United Kingdom

Surtees, Virginia

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Surtees, Virginia

Other Names:

Virginia Bell, Lady Clarke, Virginia Craig

Gender: female

Date Born: 09 January 1917

Date Died: 22 September 2017

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Pre-Raphaelite

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Victoria and Albert Museum

Overview

Art historian and leading scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement; produced the definitive reference book for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Born Virginia Bell in London to Bertha Bell (1891–1974) and Edward Bell (1882–1924). Her father, a Harvard graduate and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was appointed chargé d’affaires of the U.S. in Beijing in 1922. Therefore, Virginia and her older sister Evangeline (1914-1995) spent their early childhood in China. After Edward’s early death in 1924, Virginia’s mother remarried a British diplomat, Sir James Dodds (1861–1935), a Britisher, who was posted by England to Tokyo in 1937. Surtees married Henry Ashley Clarke (1903–1994), a colleague of her stepfather at the British Embassy in Tokyo. After the couple moved back to London in the early 1950s, Surtees spent three years at the Victoria and Albert Museum working on Gabrielle Enthoven’s theater collection, also known as “the theatrical encyclopedia.” Surtees bought a Rosetti painting Rosa Triplex in 1951 for just £285. Her husband was appointed to Rome and while there she met and had an affair with David Leonard Craig (1914–1996). She and Clarke divorced and married Craig in 1960. She divorced Craig in 1962, moving back to London, taking her maternal grandfather’s surname, Surtees, in order to inherit Mainsforth Hall, a country house in County Durham. Surtees began her Dante Gabriel Rossetti collection when her grandmother, the daughter of the artist’s model Louisa Ruth Herbert (1831–1921), bequeathed her many of the artist’s works. Free to pursue her interest while living on her own, Surtees spent ten years compiling a complete catalogue raisonné of Rossetti with assistance from art historian John Gere. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was published in 1971 in two volumes and dedicated to Sir Sydney Cockerell, who supported Surtees’s accomplishment of this arduous task. She published Sublime and Instructive, in 1972, collecting the letters between John Ruskin and the artist Louisa Waterford (1818–1891). In 1973, Surtees curated the first modern retrospective of Rossetti at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition included paintings, drawings, and watercolors that reintroduced Rossetti as an artist to the public who had hitherto only known him as a poet. In 1991, Surtees curated an exhibition of Rossetti’s portraits of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862), at the Ashmolean Museum. She never married again living in one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, South Kensington, until she entered a nursing home in 2014 and died in 2017.

As a prolific writer, Surtees published over a dozen of biographies, memoirs, and collected letters. For example, a book on Charlotte Canning, Lady-In-Waiting to Queen Victoria (1817-1861) in 1975. Surtees possessed a substantial collection of Rossetti’s work, the most important of which was auctioned at Christie’s in 2014. Her painting Rosa Triplex, which she purchased in 1951 for £285, sold for for £902,500. The rest of her collections were given to the British Museum, the Bristol City Art Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Bristol City Museum.

Surtees was an amateur historian, and the first draft of Surtees’ catalogue raisonné required considerable editorial effort from the Oxford University Press and John Gere. Nevertheless, the book was warmly received and praised as indispensable for a full exploration of the nature and significance of Rossetti’s art and “the first catalogue raisonné devoted to the work of an English painter of the period.” Surtees’ meticulous archival research resulted in the publication of collected letters and biographies based entirely on primary sources (Ormond).

Selected Bibliography

The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971;
ed., Sublime & Instructive; Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton. London: Joseph, 1972;
Charlotte Canning: Lady-In-Waiting to Queen Victoria and Wife of the First Viceroy of India 1817-1861. London: J. Murray, c1975;
Rossetti’s portraits of Elizabeth Siddal: a Catalogue of the Drawings and Watercolours. Aldershot [England]: Scolar Press, in association with Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1991.

Sources

Dorment, Richard. “Virginia Surtees Obituary.” The Guardian. 5 Dec 2017;
——. “Surtees [née Bell], Virginia (1917–2017), Art Historian and Biographer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 14 Jan 2021;
Greene, Michael. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné.” The Georgia Review, 27, p. 601–605. 1973;
Ormond, Richard. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 120, no. 5185, p. 45. 1971;
Reynolds, Graham. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 at Catalogue Raisonne.” Apollo: The International Magazine of Art & Antiques, 95, p. 70. Jan 1972;
Roberts Keith. “Virginia Surtees (1917-2017).” The Burlington Magazine. Feb 2018.

Caviness, Madeline

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Caviness, Madeline Harrison

Other Names:

Madeline Caviness
Madeline Harrison
Madeline Viva Harrison

Gender: female

Date Born: 27 March 1938

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom and United States

Subject Area(s): feminism, Medieval (European), and stained glass (visual works)

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Tufts University

Overview

Tufts University professor, medievalist scholar, and feminist theorist. Caviness, born Madeline Harrison, was born in London to Eric Vernon Harrison and Gwendoline Rigden (Harrison). Learning to read at a young age, Harrison spoke French at age five and studied Latin at age seven (Howard). She received her B.A. in 1959 from Newnham College, the University of Cambridge, where she studied Archaeology and Anthropology and English. Through Caviness’ background in Anthropology, she set her sight on a civil service career in Africa upon graduation. However, she faced tremendous resistance as the British Council then considered women unsuitable for overseas jobs. The thwarted path to civil service led to the beginning of her art historian career. Caviness accepted a scholarship to work with specialists in documenting and preserving medieval stained glass at Sorbonne Université, Paris. In 1962, she married Verne Strudwick Caviness (1934-2021), a medical student who became a Professor of Neurology at Harvard University. She received her M.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1963. During the Vietnam War, her husband was posted in the Air Force in Japan; Caviness wrote her dissertation in that country. Her completed Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Harvard University was awarded in 1970. Titled “The Stained Glass of the Trinity Chapel Ambulatory of Canterbury Cathedral,” the dissertation was written under the supervision of Harvard Professors John Coolidge and Ernst Kitzinger and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, scholar Hanns Swarzenski. During the doctoral program, Caviness frequently audited Medieval Art courses by Linda Seidel. She started as an assistant professor at Tufts University’s Fine Arts Department in 1972 and held the department chair position during 1975-1982 and 1988-1990. Caviness published her first book, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, a continuation of her doctoral dissertation, in 1977. The book was positively reviewed by Seidel, who described it as “an indispensable book for the scholar of early Gothic painting.” Caviness was appointed full professor at the Department of Art and the History of Art in 1981.

She served as the first woman President of the International Center of Medieval Art during 1984-1987, President of the Medieval Academy of America during 1993-1994, and Honorary President of Union Académique Internationale in Brussels from 2001. Describing her studies in feminist theory in medieval times as her “second career,” Caviness taught and published books on the topic of women and medieval art. Her article on Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, published on Speculum in 1993, was described by Caviness as her “first overtly feminist article.” The article aroused exasperated criticism in the Medievalist academia but received appreciation from students and became a classical read for later university courses on gender theory. Her book Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy continued the feminist methodology. Caviness conducted research with her colleague Professor Emeritus Charles G. Nelson (1925-2008) to examine the limited protection of women and Jews through illustrated German law books from the 14th century focusing on feminist theory. She retired as Professor Emerita from Tufts University in 2007.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Stained Glass of the Trinity Chapel Ambulatory of Canterbury Cathedral. Harvard University, 1970;
The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, ca. 1175-1220, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977;
The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1981;
Stained Glass before 1540: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983;
“Saint-Yved of Braine: The Primary Sources for Dating the Gothic Church.” Speculum 59 (1984): 524-558;
“Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum 68 (1993): 333-362;
“Learning from Forest Lawn,” Speculum 69 (1994): 963-992;
Stained Glass Windows. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1996;
Paintings on Glass: Studies in Romanesque and Gothic Monumental Art, Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1997;
“Tacking and Veering Through Three Careers.”Medieval Feminist Forum 6. 2000;
Medieval Art in the West and Its Audience. Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 2001;
Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001;
“Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque: G. G. King and E. H. Lowber behind a camera in Spain c. 1910-25.”Journal of Art Historiography. December 14, 2011, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/caviness1.pdf;

Sources

Caviness, Madeline H. Interview by Alexa Sue Amore. International Center of Medieval Art. July 17, 2021;
—. “Seeking Modernity through the Romanesque: G. G. King and E. H. Lowber Behind a Camera in Spain c. 1910-25.”Journal of Art Historiography. December 14, 2011;
—. “Tacking and Veering Through Three Careers.”Medieval Feminist Forum 6 (2000);
Howard, Marjorie. “Eclectic Scholar Follows a New Path,” Tufts Journal (2007)
Seidel, Linda. “The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, circa 1175-1220. Madeline Harrison Caviness.” ARLIS/NA Newsletter 6 (1978);

Contributors: Siyu Chen

Zimmern, Helen

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Zimmern, Helen

Gender: female

Date Born: 25 March 1846

Date Died: 11 January 1934

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany and United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Jewish (culture or style) and women (female humans)

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Bayswater, Finishing school, and London

Overview

Victorian art historian, writer, biographer, translator. Zimmern was born into a Jewish family in Hamburg, her father was Hermann Theodor Zimmern, a lace merchant, and her mother Antonia Marie Therese Regina (Zimmern). After the political unrest in Germany in 1848, the family emigrated to Britain in 1850, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She received sporadic and somewhat disjointed education until 1860, completing a finishing school certificate in Bayswater, London, in 1864. She thereupon decided to begin her career as an author and translator, writing biographies, novels, and reviews covering a broad range of topics. Her first literary appearance was “An Account of Goslar in the Hartz” in Once a Week in 1868. As an art historian, she contributed frequently to The Magazine of Art and the journal Modern Art, writing biographies and for periodicals for English, American, German, and Italian newspapers. She lectured on Italian art in Germany and Britain, and then moved to Florence in 1887. This same year she edited and wrote the introduction for English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds’ The Discourses, and published the book Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life and His Works on Lessing’s contributions to art and aesthetics. The following year, she wrote a thirty-two page essay in The Art Annual, “The Life and Work of L. Alma-Tadema,” which was expanded into Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, R.A., published by George Bell in 1902. In 1906, she wrote the book Italy of the Italians, including a section on plastic art, architecture, and sculpture. During her time in Italy, Zimmern began to write on political relations between Italy, Britain, and Germany; she expressed strong anti-German sentiments in Jewish Home Life by criticizing the German persecution of Jews. Zimmern grew sick in 1933 and died in Florence in 1934, having remained single.

Much of Zimmern’s work points to her role as an advocate for European art and writer on topics that many believed to be exclusively for male voices (“Helen Zimmern Corriere”). By writing about sculpture, like that of Leonardo Bistolfi in “A Modern Italian Sculptor,” 1896, she aimed to help women understand how to appreciate and evaluate a sculpture when they looked at one. Zimmern’s writing encouraged women into the artistic sphere; in “The Work of Miss Bessie Potter,” 1900, Zimmern credits Miss Potter’s identity as a woman as the reason for her sculpting skills. Her art reviews are cited as being “largely adulatory” and including many references to artists she claimed she was friends with (Fraser 83). However, this practice introduced continental European artists to people in the British Commonwealth who would otherwise not have had this artistic literacy; in this way she facilitated an international conversation on sculpture and disseminated information on sculptors (Fraser 76).

Selected Bibliography

edited, Reynold, Joshua. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses. .London: Walter Scott, 1887;
“Contemporary Italian Art. I.” Modern Art 2, no. 1 (1894). ;
“Contemporary Italian Art. II.” Modern Art 2, no. 2 (1894). ;
“A Modern Italian Sculptor”, Art Journal (1896): 339;
“The Work of Miss Bessie Potter.” The Magazine of Art (1900): 522-524;
“Jewish Home Life”. Fraser’s Magazine no. 616 (04, 1881): 482-500.;
The Life and Work of L. Alma Tadema. London: Art Journal Office, 1888;
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life and His Works. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1878;
Italy of the Italians. London: Pitman, 1914.

Sources

Frances, Hays. “Zimmern, Helen.” Essay. In Women of the Day; a Biographical Dictionary of Notable Contemporaries, 224–24. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1885;
Moon, George Washington. Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries. 13th ed., rev. London: G. Routledge, 1891;
Creffield, C. A. “Zimmern, Helen (1846–1934), translator and author.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 17 Oct. 2022. ;
Fraser, Hilary. “Women and the Modelling of Victorian Sculptural Discourse.” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 33, no. 1/2 (March 2017): 74–93. doi:10.1080/01973762.2017.1279877;
Del Vivo, Caterina. Helen Zimmern: Corriere di Londra, 1884-1910. Milan: Fondazione Corriere della sera, 2014. Accessed October 17, 2022..

Contributors: Rachel Hendrix

Meynell, Alice

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Meynell, Alice Christiana Gertrude

Other Names:

Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson
A.C. Thompson

Gender: female

Date Born: 11 October 1847

Date Died: 27 November 1922

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): art criticism; aesthetics, Impressionist (style), and Pre-Raphaelite

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Homeschooled

Overview

Late-Victorian poet, journalist, and art critic. Meynell, then Thompson, was born into an affluent and well-educated family with a pianist- and amateur painter mother, Christiana Jane Weller (1825–1910), and an independently wealthy Jewish father, Thomas James Thompson (1809–1881). Thompson and her elder sister Elizabeth Thompson (1846-1933), later known as Lady Butler and one of the most acclaimed British painters in the 1870s, were homeschooled by their father. The Thompson family’s connection with many prominent writers at the time, including Charles Dickens, grew Alice Thompson’s literature interests at an early age. She frequently moved between England and Italy beginning at age four, enabling her to speak both English and Italian. She published her first poetry collection, Preludes, in 1875, quickly following the sudden success of her sister’s paintings. Among the admirers of Preludes were the English art critic John Ruskin as well as journalist Wilfrid Meynell (1852-1948), who married Alice in 1877. Their subsequent family grew quickly with eight children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Despite having a family to attend to, Meynell was equally committed to her journalist career, regularly contributing literary criticism to the Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, The Spectator, the Saturday Review, The World, and The Tablet, among other periodicals.

Beginning in 1880, Meynell wrote as an accomplished art critic publishing essays continually in the Magazine of Art. She wrote about artists, including Alexandre Cabanel, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Léon Bonnat, Henri Regnault, William Quiller Orchardson, Ernest Meissonier, and Alphonse de Neuville, in the “Our Living Artists” column of the magazine. Meynell contributed reviews of art exhibitions and collections and collaborated on many other articles in the Magazine of Art that were credited solely to her husband. During the same period, the friendly rival of The Magazine of Art, The Art Journal, was another periodical where Meynell published her essays on artists, paintings, and architecture. Her essay The Point of Honour, was collected along with her other works from periodicals into her first volume of essays published in 1893, The Rhythm of Life. In that essay she characterized Diego Velázquez as “the first Impressionist.” The year 1892 began Meynell’s friendship with English poet and literary critic Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), who made evident his devotion to Meynell by giving her the manuscript of his most famous work The Angel in the House. Patmore invited John Singer Sargent to draw the portrait of Meynell in 1894, prompting Sargent’s admiration for Meynell’s work and consequential request for Meynell to write the introduction for The Work of John S. Sargent, R.A., a book of Sargent’s pictures’ reproductions in 1903. Meynell published her book on Ruskin, a praiser of Meynell’s earliest literary works, for Blackwood’s Modern English Writers series in 1900. Titled John Ruskin, the book was intended to be “principally a hand-book of Ruskin” (8) as Meynell offered exhaustive analyses of over twenty writings by Ruskin. After a number of illnesses, migraines and depression among them, Meynell died in 1922, age 75.

Selected Bibliography

Preludes. London: H.S. King, 1875;
The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays. London: E. Mathews and J. Lane, 1893;
(with Frederic Farrar) William Holman Hunt, His Life and Work. London: Art Journal Office, 1893;
John Ruskin. London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1900;
Children of the Old Masters (Italian School). London: Duckworth & Co, 1903;
(introduction) The Work of John S. Sargent, R.A. London: W. Heinemann; New York: S. Scribner’s Sons, 1903;

Sources

Badeni, June. “Meynell [née Thompson], Alice Christiana Gertrude (1847–1922), poet and journalist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004;
—. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Cornwall: Tabb House, 1981;
Meynell, Viola. Alice Meynell, a Memoir. London: J. Cape, 1929;
Fraser, Hilary. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking like a Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Johnson, Marion

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Johnson, Marion

Other Names:

Georgina Masson
Babs
Georgina Johnson

Gender: female

Date Born: 23 March 1912

Date Died: 1980

Place Born: Rawalpindi, Punjab Province, Pakistan

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Italy and United Kingdom

Overview

Architectural- and garden historian; photographer. Born to a British military officer stationed at the time at the Khyber Pass, Pakistan, she grew up in a military family. Educated in Bath, England, in a secondary school for daughters of British officers, she never attended higher education. Johnson worked for the British government in Paris as part of a public relations unit (and perhaps also for British military intelligence) in the years before World War II. She returned to Britain where she married a British army officer, working for the Foreign Office between 1943 and 1947. At the conclusion of the Second World War, now estranged from her husband, she was attached semi-officially to the British Fifth Army in Rome. There she met Prince Filippo Andrea Doria Pamphili Landi (1886-1958) an Italian politician and nobleman, who rented her the former stable quarters of the Palazzina Corsini on his property. Johnson decorated the apartment where it became a haven for expatriates and locals alike. These stables opened to the palace’s garden and she took a subsequent interest in garden history.

By 1950 she adopted the name of a maternal grandmother, Georgina Masson, partially to hide her Roman publishing activities from her husband. Johnson, now Masson, began studying Roman architecture and its surrounding gardens with an improvised camera. A large portion of her research was performed at the Fondazione Caetani in the city. Her initial publications were in architecture, her first article being one in 1950 on Palladian villas for Country Life. Then followed a series of articles for Architectural Review. One of them, her 1955 article, “Palladian Villas as Rural Centres,” impressed a young architectural history student (and later eminent Harvard Palladian architectural historian) James S. Ackerman who recounted it as the first time he’d read an article that considered the economic, social and political aspects of art (Ackerman, Origins). Her first book was one of historical biography on Frederick II Hohenstaufen in 1957. Publishing success came with the advent of the “coffee table book”, large-format highly illustrated art books. The publisher Thames and Hudson issued a book of her photographs and text as Italian Villas and Palaces in 1959. The combination of Masson’s artistic photographs and her easy though well-researched writing style made the book popular to a British economy only now emerging from the economic hardships of World War II. She later acquired a Roleiflex camera with which she took some of her most important photographs. A book on Italian gardens of the same genre followed in 1961, published jointly in the United States by the emerging US coffee-table publisher, Harry N. Abrams. Over time she developed connections with many British nobility and writers, most notably Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton, the latter having come from an art-dealing family and living in Florence. She developed a close relationship with literary historian and Rome specialist Gunhild Bergh (1888-1961). In 1965 the book for which she is most remembered, A Companion Guide to Rome, appeared, dedicated to Bergh. Numerous subsequent editions followed. Masson returned to biography with a book on Queen Christina of Sweden, the Swedish monarch who forsook her native country to live in Rome. Garden history, ever a passion, absorbed her later interests. The results of study and travel to Harvard University’s garden and research center, Dumbarton Oaks, appeared the same year as the Christina biography, Dumbarton Oaks: a Guide to the Gardens. When the Italian government purchased the Doria Pamphili in 1971, Masson lived briefly in rural Tuscany, aided by Acton. Unhappy with the country life, she returned to Rome and a consultantship for the Committee for the Defense of the Southern Landscape (of Italy). There she did daily research at the American Academy in Rome near her apartment. Diagnosed with cancer, she returned to England in 1978. She completed a book on the Borgias before her death in 1980 and was at work on a history of the importation of special flower species in Italian gardens. Only the Borgia book was published posthumously. Her 5,000 photographic negatives were willed to the American Academy in Rome at her death.

A “vivid personality, sociable and outgoing with a non-stop flow of conversation” (Gendel), Masson’s prim but irascible nature won her a singular following. In a celebrated incident, Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios (b. 1936), director of the periodical Arte Illustrata, published an article of hers in 1970 on seventeenth-century Italian flowers but failed to return her photos. She publicly accused him of thievery at a party hosted by Acton. Her photographs are valued perhaps more than her writing, which, well-informed, never wholly embraced the scholarly. Her Guide to Rome is considered one of the last serious guidebooks to the city, with few restaurant tips or notices of popular amusements, it served as the educated tourists guide to the city by a foreigner who knew it well. Described as, “a cross between a guidebook and a work of literature (Wanted in Rome), it focused on archaeological and architectural treasures of the city. Masson disliked the Baroque and those monuments are largely left out of the Guide. Her photographic collection included social observation, architecture and gardens and contemporary historians value her images of 1950’s Roman neighborhoods. It is still in print in later revisions by others. She received the Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Republica Italiana for her work.

Selected Bibliography

“Palladian Villas as Rural Centres.” Architectural Review 118 (July 1955):17-20;
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. A life. London: Secker & Warburg,1957;
Italian Villas and Palaces. London: Thames & Hudson, 1959;
Italian Gardens. New York: Abrams, 1961;
The Companion Guide to Rome. London: Collins, 1965;
Queen Christina. London: Secker Warburg, 1968;
Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance. London: Secker & Warburg, 1975;
The Borgias. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981;

Sources

Gendel, Milton. “A Portrait. Friend in Focus, Background Blurred.” in Georgina Masson 1912 – 1980: Milan: Edizioni Charta 2003 https://www.miltongendel.com/wp-content/uploads/2003-A-Portrait-of-Georgina-Masson.pdf;;
“The Companion Guide to Georgina Masson.” Wanted in Rome (April 22, 2003), https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/the-companion-guide-to-georgina-masson.html
Ackerman, James S., Origins, Invention, Revision: Studying the History of Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016, p. ix.

Waters, W. G.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Waters, William George

Other Names:

W. G. Waters

Gender: male

Date Born: September 1844

Date Died: 17 June 1928

Place Born: Wighton, Norfolk, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Overview

Private scholar, biographer and historian of Italian Renaissance art. Waters was the son of William Waters whose family traced its Norfolk, lineage back to Elizabeth I. He was educated at Ipswich Grammar School and Worcester College, Oxford where he won student awards for his historical scholarship. Independently wealthy, he settled in London writing, traveling and entertaining. He married Charlotte Leeder (d. 1868). After her death, in 1880 he married a second time to Emily Paton, an author and collector of cook books. He actively translated historic important scholarly texts beginning with Salernitano Masuccio’s stories from the fifteenth century in 1895. In 1901 he published a small volume in Bell’s art book series, Great masters in painting and sculpture on Piero della Francesca. Afterward he advised another amateur scholar, Evelyn Sandberg, for her book on the same subject and may have recommended the neophyte author to her Italian publisher. He died at age 83.

Selected Bibliography

The Novellino of Masuccio London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895;
Piero della Francesca. London: George Bell and Sons, 1901;
Five Italian Shrines: an Account of the Monumental Tombs of S. Augustine at Pavia, S. Dominic at Bologna, S. Peter Martyr at Milan, S. Donato at Arezzo, and of Orcagna’s Tabernacolo at Florence. London: J. Murray, 1906;
Travellers Joy. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1906;
Italian Sculptors. London, Methuen & Co.;1911;
and Waters, Emily (Paton). The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the xvth Century. London. G. Routledge & Sons, 1926

Sources

[obituary:] “Mr. W. G. Waters.” Times (London), June 18, 1928.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Archer-Straw, Petrine

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Archer-Straw, Petrine

Other Names:

Petrine Archer
P.A. Straw
P. Archer-Straw
Pet Archer-Straw

Gender: female

Date Born: 26 December 1956

Date Died: 05 December 2012

Place Born: Birmingham, West Midlands, England, UK

Place Died: Mona, Jamaica

Home Country/ies: Jamaica and United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Afro-Caribbean (style and culture), avant-garde, Black (general, race and ethnicity), Caribbean, Jamaican, and Modern (style or period)

Institution(s): Courtauld Institute and Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts

Overview

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean.

Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 and completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in 1978. She also trained in visual arts at the Jamaica School of Art from 1979 to 1982, receiving a diploma in painting. She went on to receive a M.Phil in Cultural History (1983-87). She later gained her M.A. and PhD (study in Negrophilia) in Art History from the Courtauld Institute at the University of London, where she subsequently taught between 1994 and 1995.

After receiving her doctorate in 1994 she worked as a consultant for a number of institutions in the Caribbean and Great Britain including the Royal Academy, London where she was coordinating editor for the exhibition and publication Africa the Art of a Continent (1995). Archer-Straw assisted curator and editor Tom Phillips (b. 1937) on the book specifically, consisting of over 600 pages that document the continent, including ancient Egypt and Nubia, North and Northwestern Africa as well as the sub-Saharan region. In 1990 Archer-Straw published Jamaican Art, the first book of its kind. The book was co-authored with editor-in-chief of Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly Kim Robinson-Walcott (b. 1956), in addition to a foreword by curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, David Boxer (b. 1946). She chronicled for the first time the evolution of Jamaican art, highlighting key artists in the nation’s history, like well-known sculptor Edna Manley (1900-1987), but also David Pottinger (1911-2007), Cecil Baugh (1908-2005), and Carl Abrahams (1913-2005). Her essays emphasize the distinctive and diverse nature of Jamaican art, despite its inherent connections to the European art scene, especially within the United Kingdom. In 2000, Archer-Straw was also the editor and curator of Fifty Year: Fifty Artists, an exhibition and publication in commemoration of a 50-year milestone in the development of fine art training in Jamaica, for the School of Visual Arts (Jamaica). Archer-Straw wrote two essays for the book, the first an introduction about the College’s history and the second an examination of the development of its fine arts programs. Fifty years-Fifty Artists demonstrated the significant progression in fine arts teaching since the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts received its charter back in the 1950s under the guidance of its founder, Edna Manley. Archer-Straw became famous for her 2000 publication of Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, which discusses Europeans fetishization and passion for Black culture with the mass exodus of African-American artists, writers, and musicians following WWI.

Archer-Straw worked with the National Gallery of Jamaica where she had been a visiting curator member of the Board of Directors from 2000 until her death. She was a consultant for the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas where she spearheaded the development of the gallery’s curatorial policies following its establishment until 2002. Between 2002 and 2004, she worked with the School of Visual Arts in Jamaica where she designed the college’s first degree program in Art History. She was also arts editor and a consistent writer for the Jamaica Journal, a quarterly for the sciences and arts, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her articles primarily focus on historical themes of the African diaspora and artistic connections across the Atlantic.

In her final years, she co-curated the online exhibition About Face: Revisiting Jamaica’s First Exhibition in Europe with Claudia Hucke, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, in Kingston, Jamaica. Archer-Straw died unexpectedly, aged 55, as the result of a sickle-cell crisis.

Most of Petrine’s curatorial work focused on Jamaica and Jamaican artists. Her exhibitions included: New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art (South Bank Centre and National Touring Exhibitions, 1995), Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean (Royal Geographical Society, London, 1998), and Back to Black (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2005), which she co-curated with Richard Powell and David A Bailey.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Negrophilia: Paris in the 1920’s. A Study of the Artistic Interest in and Appropriation of Negro Cultural Forms in Paris During that Period. University of London, 1994;
Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary. Whitechapel Gallery: London, 2005;
Past, Present and Personal; The Dawn Davies Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2004;
One Man’s Vision; The D’Aguilar Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2003;
Creolite and Creolization, Documenta 11- Platform 3, kessel, 2002;
Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, Thames & Hudson: London, 2000;
Fifty Years – Fifty Artists (Ed) Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston, 2000;
Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean, London: The British Council, 1998;
New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1995;
Africa: The Art of a Continent (Ed) Royal Academy, London: Prestel Verlag, 1995;
Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists London: The Arts Council, 1994;
Jamaican Art: An Overview 1922 – 1982, Kingston Publishers, 1989.

Sources

“Petrine Archer [.com]: Art History, News and Reviews.” https://petrinearcher.com/;
[obit] Chambers, Eddie, “Petrine Archer-Straw: In Memoriam (1956–2012)”. Nka 1 May 2013; 2013 (32): 6–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-2142323;
Paul, Annie, “Petrine Archer, 1956-2012: Scythed too soon,” Active Voice, 5 December 2012 https://anniepaul.net/2012/12/05/petrine-archer-1956-2012-scythed-too-soon/;
Scott-Williams, Tamara, “Dr Petrine Archer-Straw: a gentle soul with a steely grip on reality,” Jamaica Observer, 9 December 2012 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Dr-Petrine-Archer-Straw–a-gentle-soul-with-a-steely-grip-on-reality_13260628.

Mitchell, Charles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Mitchell, Charles

Gender: male

Date Born: 25 January 1912

Date Died: 23 October 1995

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Modern (style or period), and Renaissance

Institution(s): Bryn Mawr College

Overview

Professor of art history, Bryn Mawr College and Warburg scholar, specialist in Italian Renaissance art and particularly the classical influence on the period.

Clarke, Louis C. G.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Louis Colville Gray Clarke

Other Names:

Louis Clarke

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1960

Place Born: Croydon, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship

Career(s): directors (administrators)

Institution(s): Fitzwilliam Museum

Overview

Art connoisseur and director, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1937-1946. Clarke succeeded Sydney Cockerell as Director in 1937. For most of his tenure, Britain was at war. Clarke oversaw the move and collections to safekeeping (museums were possible targets of German bombing). Still, he organized temporary exhibitions in the Museum for the public. Astutely, he used museum funds to buy important work at when the war had depressed the market. An art collector, he donated 2,700 items in his lifetime. These included a portrait by Peter Lely (identified today as Mary Parsons) for £4 (!), and the 18th century woodblocks prints by Utamaro. He retired from the Museum in 1946, remaining as an honorary keeper of the museum. Carl Winter was his successor.

Clarke lacked formal training in art history. His connection with the art world, included collectors and the sale rooms, made him desirable to head the museum.

Sources

Jaffé, A. M. “Clarke, Louis Colville Gray (1881–1960)” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32430; “A Century of Giving.” section 2. Fitzwilliam Museum https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/friends/section2.html

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Hubbard, George

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: George Hubbard

Gender: male

Date Born: 1859

Date Died: 1936

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): archaeology, architecture (object genre), Italian Medieval styles, Medieval (European), sculpture (visual works), and Sicilian (culture or style)

Institution(s): Royal Institute of British Architects

Overview

Architect and architectural historian. Hubbard was the son of John Waddington Hubbard, M.R.C.S., L.S.A. (1823-1871) and Emma Evans (Hubbard). He married Sarah Eleonora Rouquette in 1892. Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA)

Selected Bibliography

“Notes on the Cathedral Church of Cefalù, Sicily.” Archaeologia 56 (1898): 57-70.

Sources

[obituary:] http://hubbardplus.co.uk/hubbard/George_Hubbard_F.S.A/unclegeorgeobit.html; George HUBBARD F.S.A., F.R.I.B.A. http://hubbardplus.co.uk/hubbard/George_Hubbard_F.S.A/george_hub%20bio.html; Welch, Charles. London at the Opening of the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Biographies. Brighton: Pike, 1905; Who Was Who [vol.] 3: 1929-1940. London: Black, 1941.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

United Kingdom

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