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Richardson, A. E., Sir

Full Name: Richardson, A. E., Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir Albert Edward Richardson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1880

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Ampthill, Bedfordshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Architectural historian and architect. Richardson was the son of Albert Edmund Richardson, a printer, and Mary Ann Richardson (maiden name, unrelated). After attending the Boys British School, Highgate (north London), he was apprenticed in 1895 to the architect/engineer Thomas Page (1803-1877), joining the offices of Evelyn Hellicar (1898-1902), Leonard Stokes (1902-3), and Frank T. Verity (1903-6). He married Elizabeth Byers (1882/3-1958) in 1904. His architectural work Richardson combined “an enthusiastic devotion to the architecture of the past, especially the then neglected history of English domestic classicism from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth.” (Summerson). The publisher Harry Batsford suggested his first book on architectural history, written in collaboration with his architectural partner, Charles Lovett Gill (1880-1960), London Houses from 1660 to 1820, in 1911. The book was an early appreciation of the simplicity of Georgian urban design. In 1914 he issued his Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries a folio-sized history beginning with the Palladian movement through the mid-Victorian. In 1916 Richardson served as a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, stationed at the school of military aeronautics at Reading. Following the war, he succeeded Frederick Moore Simpson (1855-1928).as chair of architecture at the Bartlett school of architecture, University College, London. He remained in this position for twenty-seven years. As a lecturer, he was noted for his distaste of modern art and architecture in favor of the classical and Renaissance architecture, resulting in the Bartlett School architectural student’s designing in this style nearly exclusively. His private practice with C. L. Gill grew in the 1920s and 1930s. He was elected ARA in 1936. He continued to reject the continental Modern Movement (e.g., Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier). His 1938 The Art of Architecture co-authored with Hector O. Corfiato was a reactionary last-ditch effort to espouse traditional architectural principles. His partnership with Gill ended with the onset of World War II. Richardson moved with the Bartlett School to its temporary quarters at Cambridge, where he rose to full academician in 1944 in the Royal Academy. He became a professor emeritus in 1946. In the post-war years, he embraced preservationist movements. He was president of the Royal Academy of Architects in 1954 and in 1956 he was appointed KCVO. Restoration and repair of war-damaged buildings followed in a new architectural partnership with his son-in-law. Richardson died at his home, a late eighteenth-century house. He is buried in the churchyard at Millbrook, Bedfordshire. Richardson’s amateur status as an architectural historian frequently led to poor historical practices. Architectural historians of his era frequently attributed buildings directly to the few named architects known to be of that period. Richardson was the chief offender of this practice. He frequently signed certificates of authentication which hung in churches and country houses throughout England. The work of the more scholarly Howard Montagu Colvin brought this practice to an end.


Selected Bibliography

The Old Inns of England. London: B. T. Batsford, 1935; Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland: during the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries. London: Batsford, 1914; London Houses from 1660 to 1820: a Consideration of their Architecture and Detail. London: B.T. Batsford, 1911; The English Inn, Past and Present. Philadelphia & London, J.B. Lippincott,1926; The Art of Architecture. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956; Regional Architecture of the West of England. London: E. Benn, 1924; The Significance of the Fine Arts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.


Sources

Stamp, Gavin. “Richardson, Albert E.” Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects. vol 3, p. 556-57; Houfe, Simon. Sir Albert Richardson: the Professor. Luton: White Crescent Press, 1980; Summerson, John, revised Gordon, Catherine. “Richardson, Sir Albert Edward (1880-1964).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004; Hewlings, Richard. “[Howard Colvin] Architectural historian whose biographical dictionaries laid a foundation for all other scholars in his field .” Independent (London), January 1, 2008, p. 34.




Citation

"Richardson, A. E., Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/richardsona/.


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Architectural historian and architect. Richardson was the son of Albert Edmund Richardson, a printer, and Mary Ann Richardson (maiden name, unrelated). After attending the Boys British School, Highgate (north London), he was apprenticed in 1895 to

Richardson, John

Full Name: Richardson, John

Other Names:

  • John Richardson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist, Cubist, Expressionist (style), and Post-Impressionist


Overview

Picasso scholar and biographer, partner of the art historian Douglas Cooper. Richardson’s father was Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., who served as Quarter-Master General in the Boer War and later founder of the famous Army & Navy Stores of England. Independently wealthy the younger Richardson at first considered becoming an artist. He made friends with both Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, Oxford, but at the outbreak of World War II, became ill and was excused from miliatry service to recuperate at this family home in London. Richardson worked as a designer writing art reviews for The New Observer until that became a full-time position. In 1949/1950 he met the art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, who was moving to a French chateau near Picasso with his art collection. Richard became Cooper’s significant other for the next fifteen years in France. By1960 Richardson and Cooper had split and Richardson moved to New York. His knowledge of Braque and Picasso and well as his entre into the workings of the art world helped him launched a Picasso retrospective in 1962 and a Braque retrospective in 1964. He was appointed by Christie’s auction house to found its New York office. Richardson worked at Christie’s until 1973 when he joined M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as Vice President in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting. Eventually he became Managing Director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art. In 1980, Richardson set out to write an art-historical biography of Picasso, securing the assistance of Marilyn McCully. The first volume of his A Life of Picasso was published in 1991, covering until 1906. It was nearly universally acclaimed as one of the most balanced biographies of the artist and won the Whitbread Award. Richardson was elected to the British Academy in 1993. He was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, his brief alma mater, in 1995. The second volume of the biography appeared in 1996, treating the seminal years of Cubism, 1907-1916. Volume three was published in 2007, ending with 1932.


Selected Bibliography

and McCully, Marilyn. A Life of Picasso. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991-2007.


Sources

Richardson, John. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:A Decade of Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. New York: Knopf, 1999;




Citation

"Richardson, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/richardsonj1924/.


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Picasso scholar and biographer, partner of the art historian Douglas Cooper. Richardson’s father was Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., who served as Quarter-Master General in the Boer War and later founder of the fam

Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder

Full Name: Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder

Gender: male

Date Born: 1665

Date Died: 1745

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Bloomsbury, Camden, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship

Career(s): art collectors, art critics, and artists (visual artists)


Overview

Collector, artist and art writer; first to use the term “connoisseur.” Richardson’s principal vocation was as a portrait painter. His early writing focused on art theory, such as An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). It is today considered the first important treatise on the subject by an English writer. In 1719 he wrote An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting and an Argument in Behalf of the Science of the Connoisseur. Richardson’s son, also named Jonathan (1694-1771), traveled to Italy in 1721 where he made copious and careful notes of the monuments he saw. The elder Richardson compiled these into a major early art history and travel guide, useful for much of the English speaking world taking the “grand tour”: An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Picture in Italy (1722). The treatise was republished with other works by the Richardsons in a French language edition in 1728. Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the painter theorist Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) mention it as an inspirational work. The work became so popular among the wealthy class that it virtually function as a “wish list” for those assembling collections. The Richardson’s demonstrated the value of common-sense attitude toward art. In terms of classical sculpture, the correctly surmised that multiple copies of ancient work indicated, not an original among copies, but that all were copies of a lost original. They sensed that originals might be gleaned from coinage and recognized, for example, the Knidian Aphrodite of the Belvedere was in fact the well-known statue of Praxiteles appearing on a coin of the reign of Caracalla. They were true connoisseurs, whose eyes told them as much about the truth of classical art as the known history.


Selected Bibliography

“The Connoisseur.” In The Works of Mr. Jonathan Richardson. London: T. Davies, 1773. Facsimile, The Works. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969. Two Discourses. London: W. Churchill, 1719.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 47; The Dictionary of Art 26: 345-6; Wood, C. Gibson. Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (Disseration, Warburg Institute, 1982); Dictionary of National Biography 16: 1122-24; Haskell, Francis, and Penny, Nicholas. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 99-100; Gibson-Wood, Carol. Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art /Yale University Press, 2000.




Citation

"Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/richardsonj/.


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Collector, artist and art writer; first to use the term “connoisseur.” Richardson’s principal vocation was as a portrait painter. His early writing focused on art theory, such as An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). It is today cons

Richter, Irma A.

Full Name: Richter, Irma A.

Other Names:

  • Irma Richter

Gender: female

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1956

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

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Leonardo scholar; artist and translator; sister of and collaborator with art historian Gisela M. A. Richter. Richter was the daughter of art historian Jean Paul Richter. She studied at the Slade School of art, Oxford and in Paris. Although principally an artist, her knowledge of (and interest in) art history and languages led her to translations and writing about Leonardo and, with her sister, Gisela M. A. Richter, the curator of Greek art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, books on Greek sculpture. She taught (studio) art in Greenwich, CT, and in London. Her painting exhibitions included the Beaux-arts Gallery in London, 1909-28; the Salon in Paris; Goupil Gallery, London; the New English Art Club and the National Portrait Society.


Selected Bibliography

“Re-discovered painting by Pietro da Cortona.” Apollo 14 (November 1931): 285-7; “Proportions of the Apollo in New York.” Metropolitan Museum Studies 5 (June 1934): 51-4; “Earliest reference to the Leonardo drawings in the English royal collection.” Burlington Magazine 71 (September 1937): 139-40; Rhythmic Form in Art: an Investigation of the Principles of Composition in the Works of the Great Masters. London: John Lanev, 1932; [Translated and edited:] and Richter, Jean Paul. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1939; Leonardo da Vinci. Paragone: a Comparison of the Arts. London: Oxford University Press, 1949; Richter, Jean Paul, and Morelli, Giovanni. Italienische Malerei der Renaissance: im Briefwechsel von Giovanni Morelli und Jean Paul Richter, 1876-1891 Baden-Baden: Grimm, 1960; and Richter, G. M. A. Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths: a Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.


Sources

Petteys, Chris. Dictionary of Women Artists. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985, p. 597; [obituary:] Revue Archeologique 48 no. 6 (July 1956): 71.




Citation

"Richter, Irma A.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/richteri/.


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Leonardo scholar; artist and translator; sister of and collaborator with art historian Gisela M. A. Richter. Richter was the daughter of art historian Jean Paul Richter. She studied at the Slade Scho

Reynolds, Graham

Full Name: Reynolds, Graham

Other Names:

  • Arthur Graham Reynolds

Gender: male

Date Born: 1914

Place Born: Highgate, Kent, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

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


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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




Citation

"Reynolds, Graham." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/reynoldsg/.


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Scholar of John Constable and portrait miniatures. Reynolds was educated at Highgate School and Queens’ College, Cambridge. He joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1937. During World War II he served in Ministry of Home Security (

Rice, David Talbot

Full Name: Rice, David Talbot

Other Names:

  • David Talbot Rice

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 July 1903

Date Died: 12 March 1972

Place Born: Gloucestershire, England, UK

Place Died: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

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


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Rice, David Talbot." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/riced/.


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Byzantinist and University of Edinburgh professor art. Born to Henry Charles Talbot-Rice (1862-1931) and Cecil Mary Lloyd (d. 1940) a landed family, Rice attended Eton before studying archaeology and anthropology at Christ Church, Oxford Universit

Reid, George William

Full Name: Reid, George William

Gender: male

Date Born: 1819

Date Died: 1887

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works) and prints (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator of Prints and Drawing, British Museum. He commissioned Frederic George Stephens to write the initial volumes of the collection, which began appearing in 1870.


Selected Bibliography

British Museum. Department of Prints and Drawings. Title: Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum : Division I. Political and personal satires (no.1-15496). Published: [London] : Printed by order of the Trustees, 1870-1952.





Citation

"Reid, George William." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/reidg/.


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Curator of Prints and Drawing, British Museum. He commissioned Frederic George Stephens to write the initial volumes of the collection, which began appearing in 1870.

Reitlinger, Gerald

Full Name: Reitlinger, Gerald

Other Names:

  • Gerald Roberts Reitlinger

Gender: male

Date Born: 02 March 1900

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: St. Leonards, Dorset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): economics


Overview

Scholar of the artistic taste and so-called economics of taste. Reitlinger was born to Albert Reitlinger (1845-1924), a London banker and Emma Brunner (Reitlinger). He attended the Westminster school with (Sir) Roy Forbes Harrod (1900-78), later the prominent economist. Reitlinger served briefly in the infantry of the Middlesex regiment in World War I. Afterward, he studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where the archaeologist Edward Thurlow Leeds (1877-1955) of the Ashmolean Museum suggested he study cultural topics. Afterward he studied art at the Slade School and Westminster Art School in the 1920s and early 1930s intent on being an artist. His paintings were exhibited during this time in London. Between 1927-1929 he also edited the art journal Drawing and Design, a journal “devoted to art as a national asset.” After his father’s death in 1924, Reitlinger and his brother were left the bulk of the large family estate, allowing both to be independently wealthy.  In the late 1920s he travelled to New York and Tahiti as inspiration for his painting career.  He participated in two excavations, the Field Museum (Chicago)-sponsored one at Kish (modern Iraq) in 1930-1931, and a second Oxford one he co-directed with David Talbot Rice at Hira in 1932. He appears in Robert Byron’s account of that excursion (The Station, 1928) as the character “Reinecker”. From these he built his collection of Syrian and Persian pottery of the Timurid, Isnik, and Safavid periods. Reitlinger wrote several non-fiction works during this time, A Tower of Skulls, in 1932, on his travels to Armenia and the middle east, and South of the Clouds on Yunan province, China, in 1939. The same year he married Dorothy Jardas (1900?-1951).  He served in again in World War II and in the gunnery battery and lectured to the troops. He was discharged from service because of ill-health. . After a divorce in 1939,  he remarried a second time to an independently wealthy widow, Eileen Anne Graham Bell, (born, Eileen Bilbrough), (1909-2001), working as a literary agent. After the war he began writing articles for art journals and articles on art for newspapers. The prestige and the art world luster allow Reitlinger tohold evening parties during these years, entertaining the fashionable of post-war Britain. He turned to writing about Nazi Germany and issues of the Holocaust, beginning with The Final Solution in 1953 and The SS: Alibi of a Nation in 1956. In 1960, Reitlinger published the first volume of his examination of the art market in eighteenth century France, The Economics of Taste, in part through his interest and experience of art collecting. Reitlinger was an avid and astute collector of Asian and Islamic pottery, notably Japanese Kakiemon ware, and seventeenth-century Chinese ceramics. His large porcelain collection was damaged by fire shortly before his death. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at a House Nursing Home in St. Leonards, Sussex. The collection was willed to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford where it forms the Gerald Reitlinger Gallery.

Reitlinger was neither a trained art historian nor economist.  His economic treatment of the history of modern art is really a book on taste. Although the interest in art economics can rightly be traced from his groundbreaking books, they are not filled with market data like contemporary art market analysis. Instead, Reitlinger disparages the degradation of taste in the modern era, which he attributed to a redistribution of wealth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He forecasted that in the future, only governments would be able to patronize artists due to inflated prominence of artistic personalities.


Selected Bibliography

The Economics of Taste. 3 vols. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961-70, vol. 1 The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760-1960, volume. 2. The Rise and Fall of Objets d’art Prices Since 1750, volume. 3. The Art Market in the 1960’s; The Final Solution: the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953; The House Built on Sand; the Conflicts of German Policy in Russia, 1939-1945. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson [1960; South of the Clouds: a Winter Ride through Yün-nan. London: Faber & Faber, 1939; The SS, Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. London, Heinemann, 1956; A Tower of Skulls: a Journey through Persia and Turkish Armenia. London: Duckworth, 1932.


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. 89 cited; Lord Bullock. “Gerald Reitlinger: a Portrait.” in Eastern Ceramics and Other Works of Art from the Collection of Gerald Reitlinger: Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum ; London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1981, pp. 9-11; Byron, Robert. The Station, Athos: Treasures and Men. New York: Knopf, 1928; Powell, Anthony. Messengers of Day. London: Heineman, 1978, pp.171-181; [obituaries and addenda:] “Mr Gerald Reitlinger.” The Times [London], March 11, 1978, p. 14; Powell, Anthony. “Mr Gerald Reitlinger .” The Times (London) March 17, 1978,; p. 20; D. P. [Dilys Powell?] “Mr Gerald Reitlinger.” The Times (London) March 21, 1978, p. 16; David A. Berry, “Reitlinger, Gerald Roberts (1900-1978).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Reitlinger, Gerald." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/reitlingerg/.


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Scholar of the artistic taste and so-called economics of taste. Reitlinger was born to Albert Reitlinger (1845-1924), a London banker and Emma Brunner (Reitlinger). He attended the Westminster school with (Sir) Roy Forbes Harrod (1900-78), later t

Reade, Brian

Full Name: Reade, Brian

Other Names:

  • Brian Edmund Reade

Gender: male

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 1989

Place Born: St. Marychurch, Torquay, Devon, UK

Place Died: St. Marychurch, Torquay, Devon, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom


Overview

Deputy Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1958-73 and Beardsley scholar. Reade was the son of Thomas Glover Reade (1870-1952), a painter and headmaster at a grammar school and Susan Mary King (Reade) (1873-1960). Reade attended Montpelier preparatory school, Paignton, before graduating from Clifton College, Bristol, where he gained an appreciation of that medieval city. In 1931 Reade entered King’s College, Cambridge, studying history under Sir John H. Clapham (1873-1946), the first professor of economic history at Cambridge. Awarded a research stipend, he set about researching the dispersed art collection of Charles I. He traveled throughout the continent and Asia minor in search of individual pieces, then widening his interests to include the Byzantine art. By 1936 he had ended his enormous project, securing a position in the department of prints and drawings of the Victoria and Albert Museum. His travels had broadened his appreciation of modern art from the typical conservative British taste to include the German expressionists, Fauves and Bauhaus masters, which he acquired for the museum. During World War II, Reade was assigned to the War Office as an intelligence photographic interpreter at the Allied Forces headquarters in Europe. He married Margaret Tennant Ware (b. 1916), an artist, in 1941. Reade’s return to the museum ushered in his publishing initiative. First was a brief book on the poet and illustrator Edward Lear in 1949, and a history of sixteenth-century costume for the Costume of the Western World series, The Dominance of Spain (1951). In 1953 his book on Regency antiques of the same title re-established the reputation of the furniture maker George Bullock. He organized the exhibition of Edward Lear for the Arts Council in 1958. At that year, Reade was advanced to deputy keeper in the department of prints and drawings. In 1963 his show on art nouveau objects and Alphonse Mucha at the Victoria and Albert Museum was a noted success. An exhibition on Aubrey Beardsley in 1966 at the V&A became the most attended exhibition to that time. The catalog that Reade wrote elevated him to among the top scholars of the artist’s work. The show traveled to the United States, along with Reade and Oscar Wilde’s son, Vivyan Holland. The success resulted in offers from several museums world wide, but Reade declined. Reade’s impolitic manner within the museum, sadly, resulted in the director, Trenchard Cox, to refuse adequate funding or even acknowledge Reade’s success, which otherwise would surely have resulted in the eventual directorship. A full monograph on Beardsley by Reade appeared in 1967. That year, too, his earlier research on the Gabrielle Enthoven collection of ballet design was published as Ballet Designs and Illustrations. His interest in Beardsley and that era in British history led to his 1970 book, Sexual Heretics, a survey of end-of-the-century homosexual writing. A volume of his own poetry, Eye of a Needle, appeared in 1971. A revised edition of the Beardsley book was issued in 1987. An exhibition on the singular artist Louis Wain was mounted in 1972; Reade retired from the Museum the following year. Sadly, Reade’s manuscript biography of Wain was lost in the mail and never published. Reade returned to St. Marychurch and the house in which he was born, but a strange muscle disease left him unable to walk the final years of his life. A final book on Beardsley, Beardsley Re-Mounted appeared the year of his death,1989. He was cremated and interred at Torquay. Reade was responsible for the renewing interest in Aubrey Beardsley. His 1967 monograph contributed to Beardsley as a product of his times. The Beardsley exhibition which he organized traveled to New York and Los Angeles, elevating the artist to an international level.


Selected Bibliography

Ballet Designs and Illustrations, 1581-1940: a Catalogue Raisonné. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1967; Aubrey Beardsley. New York: Viking Press, 1967; The Dominance of Spain. Costume of the Western World 3, no. 4. London: Harrap 1951; Art Nouveau and Alphonse Mucha. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1963; Regency Antiques. London: Batsford 1953; Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900: an Anthology. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970; Edward Lear’s Parrots. London: Duckworth, 1949; Beardsley Re-mounted. London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1989; Eye of a Needle. London: Fuller D’Arch Smith Ltd., 1971.


Sources

Krishnamurti, Gutala. “Reade, Brian Edmund (1913-1989).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Lambourne, Lionel. “Appreciation of Brian Reade: In Love with the Originals of Life.” The Guardian (London), November 27; [obituary:] Symondson, Anthony. The Independent November 9 1989, p. 16.




Citation

"Reade, Brian." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/readeb/.


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Deputy Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1958-73 and Beardsley scholar. Reade was the son of Thomas Glover Reade (1870-1952), a painter and headmaster at a grammar school and Susan Mary King (Reade) (1873-1960). Reade attended Montpelier p

Redgrave, Richard

Full Name: Redgrave, Richard

Gender: male

Date Born: 1804

Date Died: 1888

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): education

Career(s): activists


Overview

Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures,1857-1880 and art education reformer. Redgrave was the son of William Redgrave (1775-1845) and Mary Redgrave (d.1814?). His father was in manufacturer of wire fencing. Redgrave was educated at home and then at school in Chelsea. He joined his father’s firm, but convinced he should be an artists, began to paint. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1826, showing regularly thereafter at the Royal Academy exhibitions. During these years, Redgrave painted subjects largely drawn from literature. He was elected an associate at the Royal Academy in 1840. Redgraved married Rose Margaret Bacon (1811-1899) in 1843. His themes in his painting changed to that of the working poor. In 1847 he was hired as botanical teacher for the Government School of Design (later Royal College of Art: botanical teacher (1847), advancing to headmaster in 1848. He became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1851 and rose in to art superintendent of the College in 1852. Devoted to the improvement of craftpeople in England, he himself produced a notable design for the duke of Wellington’s funeral carriage in 1852. Redgrave organized the British art section for both the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855. In 1857 he became inspector general for art, allowing him to reform art education by formulating a national art curriculum. The same year Redgrave was appointed surveyor of the queen’s pictures, a part-time position. Redgrave and Henry Cole worked to make museums appeal to the general public and the lower classes in general As such, they oversaw the new South Kensington Museum (today Victoria and Albert Museum). Redgrave designed the Museum’s art gallery displaying British art donated in 1857 by John Sheepshanks, another liberal populist. He coordinated the exhibition of British art for the International Exhibition in London in 1862. He resigned from the surveyorship in 1880 and was created a CB. Redgrave wrote a catalog of the paintings in the Royal Collection, remaining in manuscript form, reaching 34 volumes. Together with his brother Samuel Redgrave, he published the first edition of A Century of Painters of the English School in 1866, a landmark book for British painting. It remained in print, re-edited, until 1981. Redgrave became increasingly blind in his later years. He died at home in 1888 and is buried in Brompton cemetery. Oliver Millar, his successor at the Royal Collection a century later, continued to hold respect for Redgrave’s work. A modest man dedicated to the welfare of the pictures, his professionalism manifested itself in Redgrave’s approach to conservation and display.


Selected Bibliography

A Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Etchings &c. in the British Fine Art Collections Deposited in the New Gallery at South Kensington. London: Printed by George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1860; and Redgrave, Samuel. A Century of Painters of the English School: with Critical Notices of their Works, and an Account of the Progress of Art in England. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1866;


Sources

Heleniak, Kathryn Moore. Dictionary of National Biography; Redgrave, Frances Margaret. Richard Redgrave, C.B., R.A.: a Memoir Compiled from his Diary, London: Cassels, 1891; “The Autobiography of Richard Redgrave, A.R.A.” Art Journal 12 (1850): 48-49; Casteras, Susan P., and Parkinson, Ronald. Richard Redgrave, 1804-1888. New Haven: Victoria and Albert Museum/Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, 1988; Codell, J. F. “Righting the Victorian Artist: the Redgraves.” A Century of Painters of the English School, and the Serialization of Art History. Oxford Art Journal 23 no. 2 (2000): 95-120; Corby, Tom. “Sir Oliver Millar: Eminent Art Historian who Nurtured the Queen’s Paintings but was Caustic about Some of Them.” Guardian (London) May 17, 2007, p. 36.




Citation

"Redgrave, Richard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/redgraver/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures,1857-1880 and art education reformer. Redgrave was the son of William Redgrave (1775-1845) and Mary Redgrave (d.1814?). His father was in manufacturer of wire fencing. Redgrave was educated at home and then at scho