P

Powell, Earl Alexander, III

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Powell, Earl Alexander, III

Other Names:

Earl Powell III

Gender: male

Date Born: 1943

Place Born: Spartanburg, SC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Director of the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., 1992-. Powell’s parents were Earl Alexander Powell II and Elizabeth Duckworth (Powell). Powell entered Williams College with the intent of pursuing a medical career, but after barely passing introductory chemistry, he switched to history and art history, graduating with honors in 1966, under legendary art professors S. Lane Faison, Jr., Whitney Stoddard an William H. Pierson, Jr. He served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1966 to 1969, remaining in the Naval Reserve until 1980. After discharge from the service, he Powell considered architecture school Faison urged him to continued in art history. He entered Harvard University, receiving an A. M. from Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum in 1970. He married Nancy Landry in 1971. Powell taught as a teaching fellow in fine arts at Harvard while pursuing his Ph.D., beginning in 1970. His dissertation was accepted in 1974 on the topic of Thomas Cole. The same year he joined the University of Texas at Austin as assistant professor of the history of art. In 1976 he joined the curatorial staff at the National Gallery, rising to executive curator in 1979 under the directory, J. Carter Brown. Ongoing troubles at the Los Angeles County Museum of art resulted in the forced retirement of Kenneth Donahue in 1979; the LACMA board hired Powell in 1980 to lead its museum as director. Powell transformed the Museum, both the administrative infighting and its quality of exhibitions and collections to a museum of international stature (Art in America). Budget was tripled and attendance doubled with two major building initiatives completed. Powell was responsible for luring talent to the museum, including Philip Conisbee as curator of French painting. Powell wrote a monograph on Thomas Cole in 1990. At the retirement of Brown, Powell was chosen to lead the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C. in 1992, whose other finalists were John Walsh, Jr., of the Getty. He was succeeded at LACMA by Michael Shapiro. Powell brought curtators from LACMA, notably Conisbee, with him to Washington. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Williams in 1993. Powell’s concentration was in 19th- and 20th-century European and American Art. It is as an adept arts administrator that Powell has made his reputation. Powell was embroiled in controversy when he delayed in 1994 the public acknowledgement that the Museum’s Poussin “Madonna on the Steps” was no longer thought by scholars to be by the master. The following year Powell was forced to run the important Vermeer show with seldom-lent paintings by the artist during the government shutdown of buildings because of a congressional budget dispute.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] English Influences in the Art of Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Harvard University, 1974; “Maniere Dawson’s Woman in Brown.” Arts Magazine (May 1977): 122-123; “Thomas Cole and the American Landscape Tradition: The Naturalist Controversy.” Arts Magazine (February 1978): 114-124. “Thomas Cole and the American Landscape Tradition: Associationism.” Arts Magazine (April 1978): 113-117; Thomas Cole. New York: Abrams, 1990.

Sources

“Earl A. Powell III.” U.S. Commission on Fine Arts [website] http://www.cfa.gov/about/bios/powell; CV [Earl Powell III]. National Gallery of Art [website] http://www.nga.gov/press/2002/releases/powell/pr_club/cv.shtm; Dobrzynski, Judith H. “An Art Lover Who Awakened a Generation.” New York Times October 28, 1997, p. E1; “Truth in Labeling; The National Gallery should acknowledge that its Poussin is a phony.” Washing Post November 13, 1994, p. C8;

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Powell, Nicolas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Powell, Nicolas

Other Names:

Caryll Nicolas Peter Powell

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 1986

Place Born: Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Home Country/ies: South Africa

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

Career(s): art historians

Overview

Fuseli and baroque architecture scholar; writer. Powell’s parents were Owen Price Powell and Nora Webb (Powell). His father worked as a mining engineer in South Africa. The younger Powell graduated from the Felsted (boarding) School, Essex, attending the university in Strasburg, Germany for a year, 1937-1938, before Peterhouse, Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1941. During World War II, he served with the Marine Commandos, rising to lieutenant. He was wounded in Tobru, taken prisoner in Italy in 1942 and freed by the Allies in 1943. He participated (and was wounded again) during the Normandy invasion. For his service, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Powell was awarded an M.A. from Cambridge in 1945. He worked in various capacities for British [arts] Council, London, first at the home office, 1949-1951. During this time he wrote the catalog on Henry Fuseli exhibition in 1951. Powell published his catalog of Fuseli drawings the following year. He was appointed second secretary to the British embassy in Bonn, West Germany in 1954, transferring to Cologne in 1959 and London,1962-1968. At the suggestion of former Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and drawings expert Karl Theodore Parker, Powell undertook a volume on Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” for the Art in Context series, the brainchild of Allen Lane (1902-1970) to document a single work of art. The book was completed during his appointment to the bureau in Vienna (1968-1975). His writing interests in later years turned toward that city and the Jugendstil. He produced broader but less penetrating works such as The Sacred Spring: the Arts in Vienna, 1898-1918. Powell’s final assignment was in Amsterdam, 1975-1980. He appears in the book by Hilary St. George Saunders (1898-1951), The Green Beret, 1949.

Selected Bibliography

Fuseli: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1950; The Drawings of Henry Fuseli. London: Faber and Faber, 1951; From Baroque to Rococo: an Introduction to Austrian and German Architecture from 1580 to 1790. New York: Praeger, 1959; Fuseli: The Nightmare. New York: Viking Press, 1973; The Sacred Spring: the Arts in Vienna, 1898-1918. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1974.

Sources

[jacket flap] Fuseli: The Nightmare. New York: Viking Press, 1973; “Obituary of Mr C N P Powell (163) /SCT.” Times (London) June 26, 1986.

Pool, Phoebe

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pool, Phoebe

Other Names:

Phoebe Pool

Gender: female

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 1971

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): French (culture or style), nineteenth century (dates CE), and painting (visual works)

Overview

Scholar of nineteenth-century French painting. Pool was the daughter of Gordon Desmond Pool and Agatha Eleanor Burrows (Pool). At an early age Pool was diagnosed with depression. This often incapacitated her for months and would affect her education and output. In 1931 Pool won a senior scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford University entering in 1932 to study history. She was awarded the Deakin History Essay Prize in 1934, but her mental illness prevented her from taking her degree. For some years she lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), before teaching at Westminster Tutors, London, from 1942 (through 1952), and writing reviews for the Spectator. Pool spent the whole of World War II in Air Raid Precautions, 1939-1945. At the end of the war, she published a poetry anthology, Poems of Death, in 1945. She turned to art history in 1954, and, studying as an external student at the University of London, received a B. A. in 1957 with first class honors. She was granted her Ph.D., also from London, in 1959, wring her thesis was on the literary and philosophical background to the early work of Picasso to 1906, supervised by the Courtauld Institute”s Anthony Blunt. Sections of her dissertation appeared in 1962 in a book with Blunt, Picasso: The Formative Years: a Study of his Sources. Pool began an art publishing career, mostly smaller books on nineteenth-century masters, the first of which was Degas in 1963. In 1964 with her second book, Constable, she also began lecturing at the University of Reading, part-time. In 1967 her book on Impressionism became a popular success. Written in her direct and unpretentious style, it nevertheless address the intellectual concepts of the movement. The same year her translation of the Picasso catalog by Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille, appeared.

She published another small monograph on Delacroix in 1969. Pool used the library of the Courtauld Institute for most of her research and became a fixture there, except when her depression would keep her away, sometimes for months. She committed suicide in 1971 by throwing herself under a train. A work on Paul Gauguin was published posthumously in 1978. In 1987 is was revealed in a book that Pool had at one time been a courier of secrets from Blunt to Russian operatives. One of her unsuspecting go-betweens was another Courtauld scholar, Anita Brookner (Wright).

Pool’s art-historical writing is belies a knowledge of the literary and philosophical background the art period and the artists on which she wrote. Her writing style was simple, but not simplistic. She could discuss Constable’s relation to English Romantic poetry or Delacroix’s straddling between classicism and romanticism without ostentation. Pool was well versed on Picasso. Her treatment of his anarchism in Barcelona and Paris is directly correlated to his painting.

Selected Bibliography

and Stephenson, Flora. Plan for Town and Country. London: Pilot Press, 1944; and Blunt, Anthony. Picasso: The Formative Years: a Study of his Sources. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1962; Degas. London: Spring Books, 1963; John Constable. Blandford, 1964; Impressionism. New York: Praeger, 1967; Delacroix. London: Hamlyn, 1969; Paul Gauguin. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1978.

Sources

[obituaries:] Blunt, Anthony. “Phoebe Pool.” Burlington Magazine 114, no. 828 (March 1972): 177;
“Miss Phoebe Pool.” Times (London) December 28, 1971, p. 8.
Wright, Peter and Greengrass, Paul. Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. New York, NY: Dell, 1988, p. 264;

Poole, Reginald Stuart

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Poole, Reginald Stuart

Gender: male

Date Born: 1832

Date Died: 1895

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), coins (money), Early Western World coins, metal, metalwork (visual works), metalworking, and numismatics

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of Coins, British Museum, 1870-1893, early exponent of the relationship to Greek art to coinage. Poole was born to Reverend Edward R. Poole (c. 1805-1884) and Sophia Lane (Poole) (1804-1891), the latter a grand niece of Thomas Gainsborough. His mother left his father in 1842 because of his bibliomania and alcoholism. Poole was subsequently raised by his mother and uncle, Edward W. Lane (1801-1876), the eminent Orientalist, accompanying them the same year to Egypt where Edward was assembling an Arabic dictionary. The younger Poole spent seven years in Egypt, mostly in Cairo, tutored by a family friend and studying the region. Not yet 17, he contributed a series of articles on Egyptian chronology to the Literary Guide between 1847-1848. These were published in 1851 under the patronage of Algernon Percy, the fourth Duke of Northumberland (1792-1865), who was also the patron of his uncle’s lexicon. The Duke recommended the younger Poole to a position of first-class assistant (lower section) in the department of antiquities at the British Museum in 1852, where Poole immediately began lecturing. In 1858 he was charged to rewrite and issue catalogs on the ancient coin collections of the Museum. He collaborated with his mother on a series of descriptions for the book Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: a Series of Twenty Photographic Views by the photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898), published 1860-1861. When the keeper of the department of antiquities, Edward Hawkins, (1780-1867) retired in 1861, the department was divided and Poole assigned to the new department of coins and medals and Samuel Birch (1813-1885) appointed the keeper of the department of oriental antiquities. By 1864 Poole was delivering lectures at the Royal Institute on his recurring theme: the relationship of Greek coinage to Greek art. Among those who acknowledged his findings as important were the classicist Adolf Furtwängler. He married Eliza Christina Forlonge in 1863. In 1866 Poole was appointed Assistant Keeper of Coins at the Museum and in 1870, Keeper, succeeding William Sandys Wright Vaux (1818-1885). Poole changed the department precedent by overseeing the publication of catalogs of the coin collection. Some sixteen catalogs appeared over the twenty-two years of his tenure, beginning in 1873, authored by himself and other scholars including Percy Gardner. Poole received an honorary doctorate from Cambridge for his work. In 1869-1870 he returned to Egypt for a research trip. In 1885, Poole succeeded his friend and colleague Charles T. Newton (1816-1894) as Yates chair of archaeology at University College, Cambridge. Poole never relinquished his interest in Egyptology. In 1882 he helped found the Egypt Exploration Fund and in 1884 the Society of English Medalists with the Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards (1831-1892). In later years he harbored deep animosities toward several colleagues. Jealous of Birch’s position as head of Oriental archaeology and the latter’s emphasis on Assyriology, Poole accused Birch of preventing Poole’s succession the the Department of Oriental Antiquities. Poole’s championing of Edouard Naville (1844-1926) over the much higher profile Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) as archaeologist for the Egypt Exploration Fund resulted in Petrie’s blaming Poole for mishandling the Fund. He retired in 1894 and his dream, a separate medal room for the Museum, was completed the same year. In retirement, Poole contributed the article on numismatics to the 8th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He died of a heart ailment at his West Kensington home. His nephews carried on the family tradition of scholarship; Stanley Lane-Poole (1854-1931) was a professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin, and Reginald Lane Poole (1857-1939), was Keeper of the Archives at Oxford University.

Selected Bibliography

and Frith, Francis, and Poole, Sophia Lane. Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: a Series of Twenty Photographic Views. London : William Mackenzie, 1860, and Cairo, Sinai, Jerusalem, and the Pyramids of Egypt. London: J. S. Virtue, 1860; A Catalogue of the Greek Coins in the British Museum: Italy. London: Woodfall and Kinder, 1873; and Head, Barclay Vincent. Catalogue of Greek Coins: Macedonia, etc. London: British Museum, 1879; and Lane-Poole, Stanley. Coins and Medals; their Place in History and Art. London: British Museum,1885; and Keary, Charles Francis, and Grueber, Herbert A. A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum. Anglo-Saxon Series. London: British Museum, 1887-93; and Head, Barclay Vincent. Catalogue of Greek Coins. Attica-Megaris-Aegina. London: British Museum, 1888; Catalogue of Greek Coins: Corinth, Colonies of Corinth, etc. London: British Museum, 1889.

Sources

Shakira Hussein, personal correspondence, 2008; Caygill, M. L. “Poole, (Reginald) Stuart (1832-1895).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; [obituary:] “Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole.” Times (London), February 9, 1895 p. 5; “Poole, Reginald Stuart.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th ed.

Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

Other Names:

Sir John Pope-Hennessy

Gender: male

Date Born: 13 December 1913

Date Died: 31 October 1994

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Renaissance

Career(s): curators

Overview

Director of the both the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London and curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; scholar of Italian art and major proponent of connoisseurship in art history. Born to an upper-middle class family; his grandfather and namesake, John Pope-Hennessy (1834-1891) had been a minor Conservative member of Parliament and later a successful colonial governor of Hong Kong. His father, Maj. Gen. [Ladislaus Herbert] Richard Pope-Hennessy (1875-1942), was a career officer and his mother, Dame Una Birch (Pope-Hennessy) (1876-1949), a noted writer. The younger Pope-Hennessy lived in Washgington, D. C., as a child when his father held a post as military attaché at the British Embassy there. He was educated at Downside Abbey (Somerset) and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he met Kenneth Clark, then at the Ashmolean. As a young man, he witnessed morning discourses on the Bergsonian-style aesthetics of enigmatic Matthew Stewart Prichard at the Gargoyle Club. Pope-Hennessy spent the 1935-1936 year touring Europe. He met Bernard Berenson, though the two did not initially get along. Herbert Read, then editor of the Burlington Magazine, encouraged Pope-Hennessy to write reviews and “Recent Research” pieces for the magazine in 1936.

Pope-Hennessy applied to a position at the National Gallery the same year, but was turned down. In 1937 his book on Giovanni di Paolo appeared (dedicated to Clark). In 1938 Pope-Hennessy had secured a position in the Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His second monograph, on the Siennese artist, Sassetta, appeared in 1939. During World War II, Pope-Hennessy worked for the Air Ministry as part of the national defense. Returning to Europe in 1944, he was one of the first British to report (in print) on recent work of Matisse and Picasso in the Salon d’Automne in liberated Paris. After the war, he requested a transfer in the V&A to the department of Sculpture, hoping for a larger profile than he had been able to establish in the print division. The writings of Jenö Lányi, especially on Donatello, helped him develop the acumen for this new medium within his field. Pope-Hennessy set about rewriting the catalog of sculpture previous issued by Eric Maclagan and Margaret Longhurst. The assuming of the editorship of the Burlington Magazine by Benedict Nicolson (from Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner) in 1947 started a celebrated row between Nicolson and Pope-Hennessy. Pope-Hennessy was on both the editorial board and consultative board of the magazine, and let his criticisms of Nicolson be known. Nicolson ultimately prevailed and retained his editorship; Pope-Hennessy ceased to contribute to the magazine.

He was appointed Keeper to the Department of Sculpture in 1954. By that time, he was already good friends with the high-profile New York collectors Jayne and Charles Wrightsman. The first volume of Pope-Hennessy’s introduction to Italian sculpture, on the Gothic, appeared in 1955. That same year he was a visiting professor at Yale University. The retirement of Leigh Ashton in 1955 led to speculation that Pope-Hennessy should succeed, but the position was given to Trenchard Cox. Pope-Hennessy’s interest in small bronze statuettes resulted in the 1961-1962 show in Florence and Amsterdam. He taught at Williams College during the same academic year (1962-1963). He delivered the Mellon Lectures in Washgington, D. C. in 1963. His tenure at the V&A included the acquisition of Bernini’s Neptune and Triton (1620) and Giambologna’s Samson Slaying a Philistine (1561-2). In 1964 the new catalog of the V&A Italian sculpture collection appeared. That year he published his commissioned work on the Kress Collection of Italian bronzes. One result of this was the further commission to write the catalog to the Frick Collection’s (New York) fine holdings in bronze statuettes in 1966 (appeared in in 1970). In 1965 he delivered the Wrightsman lectures at New York University. Pope-Hennessy succeeded Cox as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1967. The following year he was purportedly offered the directorship of the National Gallery, a job more suited to him, but he declined. His tenure at the V&A was marked by strong support of staff research and plans for new 20th-century galleries and a reinstallation of the Indian and Far Eastern collections, the latter two unfulfilled by his successors.

In 1974 he retired from the V&A, and was replaced by the 38-year-old director of the (British) National Portrait Gallery, Roy C. Strong. Pope-Hennessy succeeded Lord Wolfenden of Westcott (1906-1985) as director of the British Museum the same year. The British Museum was a vastly different enterprise and he never felt his successes forthcoming. When his brother James, (1916-1974), also a homosexual, was beaten to death by a lover in 1974, Pope-Hennessy looked for a change in life venue. This came in 1977 when Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving lured him to New York to be “Consultative Chairman” to the Department of European Painting. At the same time Pope-Hennessy jointly held a professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. At the Met, he rehung the entire European painting collection and instituted a more informative labeling system. His acquisitions included Rubens’ Self-portrait with Helene Fourment and their Son, Peter (1630s) and Guercino’s Blinding of Sampson (1619), both gifts of the Wrightsmans. He hired a young art historian, Walter Liedtke, who became at the museum one of the eminent curators. In those years he authored monographs on individual sculptors, including Luca della Robbia, 1980, Cellini, 1985, and Donatello in 1993. The latter two were in biographical form, but are, in fact, full studies of the artists. Although never wealthy, in the 1980s he sold two personal pictures, Domenichino’s Christ Carrying The Cross to the Getty Museum for $750,000, a work he had paid £38 for in 1946, and Annibale Carraci’s Vision of St. Francis to the National Gallery of Canada for £100,000, which he had originally purchased for £28. In New York, Pope-Hennessy met Michael Mallon, a young scholar attending Pope-Hennessy’s Frick lectures. Pope-Hennessy secured him an internship at the Metropolitan and Mallon became Pope-Hennessy’s life partner. The two retired to Florence in 1986. He was succeeded at the Metropolitan by Everett Fahy, Jr. Pope-Hennessy died in Florence at age 80 from complications from a liver ailment. He is buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in Galluzzo, a suburb of Florence. His art collection from his Florence home was sold for £1.03 million at Christie’s, New York, in 1996.

Pope-Hennessy did not have, nor did he ever apparently seek, formal training in art history. The hallmark of his methodology was connoisseurship. His important rewriting of the V&A catalog, which focused more on provenance and aspect of the sculpture than previous catalogs had, relied on material supplied by R. W. Lightbown. His introduction to Italian Sculpture was in fact the critical catalog to the V&A’s collection many had hoped his revisions would be (Radcliffe). His legacy to the dual worlds of academic and museum art history was to emphasize the importance of the object and eschew rank speculation as much as possible. Pope-Hennessy possessed a particularly difficult personality. Those who respected him termed him “abrasive,” “unrealistic” and “impatient.” The difficult relationship at the V&A with the curator of sculpture Terrence Hodgkinson is well documented. His caustic opinions of fellow art historians, both in print and verbal, are both legion and famous. He was unaccountably hard on Lightbown whose assistance on the 1964 V&A sculpture catalog was considerable; acerbic toward the work of Leo Planiscig, one of his few forerunners in the field of sculpture, and “unremittingly hostile” (Fenton) toward the American sculpture historian Charles Seymour, Jr. Pope-Hennessy’s aristocratic upbringing, which opened many doors among art museum officials and collectors, accounted in large part for his success as a museum curator and director. His universal nickname, a mixture of respect and the autocratic fear he instilled, was “The Pope.” The last director of the V&A who could could allow himself to be concerned only with scholarship issues, no one reportedly dared ask him when the roof was reported leaking, to have it fixed. His brother was the British royal family biographer and documentarian James Pope-Hennessy (1916-1974).

Selected Bibliography

Sienese Quattrocento Painting. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1947; The Drawings of Domenichino in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon Press, 1948; Fra Angelico. New York: Phaidon/Garden City Books, 1952; An Introduction to Italian Sculpture. 3 vols. New York: Phaidon: 1955-63; and Lightbown, Ronald. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 3 vols. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1964; The Portrait in the Renaissance. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966; The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980; Luca della Robbia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980; Cellini. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985; Italian Paintings. volume 1 of, The Robert Lehman Collection [Metropolitan Museum of Art]. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 1986; Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991; The Piero della Francesca Trail. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992; On Artists and Art Historians: Selected Book Reviews of John Pope-Hennessy. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 67 cited; [correspondence:] Peter Quennell, ed. Pope-Hennessy, James. A Lonely Business: a Self-portrait of James Pope-Hennessy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 50-51; Pope-Hennessy, John. Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991; Bayley, Stephen. “Vitrol & Ambition: It’s One of the World’s Great Museums [etc.].” Independent (London), July 28, 2000, p. 1; [obituaries:] C.M.E., and Radcliffe, Anthony, and Christiansen, Keith. “John Pope-Hennessy (1913-94).” The Burlington Magazine 137, no. 1102 (January 1995): 34-37; Wilson, David. “Mandarin of the Museums.” The Guardian (London), November 2, 1994, p. T17; Boucher, Bruce. The Independent (London), November 2, 1994, p. 14; Fenton, James. “More of a Sleuth than a Mandarin.” Independent (London). November 7, 1994, p. 16; The Times (London), November 2, 1994; Russell, John. “Sir John Pope-Hennessy, 80, Art Expert, Dies.” The New York Times, November 1, 1994, p. 8.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Pope, Arthur Upham

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pope, Arthur Upham

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1969

Place Born: Phenix, RI, USA

Place Died: Shiraz, Fārs, Iran

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Persian (culture)

Overview

Archaeologist and historian of Persian art. Pope was the son of a Baptist minister, Louis Atherton Pope and his mother, Imogene Titus Pope. He graduated from Brown University in 1904, remaining on the faculty to teach philosophy. He married Bertha Clark, later the author Bertha Damon, in 1905. Pope attended graduate school at Brown, Cornell and Harvard, taught the University of California 1910-1917. After his divorce to Clark, he married fellow Persianist art historian, Phyllis Ackerman, in 1920. In 1923, Pope was appointed director of the San Francisco Museum. Two years later, he went to Iran to complete research and serve as an art advisor to the Iranian government. He organized an exhibition and the First International Congress on Persian Art in Philadelphia in 1926. In 1928 he founded the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology (later the American Institute for Iranian Art and Archaeology and ultimately the Asia Institute) in New York city and incorporated 1930 in New York. He traveled around the world giving lectures and curating exhibitions of Persian art. In 1930, he edited the Survey of Persian Art. In 1934 he hired the budding Islamicist Richard Ettinghausen. The Institute became the Asia Society in 1947. During this time he supported himself by consulting on Persian art acquisitions. He reliquished his duties in 1953 (succeeded by James Landis) to devote himself to research and writing. Her served on the Council for Soviet-American Friendship board during World War II (1943-1949). However, as the cold war heighted afterward, Pope was interrogated by the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1954 The International Association of Iranian Art elected him president in 1960. He and his wife settled in Itran. He suffered a heart attack and died in 1969. His request to be buried in Isfahan, Iran was supplemented with the Shah’s order to erect a special mausoleum for Pope. In art literature, Pope is sometimes confused with the Harvard fine arts instructor, Arthur Pope (1880-1974).

Selected Bibliography

An Introduction to Persian Art Since the Seventh century A D.. London: P. Davies, 1930; and Ackerman, Phyllis. A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present. 6 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938-58; Masterpieces of Persian Art.; New York: The Dryden Press 1945; Persian Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965;. Persian Architecture: the Triumph of Form and Color. New York, G. Braziller, 1965; Introducing Persian Architecture Tehran: Soroush Press, 1976.

Sources

The Dictionary of Art 25: 234; [obituary:] “Arthur Pope, 88, Expert on Iran, Leading Authority on Old Persian Culture, Dies.” New York Times September 4, 1969 p. 47.

Pope, John Alexander

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pope, John Alexander

Gender: male

Date Born: 1906

Date Died: 1982

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), Chinese (culture or style), Early Modern Japanese, East Asian, Edo (Japanese period), Japanese (culture or style), Japanese ceramics styles, Ming (culture, period, and styles), porcelain (visual works), pottery (visual works), vase, vase paintings (visual works), and Yüan (dynastic styles and period)

Overview

Museum director and historian of Chinese and Japanese art. Pope received a Ph.D. in Chinese studies and Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1955. He also studied European collections of Chinese art at the Courtald Institute of Art in London, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. After spending three years as a lecturer of Chinese art at Columbia University, Pope was hired as a research associate at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C., and was appointed its director in 1962. He published several books, articles, and exhibition catalogs on Chinese blue- and-white vase painting, and worked to develop the museum’s collections of blue-and-white porcelain from the Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) periods. Pope also expanded the Freer’s collection of Japanese porcelain produced during the Edo (1600-1868) period. In the last decade of his life, Pope worked as a research curator of Far Eastern art from 1971 until his death in 1982.

Sources

The Dictionary of Art

Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker

Popham, Hugh

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Popham, Hugh

Other Names:

Hugh Popham

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 March 1889

Date Died: 08 December 1970

Place Born: Plymouth, Plymouth, City of, England, UK

Place Died: Islington, London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators

Overview

British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings; scholar of Italian art. Popham was son of Arthur Frederick Popham, a failed architect who worked in the bookbinding division of the Doves Press, and Florence Radford Popham. Both parents were connected to the draper’s firm of Popham and Radford, Plymouth. Popham’s parents both had died by 1908. He was educated at Dulwich College and University College, London before being sent to King’s College, Cambridge, by his guardian, where he graduated with a second-class in classics in 1911. He was friends with many of the Bloomsbury Group at this time, though not ostensibly one himself. In 1912 he joined the British Museum’s department of Prints and Drawings, under the direction of Campbell Dodgson. The same year he married Brynhild Olivier (1886/7-1935). With the outbreak of World War I, Popham joined the Royal Naval Air Service, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps, as the air force was known at that time. Returning to the museum after the war, Popham was assigned to write the volume of the catalog of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings collection, a series begun by Arthur Mayger Hind. In 1926 Popham married the divorcée Rosalind Baynes (1891/2-1973) a cousin of his first wife. Another study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawing appeared that same year, Drawings of the Early Flemish School, a handbook on the topic. Popham comprised part of an illustrious staff at the Print Department, which, aside from Dodgson, Hind and Parker, also included Laurence Binyon and Arthur Waley. With Parker, too, he assisted founding and editing the magazine Old Master Drawings (1926-1940). During these years, his catalogs, first for the exhibition of Italian drawings at the Royal Academy (1930, published 1931) and the Fitzroy Fenwick collection (1935) marked his scholarship in the Italian idiom. He was made Deputy Keeper in 1933. After cataloging the collections of T. Fitzroy Fenwick and the Burlington House collection, he assisted in moving the collections of the Museum to safekeeping during the Blitzkrieg bombings of World War II. There in Aberystwath, he worked with Frederick Antal, Philip Pouncey and Johannes Wilde. He succeeded Hind as the Keeper of the Print Room in 1945. He published his magisterial Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci the same year. Popham was instrumental in securing choice prints from the Liechtenstein Collection for the British Museum when the collection came on the market through Colnaghi’s. He collaborated with Wilde in the catalog of the Italian drawings for Windsor Castle (1949). In 1954 Popham retired and embarked on essentially another entire career of cataloging print collections for major auction houses and scholars. He succeeded Adolph Paul Oppé (1878-1957) as European adviser to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, for drawings acquisitions. His catalog of European drawings (except British) in the Ottawa collection, appeared in 1965. In 1955 he was made an honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. These included de Pass Collection of the Truro Musem, 1957, the Skippe collection (for Christie’s auction house), 1958, and pieces from the Chatsworth Collection that toured the United States 1962-63. He completed the catalogue raisonné of Parmigianino drawings, which his 1953 monograph had laid the groundwork, before his death. His work on the drawings of Holkham Hall was published in the 1980s by Christopher Lloyd. One daughter, Anne, married the art writer Quentin Bell. Popham is known for establishing the canon of the Emilian school of drawings, Parmigianino and Correggio which were not popular in the English-speaking world. As an expert cataloger, his knowledge extended far beyond but included the collections of the British Museum, Windsor, Chatsworth, Holkham, Christ Church, and Oxford.

Selected Bibliography

[edited] Old Master Drawings: a Quarterly Magazine for Students and Collectors. London: B. T Batsford, 1926-40; Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain). Italian Drawings Exhibited at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London, 1930. London: The Oxford University Press, 1931; The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945; and Wilde, Johannes. Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon, 1949; Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Volume I: The 14th and 15th Centuries, with Philip Pouncey. London: Trustees of the Britisk Museum, 1950; Selected Drawings from Windsor Castle: Raphael and Michelangelo. London: Phaidon Press, 1954; Correggio’s Drawings. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1957;Catalogue of the Drawings of Parmigianino. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1971; and Lloyd, Christopher. Old Master Drawings at Holkham Hall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Sources

Garnett, David. The Golden Echo. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1954; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 435; Kemp, Martin. “Introduction.” Popham, A. E. The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. 2nd ed. London: Pimlico, 1994; Shaw, James Byam, and Lloyd, Christopher, rev. “Popham, Arthur Ewart [Hugh] (1889-1970).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford; [obituaries] Shaw, James Byam. “Arthur Ewart Popham (1889-1970).” Burlington Magazine 113, No. 815. (February 1971): 97-98; “Mr A. E. Popham: Authority on Old Master Drawings.” The Times [London] December 9, 1970, p. 12.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Porada, Edith

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Porada, Edith

Gender: female

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1994

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Honolulu, HI, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): archaeology

Career(s): educators

Overview

Columbia University art historian and archeologist. Porada was born to a wealthy family and educated privately in Vienna and at the family estate, Hagengut, near Mariazell, Austria. She graduated from the Realreform Gymnasium Luithlen in 1930. Though initially interested in Minoan culture, she switched to near Eastern civilization because of the promise of discoveries yet to me made. Porada pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna under the maverick art historian Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski and, after his retirement, under the Ethnologist Robert Heine-Geldern (1885-1968) and the Sumerian scholar Viktor Christian (1885-1963). Her dissertation, accepted in 1935, was on glyptic art of the Old Akkadian period. At the advice of A. Leo Oppenheim (1904-1974), then at the Oriental Institute in Vienna, she moved to Paris to study the seals at the Louvre. In 1938 she emigrated to the United States where she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the seals of Assurnasirapal II, part of the collection of the Museum’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola. She was a staff member of the Museum, 1944-1945. She lectured widely around the United States. She became a U. S. citizen in 1944. The archaeologist Hetty Goldman (1881-1972) suggested Porada also study the cylinder seals at the Morgan Library. This resulted in her important publication, Mesopotamian Art in Cylinder Seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1947. She was a lecturer at New York University in 1949. After a Guggenheim fellowship to Iran, she accepted a teaching position in the art department at Queens College, Brooklyn in 1950. Despite no formal training in art history, she taught Western art courses in addition to archaeology. In 1958, Columbia University art history department chair Rudolf Wittkower, as part of his initiative to build a high-profile department, invited her to join the faculty. She developed a particular intellectual bond with the department’s classicist, Evelyn B. Harrison. She conducted her seminars in the basement of the Morgan, surrounded by her seal casts, being named honorary curator of seals and tablets at the Morgan in 1956. She was promoted to full professor in 1963. Between 1970 and 1973, she organized and directed Columbia’s excavations on the Phlamoudhi plain in northeastern Cyprus. The excavation discovered a sanctuary of the Hellenistic period which helped prove the close commercial ties between Cyprus and the Greek islands in the late Bronze Age, ca. 1500 B.C. Porada was named Arthur Lehman professor in 1973. In 1977 she received the Gold Medal for outstanding service from the Archaeological Institute of America. Columbia University established an Edith Porada professorship of ancient Near Eastern art history and archeology in 1983 with a $1 million gift. Porada was named professor emerita of art history and archeology in 1984. In retirement she held regular graduate seminars at the Morgan and sat on the Board of Visitors to both the Sackler and Freer Galleries. She died at age 81. She lived much of her life with her father and friend, the socialite, Adeline Hathaway “Happy” Weekes Scully (d.1979). Porada’s scholarship followed the tradition set by the Orientalists Anton Moortgat (1897-1977), whom she nevertheless disagreed with, and Henri Frankfort.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] “Edith Porada–Publications” Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada. Mainz on Rhine: P. von Zabern, 1987, pp. 6-11; and Dyson, C. H. and Wilkinson, C. K. Alt-Iran: die Kunst in vorislamischer Zeit. Baden-Baden: Holle, 1962, English, The Art of Ancient Iran; Pre-Islamic Cultures. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965; Mesopotamian Art in Cylinder Seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York: Morgan Library, 1947.

Sources

[obituaries:] “Edith Porada, 81, Dies; Columbia Art Historian.” New York Times, March 26, 1994, p. 8; Pittman, Holly. “Edith Porada, 1912-1994.” American Journal of Archaeology 99, no. 1 (January 1995): 143-146; Lawton, Thomas. “Dr. Edith Porada August 22, 1912-March 24, 1994.” Artibus Asiae 54, no. 3/4 (1994): 376-377

Porcher, Jean

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Porcher, Jean

Gender: male

Date Born: 1892

Date Died: 1966

Home Country/ies: France

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

Career(s): librarians

Overview

Historian of French illuminated manuscripts and librarian, Bibliothèque Nationale. After completing his studies at the école des Chartes, Porcher joined the Bibliothèque Nationale. By publishing books on illuminated manuscripts, Porcher encouraged scholars to study them in an art historical context. He became the Conservateur en Chef of the manuscripts department in 1944, where his work focused solely on illuminated manuscripts. Porcher acquired several manuscripts from the Rothschild family and the Comte Guy de Boisrouvray, increasing the amount of material available for art historical research. He established the practice of photographing the manuscripts, preserving them and making them more accessible to researchers. In 1954 and 1955, Porcher curated two exhibitions that displayed illuminated manuscripts from French libraries. The results of his research for the two exhibitions culminated in a survey of French manuscript painting in 1959, which was later translated into Italian, German, Swedish, and English. He and Anselme Dimier (1898-1975) published L’art cistercien, France, a survey on the art of the period, in 1962. In 1967 and 1968 Porcher collaborated with Jean Hubert and Fritz Volbach in the “Arts of Mankind” survey series on early medieval art. As a manuscripts scholar, Porcher was significantly more interested in the images than the text, a criticism gently lodged against him in reviews of his work. Erwin Panofsky wrote a homage praising Porcher’s relaxing of the bureaucratic regulations for scholars during his tenure at the Bibliothèque. Porcher published numerous facsimile editions of the manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie de Jean Porcher.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 13-16; and Hubert, Jean, and Volbach, Wolfgang Fritz. Europe des invasions. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, English, Europe of the Invasions. New York: G. Braziller, 1969 [British edition translated as Europe in the Dark Ages]; and Hubert, Jean, and Volbach, Wolfgang Fritz. Empire carolingien. Paris: Gallimard, 1968, English, The Carolingian Renaissance. New York, G. Braziller, 1970; Chefs-d’œuvre de l’enluminure française du 15e siècle. Paris: éditions Nomis, 1950’s?, English, Medieval French Miniatures. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1960; Les très riches Heures du duc de Berry, Musée Condé à Chantilly. Paris: Les éditions Nomis, 1950; and Dimier, Anselme. L’art cistercien, France. La Pierre-qui-Vire (Yonne): Zodiaque, 1962.

Sources

[bibliography:] Panofsky, Erwin. “Homage to Jean Porcher.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 11-12; Cain, Julian. “Jean Porcher conservateur en chef du cabinet des manuscrits.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 171-175; Morgan, Nigel. “Porcher, Jean.” The Dictionary of Art 25: 248.

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