United Kingdom

Redgrave, Samuel

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Redgrave, Samuel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1802

Date Died: 1876

Place Born: Pimlico, London, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Overview

Bureaucrat who wrote art history reference works in retirement. Redgrave was the son of William Redgrave (1775-1845), a manufacturer, and Mary Redgrave (d.1814?). He attended school in Chelsea were he studied art and did architectural drawing under John Powell. Redgrave joined the Home Office as a clerk in 1818 at the age of fifteen, where he spent his entire professional life. Concomitantly, Redgrave began studying architecture. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1833. During those years he was a founding member of the Etching Club (1837), which he held for life, and after 1842, its secretary. In 1838 he was appointed assistant secretary to the colonial secretary, Lord John Russell. These led to various important civil service positions under Fox Maule and Henry Fitzroy. He married Amelia Ann Sarah Orlebar, in 1839. After completion of his architectural studies in 1843, he served in the Society of Arts. As part of his professional duties, he wrote, Murray’s Handbook of Church and State (1852). Redgrave retired from the civil service in 1860, and alone (his wife had died in 1845 and his only daughters died 1856 and 1859) began his second career as an art historian. He organized exhibitions for the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert Museum) as well as the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1862 he worked on the international exhibitions in London. In 1866, Regrave and his brother, Richard (1804-1888), published the first edition of his A Century of Painters of the English School, a landmark book for British painting. It remained in print, re-edited, until 1981. Redgrave again participated in the 1867 international exhibition in Paris. In 1874, he brought out his Dictionary of artists of the English school, a work lasting in revisions until 1970. He was working on his Descriptive Catalogue of the Historical Collection of British Paintings in Water-colours in the South Kensington Museum, at the time of his death. It appeared posthumously the following year in 1877. Redgrave is buried in the cemetery of Holy Trinity (Brompton) London. His brother, Richard, was a painter and early art-education reformer. Regrave’s art histories are primarily biographical. His style was immediately accessible to an art-learning British public and yet authoritative. His Descriptive catalogue of the historical collection of British paintings…in the South Kensington Museum outlined the history of the British watercolor in its preface. His books were standards of English art history reference for generations.

Selected Bibliography

and Redgrave, Richard. 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, 1866; A Dictionary of Artists of the English School: Painters, Sculptors, Architects, Engravers and Ornamentists. London: Longmans, Green, 1874; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Historical Collection of Water-colour Paintings in the South Kensington Museum. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876; Catalogue of the First Special Exhibition of National Portraits . . . on Loan to the South Kensington Museum. London: Printed by Strangeways and Walden, 1866 [exhibitions of the second and third exhibition, also by Redgrave, were published through 1868].[collections:] Catalogue of the valuable collection of pictures, drawings, miniatures and other objects of art formed by that well-known connoisseur, S. Redgrave, esq. (1877) Christies auction catalog, 23-4 March 1877.

Sources

Heleniak, Kathryn Moore. “Redgrave, Samuel (1802-1876).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; 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.

Rawlinson, William George

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rawlinson, William George

Gender: male

Date Born: 1840

Date Died: 1928

Place Born: Taunton, Somerset, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Turner scholar and collector. Rawlinson was the son of William Rawlinson, a minor industrialist, and Harriet Jeboult (Rawlinson). In 1865 the younger Rawlinson joined the firm of James Pearsall & Co., silk merchants in London. Rowlinson rose to be a partner in the firm. He married Mary Margherita Cridland (b. 1847/8) in 1867. In his spare time and retirement years, Rawlinson wrote and collected the work of J. M. W. Turner. In 1872, the Burlington Fine Arts Club mounted an exhibition of Turner’s print series Liber Studiorum. Rawlinson was greatly impressed and set out assembling his own collection of Turner watercolors and graphics. Rawlinson issued a catalog of the Liber Studiorum in 1878, titled Turner’s “Liber Studiorum”: a Description and a Catalogue. The work, influenced by the esthetics of John Ruskin was a popular success. Rawlinson wrote a catalog of his personal collection of Liber proofs in 1887. As he neared retirement, he began work on the other engraved works of Turner. He retired from the firm in 1908 and that same year issued the first of his two volumes of Engraved Work of J. M. W. Turner (volume two, 1913). The catalog of the nearly 900 prints by and after the work of Turner, much of which drawn from his larger personal collection, remains the authority of this oeuvre. In 1909 a special issue of The Studio on Rawlinson’s collection featured Turner’s watercolors. A revised edition of Rawlinson’s personal Liber Studiorum collection was issued in 1912 before it was sold to Francis Bullard of Boston. In 1917 his watercolors collection was sold to R. A. Tatton. In 1919 Rawlinson sold his remaining Turner engravings collection to Samuel L. Courtauld. Rawlinson retired from his Campden Hill to a Chelsea property where he died in 1928. Rawlinson’s collections remain largely in tact today. The Courtauld collection of graphics passed to the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT and the Liber Studiorum collection of Bullard passed the next year, to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Tatton collection of Turner watercolors was dispersed at a Christies auction in 1928. Rawlinson is chiefly remembered for his scholarly publications on the engraved work of J. M. W. Turner. A second, revised, edition of the set appeared in 1906, and a new work, by his co-author A. J. Finberg, appeared in 1924.

Selected Bibliography

and Finberg, Alexander Joseph. “The water-colours of J. M. W. Turner.” London: The Studio, 1909; Turner’s Liber studiorum, a description and a catalogue. [completing the book as arranged by Turner.] London: Macmillan, 1878; The Engraved Work of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1908-1913.

Sources

Herrmann, Luke. “Rawlinson, William George.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; [obituary:] “Mr. W. G. Rawlinson.” The Times (London) May 15, 1928, p. 18.

Read, Herbert, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Read, Herbert, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Herbert Read

Gender: male

Date Born: 1893

Date Died: 1968

Place Born: Kirby Moorside, North Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Stonegrave, North Yorkshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): art critics

Institution(s): Burlington Magazine and Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)

Overview

Historian of modern art and art critic. Read was the eldest of three sons born to a Yorkshire, England, farmer. Orphaned early, he was sent to Crossley’s School, Halifax. At age 16 he worked as a bank clerk, studying in the evenings for entrance to Leeds University. He entered Leeds in 1912 where he initially studied economics and law. At Leeds he came in contact with the modern art collection of its president, Michael Sadler. After graduation, he served in the army in World War I (1915-1918) with distinction, rising to the rank of captain and engaging in battles in Belgium and France. In 1919 he married Evelyn May Roff (1894–1972), who was also a student of art history. After military service, Read worked in the British civil service as the secretary to the Controller of Establishments. In 1922 he joined the department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There he wrote books on English stained glass and pottery (one with fellow curator Bernard Rackham). As a museum curator, Read made professional contacts in Germany, becoming close friends with Bonn professor of art history Wilhelm Worringer, and director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Max Sauerlandt. Read translated Worringer’s influential book Formprobleme der Gotik, 1912, into English as Form in Gothic in 1927. Through Sauerlandt and Worringer, he met the Bauhaus artists and architects who helped him form many of his ideas on modern art. Read also published literary criticism in the magazine New Age. In 1931 he left the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Watson Gordon chair of fine arts position at Edinburgh University. During these years as an academician he published some of his most influential texts. In 1931, perhaps his most famous book on art, The Meaning of Art, appeared. It was followed by Art Now: an Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture in 1933 and Art and Industry in 1934. Read left the University in 1933–and his wife–to edit the Burlington Magazine. He married a student from Edinburgh, Margaret Ludwig (1905–1996) in 1936. During these years he lived in Hampstead and came to know many of the artists whom he would champion in later years. These included Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Nicholson’s wife, Barbara Hepworth. For the academic year 1935-1936 he was Sydney Jones lecturer in art at the University of Liverpool. In 1937 Read used his position as editor of the Burlington Magazine to lead a protest of the appointment of T. S. R. Boase as second director of the Courtauld Institute, questioning the direction of the institution. Read left the Magazine in 1939, succeeded by A. C. Sewter, when he was chosen to be the first director of a museum of modern art in London. The entry of Britain into the second world war prevented the museum’s establishment. During the early war years he was the Leon fellow at the University of London 1940-1942. Read’s writing during this time shows clearest his sympathies with socialism and the notion that refined aesthetics could lead to social harmony. His Art and Society appeared in 1937 and Anarchy and Order in 1945. Perhaps most influential book, because of the numerous translations, was his 1943 Education through Art, essentially a manifesto of the anarchism Read embraced. After the war, Read joined the book publishing firm of Routledge and Keegan Paul where he edited a series on “English Master Painters.” Together with Roland Penrose, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1947. He was knighted in 1953, lecturing as the Charles Eliot Norton Fellow at Harvard University between 1953-1954. An A. W. Mellon lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., followed in 1954. Read focused a great deal of his writing in the 1950’s and after on Henry Moore, building on an initial volume of 1944 into his Henry Moore: a Study of His Life and Work in 1965. In 1959, the first edition of his Concise History of Modern Painting was published. A lifelong pacifist, perhaps due to his personal war experiences (his brother was killed in World War I), he participated in the Ban the Bomb movement including a sitdown strike in Trafalgar Square. His papers reside at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Read was initially a “Disraeli conservative” (Oxford Biographical Dictionary). His experience reading Nietzsche and Freud lead to a psychoanalytic approach to art and literature, of which his mentor, T. S. Eliot, disapproved. Read adopted strong socialist views politically. He was for example, an early critic of Nazi Germany. He abandoned Soviet communism and adopted an anarchist politics by 1937. Read was an important interpreter of continental art and an exponent of contemporary British art.

Selected Bibliography

“The Dynamics of Art.” Eranos-Jahrbuch 1952. Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, p. 195; and Rackham, Bernard. English Pottery: its Development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Scribner’s, 1924; Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings. [eventually 6 vols., other authors edited] New York: C. Valentin, 1944-68; The Meaning of Art. London: Faber & Faber, 1931, [published in the United States as] The Anatomy of Art: an Introduction to the Problems of Art and Aesthetics. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1932; Art and Industry: the Principles of Industrial Design. London: Faber & Faber, 1934; Art and Society. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937; Annals of Innocence and Experience. London: Faber and Faber, 1940 [subsequent editions published under the title The Innocent Eye]; The Philosophy of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press, 1943; Education Through Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1946; The Grass Roots of Art: Four Lectures on Social Aspects of Art in an Industrial Age. New York: Wittenborn, 1946, [stated as 1947]; Contemporary British Art. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1951; The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1952; Ben Nicholson: Paintings. Little Library of Art 45. London: Methuen, 1962; To Hell with Culture and Other Essays on Art and Society. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1963; Henry Moore: a Study of his Life and Work. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Sources

Read, Herbert. Annals of Innocence and Experience. London: Faber and Faber, 1940 [subsequent editions published under the title The Innocent Eye]; Fisherman, Soloman. The Interpretation of Art: Essays on the Art of Criticism of John Ruskin, Walther Pater, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Herbert Read. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963, pp. 143-86; Herbert Read: A Memorial Symposium. Edited by Robin Skelton. London: Methuen, 1970; 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. 12; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 102 mentioned; Thistlewood, David. Dictionary of Art 26: 49-50; [obituaries:] “Sir Herbert Read: Poet, Critic and Interpreter of Modern Art.” Times [London] June 13, 1968; p. 12; “Read, Herbert.” Oxford Biographical Dictionary [onliine] https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35695

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Read, Hercules

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Read, Hercules

Other Names:

Charles Hercules Read

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1929

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of the British Museum. Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography.

Rackham, Bernard

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rackham, Bernard

Gender: male

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), ceramics (object genre), Medieval (European), and pottery (visual works)

Overview

Pottery and maijolica scholar and medievalist; Keeper of the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1914-1938. Rackham was a son of Alfred Rackham (1829-1912), an Admiralty Court clerk, and his wife, Annie Stevenson (Rackham) (1833-1920). He attended the City of London School before entering Pembroke College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. After receiving a first in Classics in 1898, he joined the South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum the following year), taking advantage of a new hiring level designed to attract honors graduates. He was assigned to cataloging the pottery and porcelain, an area in which he had no formal training, a large collection transferred to the V&A from the Museum of Practical Geology. Faced with identifying over 5,000 pieces of pottery from all countries and time periods, Rackham soon became an authority on the subject. He married Ruth Adams (d. 1963) around this time. Rackham began researching Italian maijolica in 1901 when assigned to write that section for the Museum’s catalog of the Cook collection (published 1903). Rackham’s concept of his subject was aided by the 1909 expansion and reorganization of the Museum, one which confirmed the display of objects by medium rather than by integrating various arts into rooms of a similar historic period. This emphasis by medium encouraged Rackham to view ceramics as an art form and not simply support artifacts to a historic period. Numerous articles on maijolica appeared in the Burlington Magazine. By the time the collection was moved to safety storage during World War I, Rackham had gained sufficient experience to publish his first important work, a Catalogue of the Schreiber Collection,1915, which established a periodization for early English porcelain. This was followed by a second important catalog of the Herbert Allen collection, then on loan to the Museum, appearing in 1918. The same year, Rackham issued his first work on non-western pottery, the Catalogue of the Le Blonde Gift of Corean Pottery. After the war, Rackham devoted himself to the re-installing of the collection. Then came his most widely read and perhaps best monograph on the subject, a collaborative effort with the esthetician Herbert Read, English Pottery: its Development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century in 1924. The following year his translated and edited edition of the Emil Hannover book, Keramisk haandbog, appeared as Pottery & Porcelain: a Handbook for Collectors. His interest in Asian pottery resulted in his contribution, together with other British art historians of note, in the Burlington House exhibition of Chinese art the same year. After this, Rackham’s interest turned increasingly to medieval stained glass and maijolica, which he termed “the pottery of Humanism.” His wider knowledge of pottery was displayed in his 1934 catalog of the Glaisher gift to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. His final years at the V&A were devoted to a permanent holdings catalog of the Museum’s Italian maijolica of over 1500 pieces. He retired from the Museum in 1938, succeeded by William B. Honey (1889-1956). His catalog, his magnum opus, appeared in 1940. In retirement, he produced English Mediaeval Pottery (1948) and a corpus on the remaining medieval stained glass at Canterbury cathedral, published in 1949. His final efforts were two books, Early Staffordshire Pottery, 1951, and Italian Maijolica, 1952. His eldest brother was the illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Rackham built his methodology upon the continental pottery studies of Hannover, melding them with his objects at the V&A. He took a genre of object, largely defined as a collectables hobby by antiquaries such as William Chaffers (1811-1892) or as support artifacts by British Museum Keeper Hercules Read, and redefined it into an academic discipline, rooted in historical method and artistic merit.

Selected Bibliography

and Read, Herbert. English Pottery: its Development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Scribner’s, 1924; translated and edited, Hannover, Emil. Pottery & Porcelain: a Handbook for Collectors. 3 vols. London: E. Benn, limited, 1925; and Fry, Roger Eliot, and Binyon, Laurence, and Kendrick, Albert Frank, and Sién, Osvald, et al. Chinese Art: an Introductory Handbook to Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Textiles, Bronzes & Minor Arts. London: Burlington Magazine/B. T. Batsford, 1925;

Sources

[obituary:] “Mr. Bernard Rackham.” The Times (London) February 15, 1964, p. 10, addendum, Thorpe, W. A. The Times (London) February 20, 1964, p. 15; “Bernard Rackham, C. B., F. S. A.” Burlington Magazine 106, no. 738 (September 1964): 424-425.

Prior, Edward S.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Prior, Edward S.

Other Names:

Edward Schröder Prior

Gender: male

Date Born: 1852

Date Died: 1932

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Medievalist art and architectural historian. Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner characterized him as, “the best English interpreter of the Gothic style.”

Selected Bibliography

A History of Gothic Art in England. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1900; An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England. Cambridge, University Press, 1912; The Cathedral Builders in England. London: Seeley and Co/New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1905; Eight Chapters on English Medieval Art: a Study in English Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.

Sources

Pevsner, Nikolaus. Matthew Digby Wyatt: the First Cambridge Slade professor of Fine Art: an Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, p. 23; Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980, pp. 105-108.

Medievalist art and architectural historian. Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner characterized him as, “the best English interpreter of the Gothic style.”

Pryce, Frederick Norman

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pryce, Frederick Norman

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1953

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): antiquities (object genre), Classical, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum; the curator held principally responsible for the disastrous “cleaning” of the Elgin Marbles incident in 1937-1939. In 1935 he revised The Grandeur that was Rome, a survey originally written by J. C. Stobart (1878-1933). In 1936 Pryce became Keeper of the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Under Pryce the cleaning of the Elgin Marbles was resumed. The Elgin Marbles had periodically been washed throughout their history in England. In1932 the group was cleaned again. In the summer of 1937 fourteen blocks of north frieze and the west frieze block II were taken down and their plaster and Portland stone restorations removed. A second “cleaning” of the stones occurred and the group was replaced exhibit. This phase of cleaning continued through 1938.

Selected Bibliography

Corpus vasorum antiquorum. Great Britain. British Museum. Department of Greek and Roman antiquities. London: The Museum, fasicule 7. 1932; revised, Stobart, John Clarke. The Grandeur that was Rome: a Survey of Roman Culture and Civilisation. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935.

Sources

The British Museum. section 2. “Cleaning of the Sculptures 1811-1936.” http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/parthenon/2

Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1812

Date Died: 1852

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architect, architectural theorist and medievalist. Pugin was the son of the architect Auguste Charles Pugin (1768/9-1832) and Catherine Welby (c.1772-1833). Though his father was nominally Roman Catholic, his mother was a fanatical protestant, who raised the boy in the tradition of the theologian Edward Irving (1792-1834), whose sermons they frequently attended in the 1820s. He briefly attended school at Christ’s Hospital, London, but from the first manifested an interest in medieval architecture. His family traveled to France, visiting the medieval monuments, beginning in 1819. In 1827 Pugin was commissioned to design a gothic-style chalice for George IV, known today as the Coronation Cup. Further commissions for Windsor Castle furniture followed. Pugin also developed an interest in theater design. In 1829 Pugin joined Covent Garden as a stage carpenter and for the King’s Theatre. A business he formed the same year created gothic furniture. He met the architect James Gillespie Graham (1776-1855), who assisted him with his designs. In 1831 his business failed and, though he married Anne Garnet (c.1811-1832) the same year, she died in childbirth in 1832. Pugin’s father also died in 1832, and his mother and aunt in 1833. He married Louisa Burton (c.1813-1844) the same year. Between 1832 and 1834 he toured France, Germany, Belgium and England studying and drawing medieval architecture. Now with a measure of wealth from his late aunt, Pugin hoped to become an architect, though he lacked the foundation training. He started designing imaginary medieval buildings in book form. These included The Hospital of St. John (1833), The Deanery, and St. Marie’s College (both 1834). In 1835 and 1836, he published books on his furniture designs. Pugin converted to Roman Catholicism in 1835, resolving to make at least one continental sketching tour every year, which he did. He joined the architectural firm of his friend, Graham, and Charles Barry (1795-1860); his drawings for the new Houses of Parliament for their firm won them the commission in 1836. Pugin designed and built a home he called St. Marie’s Grange, Alderbury, near Salisbury. In 1836, too, he published his manifesto asserting the gothic style over Regency: Contrasts, or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by Appropriate Text. The book is a series of comparisons between idealized medieval building types and caricatures of “modern” buildings of similar function. Major architectural commissions soon followed, including the renovations and new structures for Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire, for Charles Scarisbrick (1801-1860). Pugin began an association with the Roman Catholic school St. Mary’s College, Oscott, Warwickshire, establishing a museum and lecturing on medieval architecture. With the medalist John Hardman (1811-1867) he began producing stained glass and furnishings between 1838 and 1845. His major architectural work, Alton Towers, Staffordshire, designed for John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (1791-1852), began at this time, too. Other, largely church commissions followed. In 1839 he met Charles-Forbes-René, comte de Montalembert (1810-1870) a fellow medieval revivalist. In 1841 he published The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, a treatise for architects. His motto that “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building,” was a plea for clarity of his style. A revised edition of Contrasts with a new conclusion appeared in 1841 as well with an appendix on the French architectural practice by comte de Montalembert. Pugin worked with Herbert Minton (1793-1858), the pottery manufacturer, and J. G. Crace (1809-1889), the interior designer during this time. Working exclusively for a Roman Catholic clientele, he built numerous churches, including St. George, Southwark, London (1841-8) and the first post-Reformation monastery in Britain, Mount St. Bernard’s Abbey, Leicestershire (1839-c.1844). Pugin’s designed a second home, St. Augustine’s (now known as The Grange), on a cliff at Ramsgate, Kent, was begun in 1843. After his designs for rebuilding Balliol College, Oxford, were rejected (largely because of his denomination), he completed another book, his scholarly Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, 1844. The book explained symbolism, vestments and church furnishings in color plates and other stunning illustrations and was responsible for reviving liturgical objects long out of use before in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic ceremony. When his second wife, Louisa, died the same year, (1844) he proposed to Mary Amherst (1824-1860) who accepted him, but by 1846 had instead entered a convent. Pugin began the Roman Catholic church of St. Augustine, Ramsgate, in 1845 at his own expense. Despite his return to the Parliament interior project under Barry, Pugin’s architectural commissions declined, partially because other architects, such as M. E. Hadfield (1812-1885) and Charles Hansom (1816-1888) had taken up his stance. Pugin worked on the college of St. Patrick, Maynooth, Ireland in 1845 and the Parliament projects. Barry and Pugin completed the House of Lords in 1847, a triumph for Pugin’s True Principles. In 1847 he left for Italy (his only visit to that country). He was briefly engaged in 1848 to Helen Lumsdaine, whose parents would not allow her conversion, before marrying Jane Knill (1825-1909) the same year. Floriated Ornament, a work chiefly of plates, appeared in 1849. The Great Exhibition of 1851 proved Pugin’s greatest triumph for the public. A “medieval court” was created to highlight the Pugin’s designs realized in metalwork and stained glass by Hardman, sculpture (a tomb) by Myers, ceramics and encaustic tiles by Minton, and textiles, wallpaper, and furniture by Crace. That year, too, the medieval exponent and art critic John Ruskin attacked St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark, in his book Stones of Venice as and “eruption of diseased crockets”. The House of Commons was opened in 1852 along with Pugin’s work for the libraries, and committee rooms. Admission to the Royal Academy was declined. Pugin’s broke down and was declared insane in 1852 and eventually housed in the Bethlehem Pauper Hospital for the Insane (“Bedlam”). He returned to his home at Ramsgate shortly before his death the same year, age 40. He is buried in the Pugin chapel in St. Augustine’s Church. His son, Edward Welby Pugin, assumed his practice. His library and collection of medieval artifacts were sold at auction in 1853. Hardman, Minton, and Crace all continued to use Pugin’s designs after his death. The end of the nineteenth century saw a revival of his principles in the work of the architects G. F. Bodley (1827-1907) and Thomas Garner (1839-1906) and stained-glass designer C. E. Kempe (1837-1907). In 1995, the Pugin Society was founded to further the appreciation of his works and the gothic-revival style. Pugin was one of the principal exponents of the gothic revival in the English-speaking world disseminated primarily through his books. His theme, that Christian practice, both architectural and moral, is inextricably connected with the gothic style, took hold in the Victorian age. Pugin’s writing owes much to gothic exponent and antiquary, John Carter (1748-1817). As an architect and designer, the reform movement in nineteenth-century England can be traced back to his writing (Pevsner). Pugin’s architectural work was disparaged by John Ruskin, who found Pugin’s eclecticism “untruthful,” although Ruskin owed much to Pugin’s thought. Among those who came to Pugin’s defense were the first Cambridge University Slade professor, Matthew Digby Wyatt. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, conformed to the theoretics of Abbé Laugier (1713-1769) in Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753), and the French rationalists who envision their dictum in classical terms.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Belcher, Margaret. A. W. N. Pugin: an Annotated Critical Bibliography. London: Mansell, 1987; Belcher, Margaret, ed. The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001ff.; An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. London: J. Weale, 1843; Floriated Ornament: a Series of Thirty-one Designs. London: H. G. Bohn, 1849; A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification. London: C. Dolman, 1851; Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume. London: H. G. Bohn, 1844; Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present day. Shewing the Present Decay of Taste. London: A. W. N. Pugin, 1836; The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. London: J. Weale, 1841.

Sources

Stanton, Phoebe B. Pugin. New York: Viking Press, 1971; Trappes-Lomax, Michael. Pugin: a Mediaeval Victorian. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932; Atterbury, Paul, ed., and Wainwright, Clive. Pugin: a Gothic Passion. New Haven: Yale University Press/Victoria & Albert Museum. 1994; Aldrich, Megan, and Atterbury, Paul, ed. A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival. New Haven: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York/Yale University Press, 1995; Pevsner, Nikolaus. Matthew Digby Wyatt: the First Cambridge Slade professor of Fine Art: an Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950; Ferrey, Benjamin. Recollections of A. W. N. Pugin and his Father Augustus Pugin. 2nd ed. London: Scolar Press, 1978.

Poynter, Edward John, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Poynter, Edward John, Sir

Gender: male

Date Born: 1836

Date Died: 1919

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

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors

Overview

Director, National Gallery, 1894-1905 and artist. Poynter was the son of the architect Ambrose Poynter (1796-1886) and Emma Forster (Poynter) (1800-1848), the latter the granddaughter of sculptor Thomas Banks (1735-1805). Poynter studied at Westminster School, Brighton College, and Ipswich grammar school, between 1847-52, inclusively. He further studied under Thomas Shotter Boys and Leigh’s academy. In the winter of 1853 he traveled to Rome where he met the painter Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) and was greatly impressed by the classicizing genre. He joined the studio of Charles Gleyre (1806-1874) in Paris in 1856 and later the éole des Beaux-Arts. There he met James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), the author and illustrator George Du Maurier (1834-1896) (in whose novel, Trilby, 1894, Poynter appears), Thomas R. Lamont (1826-1898), and Thomas Armstrong (1832-1911). He returned to London in1860, working for a glassworks firm. Poynter married Agnes Macdonald (1843-1906) in 1866, a beautiful and socially aspiring woman who became the aunt of Rudyard Kipling and the sister-in-law of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). Poynter also worked illustrating magazines, including London Society, and books, such as the Dalziel brothers’ popular Bible Gallery (1880). Poynter began exhibiting Orientalist paintings at the Royal Academy in 1861. He traveled to Venice in 1868 to study mosaics for a decoration and, in 1869, was made a member of the Royal Academy. As such he worked on designs the frieze of the Royal Albert Hall and the St. George mosaic in the British houses of parliament, both of that same year. Poynter was appointed the first Slade professor at University College, London in 1871. His lectures were published in 1879 as Ten Lectures on Art. Intensely impressed with French methods of artistic pedagogy, including the importance of drawing, Poynter made many reforms and saw to it at his resignation in 1875 that his successor was the French artist Alphonse Legros (1837-1911). That year Poynter was appointed the director and principal of the National Art Training School at South Kensington. Poynter again took a reformist stance to the school, publishing of a series of art history textbooks. During these years he also executed many important public painting projects for which he is still principally remembered. His Visit to Aesculapius (1880, Tate Gallery), and The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) were among these. In 1894 he was appointed director of the National Gallery, London, succeeding Frederic William Burton, beating out Charles Fairfax Murray and Charles L. Eastlake for the position. Poynter’s acquisitions during his years as director included The Vision of St. Eustace by Pisanello, Agony in the Garden by Mantegna, Portrait of a Man by Titian and the Rembrandt portraits of Jacob Trip and his wife, and works by Lorenzo Monaco, Zurbaran, and Goya. Unlike his predecessor, Poynter’s acquisitions were performed in concert with the Board of Trustees. In 1896 he was knighted and then elected president of the Royal Academy, succeeding John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Poynter was instrumental in the installation of objects in the National Gallery of British Art (later the Tate Gallery) in 1897. He retired from National Gallery in 1905 (succeeded by Charles Holroyd), retaining the Academy directorship until 1918. His health failing, Poynter sold his extensive collection of master drawings in 1918. He died at his house and studio in Kensington (London) and is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. His nephew was the director of the Ashmolean Museum, Charles F. Bell. Though primarily remembered as an academic artist, Poynter’s contribution to art history is significant. At the National Gallery, he issued the first complete illustrated catalog of the collection in 1899. As an artist he was frequently criticized by modernists as the embodiment of the stilted “Victorian Olympian,” however, his work in art education and art-historical survey texts became the model for the next generation. A cosmopolitan artist, he did not shrink from portrayal of the nude or works that glorified its sensual qualities, even during a time when this was not popular.

Selected Bibliography

edited, The National Gallery. 3 vols. London/New York: Cassell, 1899-1900; Ten Lectures on Art. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879; The National Gallery of British Art (Millbank) Illustrated Catalogue. London/New York: Cassell and Co., 1902; Illustrated Text-books of Art Education [series:] and Head, Percy R. Classic and Italian Painting. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880; and Buxton, Henry Wilmot. German, Flemish and Dutch Painting. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881; and Smith, Thomas Roger. Architecture, Gothic and Renaissance. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880;[drawings collection sale:] Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge. Catalogue of the Superb Collection of Drawings by Old Masters, the Property of Sir Edward J. Poynter. London: Dryden press, 1918.

Sources

Inglis, Alison. “Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Connor, P. “‘Wedding Archaeology to Art’: Poynter’s Israel in Egypt.” in, Macready, Sarah, and Thompson, F. H., eds. Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture. London: Society of Antiquaries, 1985, pp.112-20; Inglis, Alison. “Sir Edward Poynter and the Earl of Wharncliffe’s Billiard Room.” Apollo 126 (1987): 249-55; Kestner, Joseph. “Poynter and Leighton as Aestheticians: the Ten Lectures and Addresses.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies 2 no. 1 (1989): 108-20; Smith, Alison. The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin’s Press, 1996; M. Liversidge and C. Edwards, eds., Imagining Rome: British artists and Rome in the nineteenth century. London: Merrell Holberton, 1996; Arscott, C. “Poynter and the Arty.” in, Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, pp. 135-51; Smith, Alision. ed., Exposed: the Victorian Nude. London: Tate Publishing, 2001; Freeman, Julian. Life at Arm’s Length: Sir Edward Poynter 1836-1919: a Pupil at Brighton College from 1849-1850. Brighton, UK: Brighton College, 1995. [depicted] Trilby: a Novel. New York: Harper & Bros., 1894. [obituaries:] “Death of Sir E. Poynter. A Great Victorian.” The Times (London), July 28, 1919, p. 16.

Prichard, Matthew Stewart

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Prichard, Matthew Stewart

Other Names:

Matthew Stewart Prichard

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 January 1865

Date Died: 15 October 1936

Place Born: Keynsham, Bath and Northeast Somerset, UK

Place Died: Great Hampden, Buckinghamshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Museum curator and exponent of Byzantine art. Prichard’s parents were Charles Henry Prichard, a merchant, and Mattie Stewart (Prichard) (d. 1881). He attended Marlborough College in 1883 and graduated from New College, Oxford, 1887 with a law degree. He practiced briefly London. In 1892 he came under the spell a group of predominantly homosexual Oxford-educated esthetes living at Lewes House, Sussex, centered around the wealth Bostonian Edward Perry “Ned” Warren (1860-1928), his partner John Marshall (1862-1928). Warren introduced Prichard to his brother, Samuel Dennis Warren (-1910), then president of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who appointed Prichard museum secretary in 1902. Prichard worked as a classical antiquities specialist for the museum and, by 1904, assistant director. He developed a disdain for the artificial arrangement and display of objects in museums and their appeal to the wealthy, a theme he would carry with him his life. Through the MFA he met the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) and the Japanese museum curator and artist Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913), the latter instilling in him an appreciation of oriental art. In 1905 he also met the British art historian Roger Fry, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in Boston impressing Fry with his singular ideas of museums and knowledge of oriental art. Prichard’s views on museology, which ran counter to most institutional collecting naturally led to conflicts. Ultimately the board of trustees dismissed him in 1907 for demanding the removal of the museum’s plaster casts of classical sculpture. Prichard left the U.S., living for Europe. In Italy he discovered Byzantine art at San Marco and Ravenna, an art genre which, for the rest of his life, he would inspire collectors, artists and scholars to pursue. He met and maintained a correspondence with the Italianist Bernard Berenson. He settled in Paris at the end of 1908. In Paris he toured the Louvre with Fry. He also met the art collectors Michael Stein (1865-1938) (Gertrude Stein’s oldest brother) and his wife, Sarah (1870-1953), who introduced him to Henri Matisse the following year; the two developed creatively from one another. Prichard introduced Matisse to Byzantine art and he, in turn, became a devotee to the artist (Matisse did a drypoint of Prichard in 1914). Prichard made the acquaintance of the nineteen-year-old Georges Duthuit, who became Prichard’s most important pre-war disciple. Prichard adopted the art philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) as personal esthetic, disparaging Western art’s traditional verisimilitude in favor of decoration. An alluring personality, he imparted his esthetic to many, including the art critic (and future son-in-law of Matisse), Georges Duthuit, Fry and the poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). In 1910, he visited the seminal exhibition of Islamic art in Munich. The show also caught the eye of others he inspired, particularly Whittemore, who was on hand to nurse Prichard through a long illness recovery in Paris the same year. Prichard was caught in Germany when World War I was declared in 1914 and was interned as an enemy citizen in Ruhleben, a POW camp. He remained there until the War’s end, having food sent to him by his American friends (the U.S. was not yet a participant in the War). The confinement affected Prichard dramatically. He settled in London in 1918, and after briefly working for a government committee on prisoners, developed a new coterie of followers at the Gargoyle Club, holding morning discourses on aesthetics (Pope-Hennessy) to David Tennant, the club’s owner, and (future V&A and Met curator) John Pope-Hennessy. Prichard organized a conference at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919. The conference lectures appeared in 1921, one of his few published writing on art. In the 1930, he supported and anonymously wrote portions of the first and second preliminary reports on the Byzantine mosaics in Hagia Sofia organized by Whittemore. He suffered a heart attack at his brother’s home in 1936 and died. His personal papers consist of letters to Mrs. Gardner and notebooks, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and notebooks at the Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore, Paris. Though Prichard’s career as a professional art historian was limited to brief work in a museum and ghost-written reports on Byzantine art, his influence on art historians and developers of the discipline was immense. A charismatic teacher religious and in later years, profoundly anti-materialistic, his interests in both art and Byzantium were intensely spiritual.

Selected Bibliography

“Current Theories of the Arrangement of Museums of Art.” ; Greek and Byzantine Art (1921), is the text of a conference given at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919; [anonymous contributions] and Whittemore, Thomas, et al. The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work, 1931-1932: The Mosaics of the Narthex. Paris: Byzantine Institute of America, printed by J. Johnson at the Oxford University Press, 1933, The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work: Second Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1933 and 1934: the Mosaics of the Southern Vestibule, 1936.

Sources

Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [unpublished notebooks]. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives; Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [manuscript notebooks]. Paris, Collège de France, École des Langues Orientales Vivantes Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore; Ketchum, John Davidson. Ruhleben: a Prison Camp Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965, p. 260; Hadley, Rollin van N., ed. The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, pp. 381, 444, 624; Labrusse, Rémi. “Prichard, Matthew Stewart.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Sox, David. Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes Brotherhood. London: Fourth Estate, 1991 pp. 167-186; Pope-Hennessy, John. Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991, pp. 273-274; Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 156-161.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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