diagnosed with tuberculosis and advised to live in the fresh air of the countryside. He apparently resided for a period in Greatwoods, NH as well as Woodstock. During this time he self-published books on emerging artists in a series hecalled the Younger Artists, beginning with Ernest Fiene in 1922. He wrote under his mother’s maiden name, Murrell, and his full name as the publishing house, W. M. Fisher. The series eventually included Peggy Bacon and Elie Nadelman (1923). He travelled to Germany the same year, 1923, ostensibly to find a publisher for a book on Benn, but also touring the sights. In the early 1930s Fisher, now wriitng exclusively as Murrell, began issuing books for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York under the series ” American Artists.” The first was a monograph of Charles Demuth (1931). In 1933 he was commission to produce an exhibition on political art proceeds of which would benefit indigent artists of the Depression. Together with Priscilla Greene Hilder and Louise Rehm he organized and published Catalogue of the Salon of American Humorists: a Political and Social Pageant from the Revolution to the Present Day for the College art association. This catalog was later expanded into the book in two volumes, A History of American Graphic Humor, 1933. The book took the most common form of “art” for a public steeped in the Great Depression and translated it into a graphic art form worthy of study and celebration. Fisher lived summers in Milford, CT (from 1935 onwards) and New York City in the Winter. He contracted lymphoblastic lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and died in a New Haven, CT, hospital in 1969. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in Long Island Sound. Murrell’s History of American Graphic Humor remains one of the great treatises on political cartoon art. During a time of tremendous economic difficulty for the United States, Murrell, through the auspices of the Whitney, took the great tradition of graphic humor, central to the American experience of the time through the front page of American newspapers, and treated it in the tradition of important social art in the genre of Daumier and Cruikshank. Murrell himself was a bit of a dandy and raconteur; Peggy Bacon’s estimation that Murrell published less than he could have because he expended his wit and observation on conversation seems apt.


Selected Bibliography

Arts and Decoration no. 3 (1913); “The Georgia O’Keeffe Drawings and Paintings at ‘291.” Camera Work nos. 49-50 (June 1917); Ernest Fiene. Introduction by Harold Ward. Woodstock, NY: W. M. Fisher, 1922; Peggy Bacon. Woodstock, NY:W.M. Fisher, 1922; Alexander Brook. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1922; Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1922; Elie Nadelman. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1923; Charles Demuth. American Artists (series). Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931; and Hilder, Priscilla Greene, and Rehm, Louise. Catalogue of the Salon of American Humorists: a Political and Social Pageant from the Revolution to the Present Day. New York: College Art Association, 1933, reformatted, expanded and published as, A History of American Graphic Humor. 2vols. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933-1938.


Sources

Yanul, Thomas. “William Murrell Fisher: The Bones of a Forgotten Scholar.” http://www.thomasyanul.com/fisherpage1 (reliability not determined); “Oral History Interview with Alexander Brook.” 1977 July 7-8, Archives of American Art; Bryson Burroughs papers, 1915-1922 and [undated], Archives of American Art; [administrative records: publications, 1931-1984] Whitney Museum of American Art; Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press/InterCultura, Fort Worth, 1993, p. 214, note 20.




Citation

"Murrell, William." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrellw/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Historian of caricature and American artists; wrote an early survey of the graphic caricature art. Fisher was the son of William S. Fisher and Eva Murrell. In 1905, at age 15, Fisher emigrated with his younger brother to New York from Liverpool, h

Mus, Paul

Full Name: Mus, Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1969

Place Died: Murs, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Buddhism, Indian (South Asian), Mahayana, Theravada, and Tibetan Buddhism


Overview

Art historian of Buddhism in India and southeast Asia. Employed sociological method to the topics of colonization of art, especially in Viet Nam. Director of the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. Beginning in 1946 he was appointed to the College de France and later taught at Yale University.



Sources

The Dictionary of Art 22: 353.




Citation

"Mus, Paul." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/musp/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Art historian of Buddhism in India and southeast Asia. Employed sociological method to the topics of colonization of art, especially in Viet Nam. Director of the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. Beginning in 1946 he was appointed to the C

Muller, Frederik

Full Name: Muller, Frederik

Gender: male

Date Born: 1817

Date Died: 1881

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): catalogues raisonnés and prints (visual works)

Career(s): librarians

Institution(s): Athenaeum Illustre


Overview

Print cataloger. He and Jan Frederik van Someren (1852-1930) wrote a catalog of engraved portraits beginning in 1888. The professor of Art History at Utrecht University, J. G. van Gelder, described Muller’s work as one of the praiseworthy graphic studies of Netherlandish of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


Selected Bibliography

Essai d’une bibliographie néerlando-russe; catalogue d’une collection remarquable de livres, atlas, cartes, portraits, planches, manuscrits hollandais, et de plusiers livres étrangers, tous concernant la Russie et la Pologne. Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1859; and Someren, Jan Frederik. Beschrijvende catalogus van gegraveerde portretten van Nederlanders . . . Catalogus van 7000 portretten van Nederlanders. 3 vols. Amsterdam: F. Muller, 1888-1891.




Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Muller, Frederik." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mullerf/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Print cataloger. He and Jan Frederik van Someren (1852-1930) wrote a catalog of engraved portraits beginning in 1888. The professor of Art History at Utrecht University, J. G. van Gelder, described Muller’s work as one of th

Müller, Kurt

Full Name: Müller, Kurt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1880

Date Died: 1972

Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

Specialist in early ancient Greek art, particularly the excavation at Tiryn. Student of Franz Studniczka, longtime dozent and assistant (ausserordentliche 1921-1937, ausserplanmässige 1939-?) Professor at the University of Göttingen.


Selected Bibliography

“Frühmykenische Relifes aus Kreta und vom griechischen Festland,” JdI 20, 1915, 242ff. Die Urfirniskeramik, Tiryns IV, 1938. Gebäudemodelle spätgeometrischer Zeit, AM 48, 1923, 52ff.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 202-203.




Citation

"Müller, Kurt." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mullerk/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Specialist in early ancient Greek art, particularly the excavation at Tiryn. Student of Franz Studniczka, longtime dozent and assistant (ausserordentliche 1921-1937, ausserplanmässige 1939-?) Professor at the University

Müller, Liselotte

Full Name: Müller, Liselotte

Gender: female

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. She was student of Erwin Panofsky at the newly founded department of art history, together with fellow students William S. Heckscher and Horst Woldemar Janson.






Citation

"Müller, Liselotte." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mullerl/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Curator at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. She was student of Erwin Panofsky at the newly founded department of art history, together with fellow students William S. Heckscher and

Müller, Otfried

Full Name: Müller, Otfried

Other Names:

  • Karl Otfried Müller

Gender: male

Date Born: 1797

Date Died: 1840

Place Born: Brieg, Silesia, Prussia

Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Classical


Overview

Archaeologist and general classical-studies scholar, including art history, at Göttingen University. Müller was the son of minister. He initially attended the university in Breslau and the classes of Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831) on Roman history. Settling on Classics as a field, he moved to Berlin where he continued study with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Philipp Buttmann (1764-1829) and most importantly for Müller, August Böckh (1785-1867). Böckh instilled in the young Müller the notion of using all sources of ancient history to construct a comprehensive view of the past. This Müller did with stunning impact, beginning with his 1817 dissertation, Aegineticorum liber, a history of the island of Aegina. Müller succeeded Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker at Göttingen University in 1819, still only twenty-two, with the title Extraordinarius professor. Müller published books on mythology and the Dorian peoples before proceeding to art history. De Phidiae vita et operibus, a discussion of the sculptor Phidias and the Elgin marbles (brought to England in 1812), appeared in 1827. Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst of 1830 summarized the field and was quickly translated into French and English. After that, books on Greek and Latin literary history as well as on other areas followed. During a trip to Delphi in Greece in 1839, Müller became ill and died in in 1840 in Athens. He is buried at Colonus, Greece. His students included Ernst Curtius, in whose presence Müller died while on research visit.Müller was the first great German classicist to visit England and his books were early translated into English. His penchant for describing ancient peoples as “races” was usurped by the Nazis in the 1930s to connect Greeks with an Aryan lineage, divorcing them from Semitic contexts, something Müller never intended. The revolution he created in classical scholarship was disseminated more by books than his students (Calder).


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Aegineticorum liber. Berlin: Libraria Reimeriana, 1817; Müller, Eduard, editor. Karl Otfried Müller’s kleine deutsche Schriften über Religion, Kunst, Sprache und Literatur. 2 vols. Breslau, J. Max und Komp., 1847-1848; Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst. Breslau: J. Max, 1830, English, based on the 2nd German ed.: Ancient Art and its Remains or, A Manual of the Archaeology of Art. London: A. Fullarton & Co., 1847; Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1825; De Phidiae vita et operibus commentationes tres. Göttingen: Typis Dieterichianis, 1827; and Wieseler, Friedrich, and Oesterley, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm. Denkmäler der alten Kunst. 2 vols. Göttingen: In der Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1832-1856.


Sources

Gooch, G. P. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. 2nd edition. New York: Longmans, Green, 1952, pp. 33-38 [notes on work, tragic death]; Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 23-24; Calder, William C. “Müller, Karl Otfried.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 773-4; Ranke, Karl Ferdinand. Carl Otfried Müller: ein Lebensbild. Berlin: A.W. Hahn’s Erben, 1870.




Citation

"Müller, Otfried." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mullerko/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Archaeologist and general classical-studies scholar, including art history, at Göttingen University. Müller was the son of minister. He initially attended the university in Breslau and the classes of Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831) on Roman history.