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Pouncey, Philip

Full Name: Pouncey, Philip

Other Names:

  • Philip Michael Rivers Pouncey

Gender: male

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1990

Place Born: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works) and Italian (culture or style)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator and historian of Italian drawings. Pouncy was the son of Reverend George Ernest Pouncey, a banker who had taken clerical vows, Madeline Mary Roberts (Pouncy). He attended Marlborough College and Queens’ College, Cambridge. After viewing the 1930 “Italian Art, 1200-1900” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, he decided to pursue art after college. He graduated in1931 and volunteered at the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1931-1933, making short trips to Italy in between. He was appointed as an assistant keeper in the National Gallery in London in 1934, where he remained until 1939. In 1937 he married Myril Gros, the daughter of a French army officer. He wrote the catalogs for the fourteenth-century Italian paintings, all published after he left the Gallery. In 1939 he move with the objects from the National Gallery to safekeeping in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. At Aberystwyth his duties included editing the existing catalog of early Italian paintings, and supervising the management of the National Gallery collection, which was transferred from London during World War II. While working in Aberystwyth, Pouncey was closely associated with the assistant curator of the Print Room for the British Museum, Hugh Popham. The prints from this collection had also been moved to Aberystwyth. Popham, Johannes Wilde and Frederick Antal who were also assigned to Aberystwyth, would discuss the collection with Pouncey. He completed his war service working for the Intelligence Unit of the Foreign Office (Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park). After the war, his familiarity with the Print collection at the British Museum, led to an appointment there, collaborating with Popham (officially now) on cataloging the Italian drawings. These volumes appeared in 1950, 1962 (in collaboration with John Arthur Gere) and in 1983. Pouncy was named deputy keeper in 1954, however the keepership was never offered. In 1966 he joined Sothebys as a director while continuing to work on his catalogs. His only monograph, a 15-page Italian essay on Lorenzo Lotto’s drawings, Lotto disegnatore,1965, described the relationship between Lotto’s paintings and his drawings. From 1966 until his retirement in 1983, Pouncey served as a director at Sotheby’s, and as an advisor to the Uffizi, Louvre, Fitzwilliam, and Victoria and Albert Museums. In 1975 Pouncey was elected a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary keeper of Italian drawings of the British Museum. A loan exhibition of his (re)attributions was held on his 75th birthday at the Museum. A daughter, Francoise, married Marco Chiarini, director of the Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti). Pouncey was greatly influenced by the classic Crowe and Cavalcaselle History of Italian Renaissance Art, whose own approach was similarly untheoretical and connoisseurship based. His review of the 1964 Italian edition of Bernard Berenson‘s The Drawings of the Florentine Painters remains part of his significant writings.


Selected Bibliography

  • Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. 3 vols. in 7. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1950-1983, specifically, vols 1 & 2 Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Popham, A. E. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries; vols 3 & 4, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Gere, J. A. Raphael and his Circle; 5 & 6, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • [only Popham] Artists Working in Parma in the Sixteenth Century, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • vol 7 [Wilde, Johannes] Michelangelo and his Studio; vols 8 & 9, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Gere, J. A., and Wood, Rosalind. Artists Working in Rome, c. 1550 to c. 1640; “Review of I disegni dei pittori fiorentini, by Bernard Berenson.” Master Drawings 2, no. 3 (1964): 278-93.

Sources

  • The Dictionary of Art; Gere, J. A. “Pouncey, Philip Michael Rivers (1910-1990).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.


Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Pouncey, Philip." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pounceyp/.


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Curator and historian of Italian drawings. Pouncy was the son of Reverend George Ernest Pouncey, a banker who had taken clerical vows, Madeline Mary Roberts (Pouncy). He attended Marlborough College and Queens’ College, Cambridge. After viewing th

Pool, Phoebe

Full Name: Pool, Phoebe

Other Names:

  • Phoebe Pool

Gender: female

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 1971

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

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

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

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


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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



Citation

"Pool, Phoebe." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/poolp/.


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Scholar of nineteenth-century French painting. Pool was the daughter of Gordon Desmond Pool and Agatha Eleanor Burrows (Pool). At an early age Pool was diagnosed with depression. This often incapacitated her for months and would affect her educati

Poole, Reginald Stuart

Full Name: Poole, Reginald Stuart

Gender: male

Date Born: 1832

Date Died: 1895

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators


Overview

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


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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




Citation

"Poole, Reginald Stuart." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/poolr/.


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Keeper of Coins, British Museum, 1870-1893, early exponent of the relationship to Greek art to coinage. Poole was born to Reverend Edward R. Poole (c. 1805-1884) and Sophia Lane (Poole) (1804-1891), the latter a grand niece of Thomas Gainsborough.

Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

Full Name: Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir John Pope-Hennessy

Gender: male

Date Born: 13 December 1913

Date Died: 31 October 1994

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Renaissance

Career(s): curators


Overview

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

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

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

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

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

 


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/popehennessyj/.


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Director of the both the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London and curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; scholar of Italian art and major proponent of connoisseurship in art history. Born to an upper-middle class family;

Popham, Hugh

Full Name: Popham, Hugh

Other Names:

  • Hugh Popham

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 March 1889

Date Died: 08 December 1970

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

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

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators


Overview

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


Selected Bibliography

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


Sources

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



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Popham, Hugh." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pophama/.


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British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings; scholar of Italian art. Popham was son of Arthur Frederick Popham, a failed architect who worked in the bookbinding division of the Doves Press, and Florence Radford Popham. Both parents were connected

Podro, Michael

Full Name: Podro, Michael

Other Names:

  • Michael Isaac Podro

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Historian of the Italian Renaissance; writer on art theory and art historiographer. Podro was the son of the German Jewish author and journalist Joshua Podro and Fanny Podro. Podro received his M.A. in English Literature from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1954. His Ph.D. was granted from the University College, London in 1961, under E. H. Gombrich, and the philosophers A. J. Ayer (1910-1989) and Richard Wollheim (1923-2003), writing a dissertation on the topic of art theory of Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895). He married the museum conservator and Egyptologist Charlotte Booth the same year. Podro began as a lecturer in art history at Camberwell School of Art, where he was department head, 1961 to 1967. In 1967 he joined the Warburg Institute of the University of London as a lecturer in philosophy of art. He became a Reader at the University of Essex in the Department of Art History and Theory in 1969, advancing to professor of art history and theory in 1973. He spent the 1974 year as Charlton Lecturer at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, publishing his lecture, “Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross,” the same year. During these years Podro began focusing his research on the historiography of art, lecturing on various aspects and personalities of the discipline. After a year as a visiting professor at the University of Tel Aviv in 1981, he issued a book-length study on German historiography and its theorists, Critical Historians of Art in 1982. The book was the first full-length treatment of the history of art history in English. His friend, the painter R. B. Kitaj painted Podro’s portrait, “The Jewish Rider,” in 1985-1986. Podro was named a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum beginning in 1987, weathering, among other issues, the controversial hiring of the director, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll. He retired from Essex in 1996. His research migrated toward contemporary visual theory with his 1998 book Depiction. He wrote an insightful article on his mentor, Wollheim, in 2004, whom he linked with Walter Pater. Podro published comparatively little given his academic position. His historical subject area was the Florentine Quattrocento Renaissance. He is most widely known as an historian of art theory and historiography. His book Critical Historians of Art organized major German art historians and the philosophers who affected their thinking, into intellectual rather than strict chronological groupings.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Konrad Fiedler’s Theory of the Visual Arts. University College, London, 1961, published, The Parallel of Linguistic and Visual Formulation in the Writing of Konrad Fiedler. Turin: Edizioni di “Filosofia,” 1961; The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972; Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974; The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1982; Depiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998; “On Richard Wollheim.” British Journal of Aesthetics 2004 44 no. 3: 213-225.


Sources

Chancellor’s address, University of Essex, http://www.essex.ac.uk/vc/orate2000/Podro%20Oration.rtf; Solheim, Randi. “Michael Podro.” in, Konsten-en Trävetenskaplig Horizont/Subjectivity and Art historical Methodology. Eidos 23 http://www.arthistory.su.se/eidos23.htm.




Citation

"Podro, Michael." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/podrom/.


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Historian of the Italian Renaissance; writer on art theory and art historiographer. Podro was the son of the German Jewish author and journalist Joshua Podro and Fanny Podro. Podro received his M.A. in English Literature from Jesus College, Cambri

Phillips, Claude, Sir

Full Name: Phillips, Claude, Sir

Gender: male

Date Born: 1846

Date Died: 1924

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom


Overview

First keeper of the Wallace Collection,1897-1912; critic. Phillips was the son of Robert Abraham Phillips and Helen Levy (Phillips). His father was a jeweler and his maternal uncle, Joseph Moses Levy (1812-1888), was the founder of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. After initial education in Germany and France, Phillips graduated from London University with both a B. A. and a master’s degree. He studied law, joined the Inner Temple (a professional society licensing barristers), and admitted to the bar in 1883. Traveling to Italy for legal business, Phillips fed a personal interest in art and music. This knowledge allowed him to write criticism for the Daily Telegraph in the late 1880’s. Though initially on music, he later turned to art. A series of monograph on major artists in The Portfolio Artistic Monographs series, and a larger monograph on Joshua Reynolds in 1894 resulted in a permanent art critic position for him at the paper in 1897. Phillips also submitted more scholarly articles to Fortnightly Review, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Art Journal, and the Magazine of Art. His articles discussed contemporary artists such as Gustav Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and critiqued exhibitions at the New Gallery in London. Articles to the Burlington Magazine included discoveries of new masterworks; he was eventually appointed to the journal’s consultative committee. The administrators of the nascent Wallace Collection appointed Phillips its first “Keeper” (curator) in 1897. Phillips cataloged the collection identifying a “school of Titian” painting, a “Perseus and Andromeda,” as an original. Two monographs on Titian, The Earlier Work of Titian,1897, and The Later Work of Titian,1898, followed. The Wallace Collection (museum) opened in Hertford House in 1900. After the founding of National Art Collections Fund in 1903, Phillips became a noted supporter. He amassed a large personal collection of painting and sculpture, including “Young Mother” and “Despair” by Auguste Rodin (today, Victorian and Albert Museum), and the “Pietà” by Dosso Dossi. In 1910 and 1912, Phillips reviewed two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London. He retired in 1911, succeeded by D. S. MacColl, and received a knighthood. In his retirement years, he mounted a public concern for the National Gallery when it appeared to be a target in the First World War. He died at his Kensington, London, home where he lived with his sister, Eugénie, in 1924. He is buried at Kensal Green cemetery. Phillips bequeathed half of his collection to the National Gallery in London, as well as several other European museums. His collected essays, Emotion in Art appeared a year after his death. Phillips’ art-criticism approach to art history helped established art writing as a respectable form (Sutton), at a time before connoisseurship standards were codified (MacColl/Lloyd). he was not research scholar. The London Times described his criticism as “sound rather than brilliant.” He was conversant with the art literature in French, German, and Italian. A celibate homosexual in the tradition of Oscar Wilde, he was a gregarious, perfumed dandy (though physically stout), “who talked continuously while he looked at the pictures” (Brown).


Selected Bibliography

Brockwell, Maurice W., ed. Emotion in Art. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924; The Later Work of Titian. London: Seeley and Co., 1898; Sir Joshua Reynolds. London: Seeley and Co., 1894.


Sources

Sutton, Denys. “Phillips, Sir Claude.” The Dictionary of Art; Sutton, Denys. “Sir Claude Phillips: First Keeper of the Wallace Collection. ” Apollo 116 (1982): 322-32; Brown, Oliver. Exhibitions: the Memoirs of Oliver Brown. 1968, p. 35; MacColl, D. S., and Lloyd, Christopher. “Phillips, Sir Claude (1846-1924).” Dictionary of National Biography; [obituaries:] Tatlock, R. R. Burlington Magazine, 45 (1924): 105-6; “Sir Claude Phillips.” The Times (London) August 11, 1924, p. 12.




Citation

"Phillips, Claude, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/phillipsc/.


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First keeper of the Wallace Collection,1897-1912; critic. Phillips was the son of Robert Abraham Phillips and Helen Levy (Phillips). His father was a jeweler and his maternal uncle, Joseph Moses Levy (1812-1888), was the founder of the Daily T

Pennethorne, John

Full Name: Pennethorne, John

Gender: male

Date Born: 1808

Date Died: 1888

Place Born: Worcester, Worcestershire, England, UK

Place Died: Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architect and mathematician; first to suggest entasis in Greek buildings. Pennethorne was the son of Thomas Pennethorne. He joined the architectural firm of John Nash (1752-1835) where he quickly became Nash’s favorite pupil. In 1830 he toured Europe in order to study the architectural monuments. While in Athens in 1832 he observed that the lines of the Parthenon were not the strict rectilinear ones, but were in fact bent to make the building appear more even from a distance. He observed similar configurations at a temple in Thebes. He mad wax impressions of the Parthenon ornaments on a return trip to Athens in 1834. Another trip to Greece in 1837 confirmed his suspicions about the entasis of the building. However, Joseph Hoffer in a book by Christian F. L. Föster, Allgemeines Bauzeitung (1838), published the finding before Pennethorne could. There is no doubt that Hoffer’s measurements, quoted from research done by the Prussian collector Eduard Gustav Schaubert (1804-1860), were made after Pennethorne’s. In 1844 Pennethorne published his findings in a pamphlet, The Elements and Mathematical Principles of the Greek Architects. Quoting Plato and other sources, Pennethorne showed the intentionality of the Greek temple design. Pennethorne’s publication spurred on Francis Cranmer Penrose to publish a more substantial account of Greek architecture, funded by the Society of Dilettanti, in 1851. In 1878 Pennethorne published his own treatise on the ancients, The Geometry and Optics of the Ancient Architecture.


Selected Bibliography

The Geometry and Optics of Ancient Architecture illustrated by examples from Thebes, Athens and Rome. London: Williams and Norgate, 1878.


Sources

Tyack, Geoffrey. Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Dictionary of National Biography15: 774-75.




Citation

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


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Architect and mathematician; first to suggest entasis in Greek buildings. Pennethorne was the son of Thomas Pennethorne. He joined the architectural firm of John Nash (1752-1835) where he quickly became Nash’s favorite pupil. In 1830 he toured Eur

Penny, Nicholas

Full Name: Penny, Nicholas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1949

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Institution(s): The National Gallery


Overview



Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 416



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Penny, Nicholas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pennyn/.


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Penrose, Francis Cranmer

Full Name: Penrose, Francis Cranmer

Gender: male

Date Born: 1817

Date Died: 1903

Place Born: Bracebridge, Lincolnshire, England, UK

Place Died: Wimbledon, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architectural historian of the buildings of classical Greece. Penrose was the son of John Penrose, the local vicar of Bracebridge. He attended Wincester College and afterward worked briefly for an architectural firm. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge University, as an undergraduate, studying astronomy among other subjects and completing this degree in 1842. Under the Cambridge designation as travelling bachelor[sic], he traveled throughout Europe between 1842 and 1845, studying gothic and other architectural monuments. At Rome in 1843, based upon observation alone, Penrose found fault with the pitch of the roof of pediment of the Pantheon. Subsequent research vindicated his observation: the angle had been changed from the original design. In Greece, he studied the classical monuments, taking care to measure them and record his findings. Penrose was one of the first to the entasis of the Parthenon and the intentional curvature of the steps and entablature. The Society of Dilettanti, fascinated by his findings and those of John Pennethorne who had come to much the same conclusion in 1844, sent him back to Greece to confirm his findings. The Society published Anomalies in the Construction of the Parthenon in 1847. However Penrose’s 1851 Principles of Athenian Architecture was the first complete publication on the subject. An enlarged edition appearing in 1888. Penrose was appointed surveyor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1852, specifically charged to complete the interior of the church according to Wren’s design. His disagreements with the committee’s in charge led to his intentions being modified. In 1856 he married Harriette Gibbes. Penrose was also an amateur astronomer and published a work on Saturn in1869. He combined interests to study how astronomical phenomenon determined the design of ancient buildings, such as Stonehenge. A practicing architect, he designed a number of buildings in Cambridge University and the building of the present British School at Athens, the latter without fee. A portrait of him at the Royal Insititute of British Architects was painted by John Singer Sargent.


Selected Bibliography

An Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture; or, The Results of a Survey conducted Chiefly with Reference to the Optical Refinements Exhibited in the Construction of the Ancient Buildings at Athens. London: Macmillan, 1851, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1888; On a Method of Predicting by Graphical Construction Occultations of Stars by the Moon and Solar Eclipses for Any Given Place, together with more Rigorous Methods of Reduction for the Accurate Calculation of Longitude. London: Macmillan & Co., 1869; Two letters from Athens. London: Published for the Society of Dilettanti, 1847; On the Orientation of Greek Temples, being the Results of some Observations taken in Greece and Sicily in the Month of May, 1898. Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 65. London: Harrison and Sons, 1900.


Sources

de Grummond, W. W. “Penrose, Francis Cranmer.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 872-3; Dictionary of National Biography Supplement 1 (1901-1911): 101-103.




Citation

"Penrose, Francis Cranmer." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/penrosef/.


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Architectural historian of the buildings of classical Greece. Penrose was the son of John Penrose, the local vicar of Bracebridge. He attended Wincester College and afterward worked briefly for an architectural firm. He attended Magdalene College,