Full Name: Norman, Davey
Gender: male
Date Born: 1900
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): ancient, painting (visual works), and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)
Scholar on ancient Roman painting.
and Ling, Roger. Wall-Painting in Roman Britain. Gloucester: Sutton, 1982;
Scholar on ancient Roman painting.
Full Name: Newton, Charles T., Sir
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1816
Date Died: 1894
Place Born: Bredwardine, Herefordshire, England, UK
Place Died: Westgate-on-Sea, Thanet, Isle of, Kent, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): ancient, archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), and pottery (visual works)
Archaeologist and vase scholar; built major collections for the British Museum as Keeper of Department of Antiquities. Newton was educated at Christ Church, Oxford where he received his B. A. in 1837 and M.A. in 1840. He joined the British Museum that same year. Newton organized the publication of the Greek and Etruscan vases in the Museum beginning in 1851. The following year, his superiors had him appointed as a consular official for Mytilene (and later acting consul at Rhodes), so that Newton could secure classical object for the Museum. He even turned down an appointment as Regius chair of Greek at Oxford University so that he could remain collecting objects. At the excavations in Bodrum, Newton unearthed the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. His discovery of the large statues of Mausolas and his wife, as well as the frieze of the Mausoleum in 1857 led to their export to the British Museum, aided by a sympathetic Turkish government. His book, History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, was published in 1862. Newton spent the years 1859-61 as Consul in Rome. In 1862 he returned to the Museum, now appointed keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities. During his tenure, Newton acquired some of the most spectacular pieces of classical art for the Museum. These included the collections of the Farnese, Pourtalès, Blacas and Castellani families. In 1877 Newton traveled with Percy Gardner to evaluate the finds of Heinrich Schliemann‘s Mycenae exavation. In 1880 he was appointed Yates chair of classical archaeology at University College, London, a position he maintained while still keeper of antiquities at the Museum. He was principally responsible for the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in 1879 as well as the British School at Athens, 1885. His protégées at the British Museum include Jane Ellen Harrison and Eugénie Sellers Strong. Newton used a scientific approach to the study of classical art. He was one of the first to photograph archaeological sites and publish them. He urged the study of classical objects, especially vases and coins, which during the 19th century were largely ignored in favor of textual studies. He is credited with bringing the British Museum’s ancient collections in line with those of the museums of the continental European capitals.
The Collection of Ancient Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum. 4 vols. Oxford: Trustees of the British Museum, 1874- 1916; Essays on Art and Archaeology. London: Macmillan, 1880; Travels & Discoveries in the Levant. 2 vols. London: Day & son, 1865; and Pullan, Richard Popplewell. A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus & Branchidæ. London: Day & Son, 1862-1863; and Birch, Samuel. A Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum. London: W. Nicol, 1851 ff; and Smith, Arthur Hamilton. The Later Greek and Graeco-Roman Reliefs, Decorative and Architectural Sculpture, in the British Museum. London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1904; A Guide to the Blacas Collection of Antiquities. London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1867.
Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 218-221; Ridgway, David. “Newton, Sir Charles Thomas.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 801-3.
Archaeologist and vase scholar; built major collections for the British Museum as Keeper of Department of Antiquities. Newton was educated at Christ Church, Oxford where he received his B. A. in 1837 and M.A. in 1840. He joined the British Museum
Full Name: Newton, Douglas
Gender: male
Date Born: 1920
Date Died: 2001
Place Born: Malaysia
Place Died: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), Americas, The, indigenous art, Maori (culture or style), Melanesian, Native American, New Guinean, New Zealand, Oceanic, Pacific (regional reference), and Polynesian
Career(s): curators
Museum curator and historian of African, Native American, and Oceanic art. Newton was born to English parents on a rubber plantation in Malaysia. Before moving into museum work in the United States in 1956, he worked for the BBC as a journalist and editor. As a curator for the Museum of Primitive Art, Newton designed over sixty-four exhibitions for the museum. His ability to create innovative exhibition designs while remaining sensitive to the problems of displaying non-Western art attracted praise from both art historians and the public. In 1960, Newton was promoted to full curator, and was appointed director in 1974. He designed exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including “The Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas” (1969) and “Te Maori” (1984). His publications focused on the art of the Pacific Islands. In addition to editing more than twenty five books on the subject, Newton published two monographs entitled Crocodile and Cassowary: Religious Art of the Upper Sepik River, New Guinea (1971) and Arts of the South Seas (1999). After being appointed consultative chairman of the department of primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum in 1974, Newton became the overseer of the transfer of the Museum of Primitive Art’s collections and archives to the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, which was completed in 1982. In the same year, he was named Evelyn A.J. Hall and John A.Friede Chairman of the department of primitive art at the museum, and was elected curator emeritus when he retired in 1990. At the end of his career, Newton received several lifetime achievement awards, including Manu Daula Award by the Pacific Arts Association.
and Gathercole, Peter; Kaeppler, Adrienne L. The Art of the Pacific Islands. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1979; and Sieber, Roy; Coe, Michael D. African, Pacific, and Pre-Columbian Art in the Indiana University Art Museum. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Art Museum, 1986; and Barbier, Jean Paul, eds. Islands and Ancestors: Indigenous Styles of Southeast Asia. Munich: Prestel, 1988; (foreword by André Malraux) Masterpieces of Primitive Art. New York: Knopf, 1978; Art Styles of the Papuan Gulf. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1961; Crocodile and Cassowary: Religious Art of the Upper Sepik River, New Guinea. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1971; Malu: Openwork Boards of the Tshuosh Tribe. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1963; New Guinea Art in the Collection of the Museum of Primitive Art. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1967; Oceanic Images. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1978.
Obituary, New York Times, September 22, 2001; [Paid Notice:] Deaths, New York Times, September 21, 2001.
Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker
Museum curator and historian of African, Native American, and Oceanic art. Newton was born to English parents on a rubber plantation in Malaysia. Before moving into museum work in the United States in 1956, he worked for the BBC as a journalist an
Full Name: Newton, Eric
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1893
Date Died: 1965
Place Born: Marple Bridge, Manchester, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): art critics, authors, and publishers
Times (London) and Guardian art critic and book author. Newton was the son of L. J. Oppenheimer (d. 1917) and Edith Newton. His father owned an architectural decoration firm in Manchester. As Eric Oppenheimer, he was educated at Manchester University, receiving a B.A. in 1914. After schooling, he joined his family company, L. Oppenheimer Ltd., as a mosaic craftsman, contributing mostly ecclesiastic designs. Newton served in World War I in the British Army, 29th Manchester Regiment, 1914-1918, rising to captain. During that time he married [Isabel] Aileen Vinicombe in 1915. His father, also serving in military, died of gas poisoning. He changed his surname to his mother’s in 1918 to avoid association with Germany. While a member of F. Sladen-Smith’s amateur dramatic group, the Unnamed Society, Manchester, he met the dress designer and later costume historian Stella Mary Pearce (1901-2001) and fell in love. He resigned from the decoration firm in 1922, writing occasional art criticism for the Manchester Guardian. In 1930 he began writing full time criticism for the Guardian. He divorced his wife and married Pearce in 1934. Early in 1935 Newton delivered twelve BBC radio lectures, “The Artist and His Public,” which appeared as his first book the same year. He moved to London in 1936 to be closer to the exhibitions. Newton traveled to North America to lecture between 1936 and 1937 on behalf of the National Gallery of Canada. His broadcast series, “The Artist and his Public,” 1940, and weekly symposium, “The Critics,” both for the BBC, made him a household name. A second book, European Painting and Sculpture, appeared in 1941 by Penguin Press. Following World War II, his publications tended toward theoretical and esthetics. In 1947 he left the Manchester paper to be art critic for the Sunday Times in London. However, after a controversial review of a Royal Academy of Art exhibition in 1950, he was dismissed by the paper, succeeded at the Times by John Russell. Newton returned to Manchester University and completed an M.A. in 1951. His thesis was on Tintoretto. Newton turned this into a book on Tintoretto in 1952, most notable for the appendix where his wife, now a noted costume historian, redated seven Tintoretto paintings by the sitter’s costumes, convincingly altering the chronology of the painter’s style. Newton returned to the Guardian in 1956, holding the Slade Professorship of art at Oxford for the 1959-1960 year. His most popular work, The Romantic Rebellion, was published in 1962, three years before his death. He collapsed at his London office and died at age 71. Newton followed an art-appreciation model of art analysis, akin to that of John Ruskin, who’s writing he valued. His esthetic was that art reached its height when it achieved a balance between realism and non-objective. His books are not generally read today.
[master’s thesis:] Tintoretto’s Paintings in the Church and Scuola of San Rocco, Venice. Manchester University, 1951; An Approach to Art: a Pictorial Guide to Twelve Broadcast Talks and Discussions on The Artist and his Public, Mondays, 7 January – 25 March 1935. London: BBC, 1935; European Painting and Sculpture. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1941; British Painting. London: British Council/Longmans Green, 1945; In My View. London: Longmans, Green, 1950; Tintoretto. London: Longmans, Green, 1952; The Arts of Man: an Anthology and Interpretation of Great Works of Art. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1960; The Romantic Rebellion. London: Longmans, 1962.
Current Biography Yearbook 1956: 461-463; Batts, John Stuart, ed. The Diary of English Art Critic Eric Newton: On a North American Lecture Tour in 1937. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997; Garlake, Margaret. New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society. New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 1998; [obituary:] “Mr. Eric Newton Art Critic And Historian.” Times (London) Mar 11, 1965, p. 14; “Eric Newton, London Art Critic, Newsman, Author, Teacher and Lecturer Is Dead.” New York Times March 11, 1965, p. 33.
Times (London) and Guardian art critic and book author. Newton was the son of L. J. Oppenheimer (d. 1917) and Edith Newton. His father owned an architectural decoration firm in Manchester. As Eric Oppenheimer, he was educated at
Full Name: Nicolson, Benedict
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1914
Date Died: 1978
Place Born: Sevenoaks, Kent, England, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): art critics and publishers
Editor, Burlington Magazine (1947-1978). Nicolson was the oldest child of Harold George Nicolson (1886-1968) and Victoria Mary (“Vita”) Sackville-West (1892-1962). He attended Eton and then, between 1933-36, Balliol College, Oxford, where he majored in modern history. There he met and became early friends with John Pope-Hennessy. He and a group of Oxford colleagues founded the “Florentine Club” which invited art historians such as Kenneth Clark, Herbert Read, Clive Bell and the painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978) to discuss art. He traveled extensively in Europe and the United States, spending a great deal of time studying with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti. Clark assigned him an unpaid position at the National Gallery until Nicolson left to attend courses at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum. He returned to London where Clark now secured a post for his as Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures in 1939. However, World War II erupted almost immediately. Nicolson served in British Army Intelligence, 1939-45, first as an interpreter in a POW camp in Italy and then the Middle East where he rose to the rank of captain. He was badly injured in an auto accident while on leave in England and never returned to service. He resumed his job as surveyor, now under Anthony Blunt, and organized exhibitions at Burlington House. In 1947, at age 32, largely at the insistence of Read and Ellis K. Waterhouse, Nicolson was given the editorship of the Burlington Magazine. The magazine had been editorless since before the war, when Waterhouse had been in charge. He remained at the magazine for more than thirty years. During that time, Nicolson turned the magazine, which had previously focused on collectors as its audience, into the major British scholarly periodical on art history. In 1955 he married the art historian Luisa Vertova, a Berenson student working at I Tatti. They divorced in 1962. In 1973, Nicolson authored the volume on Courbet’s The Studio of the Painter for the innovative Art in Context series of Penguin Press. His Joseph Wright of Derby (1968) remains and important work on the subject. Returning from a party celebrating his years as editor of the Burlington Magazine, Nicolson suffered a heart attack, alone, on a London subway platform and died. He was succeeded at the Burlington Magazine by Terence Hodgkinson. Nicolson’s younger brother, Nigel Nicolson (b. 1917), co-founded the publishing firm Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Nicolson’s 1973 Art in Context volume on Courbet appeared the same year as another groundbreaking monograph on Courbet, An Image of the People by T. J. Clark. The approaches of the two men could not be more contrasting. As an editor he was called upon to make quick and at times Quixotic decisions about articles. He would even alter meeting minutes of the Burlington Magazine executive board to get this way. His celebrated row with contributor and one-time board member John Pope-Hennessy was well documented and lasted their lives. Nicolson was particularly unconcerned about his own health. A smoker and hard drinker, his death at 64 came after a period of declining health. His divorce from Luisa Vertova resulted in a number of bizarre phobias including crossing bridges on foot.
Hendrick Terbrugghen. London: L. Humphries, 1959; Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light. 2 vols. London and New York: 1968; Courbet: The Studio of the Painter. Art in Context (series). New York: Viking, 1973; and Wright, Christopher. Georges de La Tour. London: Phaidon Press, 1974; The International Caravaggesque Movement: Lists of Pictures by Caravaggio and his Followers throughout Europe from 1590 to 1650. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979; John Hamilton Mortimer ARA, 1740-1779: Paintings, Drawings and Prints. London: Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1968; and Kerslake, John. The Treasures of the Foundling Hospital. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 506; 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. 84; “Benedict Nicolson and the Burlington Magazine.” The Burlington Magazine 69 no. 889 (April 1977): 229-230; Nicolson, Nigel. “Nicolson, (Lionel) Benedict.” The Dictionary of National Biography. 1971-1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 630-31; [obituaries] Haskell, Francis. “Benedict Nicolson (1914-1978).” The Burlington Magazine 120, No. 904. (July 1978): 429-431; “Mr Benedict Nicolson.” The Times (London) May 26, 1978, p. 20.
Editor, Burlington Magazine (1947-1978). Nicolson was the oldest child of Harold George Nicolson (1886-1968) and Victoria Mary (“Vita”) Sackville-West (1892-1962). He attended Eton and then, between 1933-36, Balliol College, Oxford, where
Full Name: Murray, Alexander Stuart
Gender: male
Date Born: 1841
Date Died: 1904
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)
Together with other British and Italian art historians, he revised the 1843 John Murray Guide to Rome in 1894.
revised section on “Sculpture.”; A Handbook of Rome and its Environs. 15th ed. London: John Murray, 1894.
Together with other British and Italian art historians, he revised the 1843 John Murray Guide to Rome in 1894.
Full Name: Murray, Charles Fairfax
Gender: male
Date Born: 1849
Date Died: 1919
Place Born: Bow, London, England, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): connoisseurship
Career(s): art dealers
Connoisseur and advisor to major art collections, painter and art dealer. Murray’s parents were James Dalton Murray (1808-1876), a linen-draper, and Elizabeth Scott (Draper) (1816-1853). He grew up in Sudbury, Suffolk. By age 13 he had already received art lessons, possibly from Richard Gainsborough Dupont, and had moved to London. Murray worked as an apprentice in the drawing office of Sir Samuel Morton Peto, the great Victorian railway builder. In 1866 Murray attracted the attention of John Ruskin who arranged for additional training as an assistant to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Murray also painted for William Morris and copied paintings for Rossetti. In 1871 he went to Italy to paint and to study, returning again in 1873 to copy the Botticelli frescos in the Sistine Chapel for Ruskin. There, in 1875, he married Angelica Collevichi, a sixteen-year old local Italian girl, settling in Florence. In Italy he was an agent for Frederic William Burton, the director of the National Gallery in London, selling him among other works Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Poor Clares in 1878. As a dealer and facilitator of deals, his clientele grew to include the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode and the British collectors Charles Butler (1822-1910), George Salting (1835-1909) and Robert Henry Benson (1850-1929). In 1886 Fairfax Murray, his reputation now as much a dealer and connoisseur as a portraitist, returned to London, though wife elected to remain in Italy for most of her time. He formed a liaison with a local woman, Blanche Richmond, fathering children by both her and his wife in 1888. Fairfax Murray had five more children by Richmond. After a period advising for Agnew’s, he became a partner. In 1891 he cataloged the collection for the Duke of Portland, one of the few books on art he would write, along with the 1893 catalog the Roscoe collection in Liverpool. His 1894 bid for the director position of the National Gallery was rejected in favor of Edward John Poynter, Burne-Jones’s brother-in-law. After retiring from painting in 1903 and selling his personal collections of works by his friends Rossetti, Madox Brown, Millais, Sandys and Burne-Jones, he compiled a collection of early books and illuminated manuscripts. In1908 he recommended his friend Sydney Cockerell to the Directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The following year he sold his personal collection of 1400 Old Master drawings J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913). He donated 46 paintings to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1911. Murray returned to Italy in 1914 with his early book collection. He suffered a series of strokes, the latter, in 1916 paralyzing him for almost six months. He returned to London in early 1919 to complete his will, and died there.Fairfax Murray was a great influence in the art market, advising to numerous private and public collections in Europe and the United States. Lockett Agnew described him as “the finest judge of art in the world.” He formed part of the British art historians lobbying against overpainting of Italian monuments in Venice and Siena. Edward Hutton claimed that during the late nineteenth century, Reniassance treasures were so plentiful that Murray would park himself on a cafe bench, and, pounding the bench with a stick, shout, “Bring out your Madonnas! Two hundred lire!”
Catalogue of the Pictures Belonging to the Duke of Portland, at Welbeck Abbey, and in London. London: The Chiswick Press, 1894.
Elliott, David B. Charles Fairfax Murray: the Unknown Pre-Raphaelite. Lewes, Sussex: Book Guild, Ltd., 2000; Charles Fairfax Murray (website), http://www.fairfaxmurray.co.uk; Hutton, Edward. “F. Mason Perkins.” Burlington Magazine 97 (December 1955): 391; Elliott, David B. “Charles Fairfax Murray: Keeper of the Pre-Raphaelite Flame.” in, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum. Alexandria, VA: Art Services, 2004, pp. 42-51.
Connoisseur and advisor to major art collections, painter and art dealer. Murray’s parents were James Dalton Murray (1808-1876), a linen-draper, and Elizabeth Scott (Draper) (1816-1853). He grew up in Sudbury, Suffolk. By age 13 he had already rec
Full Name: Murray, Linda, née Bramley
Gender: female
Date Born: 1913
Date Died: 2004
Place Born: Herne Bay, Kent, England, UK
Place Died: Farmoor, Oxfordshire, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Renaissance
Renaissance scholar. Bramley was the daughter of J. F. Bramley, an exporter, and Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa. She was educated principally by her mother, preferring to travel with them rather than attend boarding school. French and English were her native tongues; she rapidly learned Spanish and Italian. She studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. During World War II Bramley worked for the U.S. High Command in London where her skill as an artist was put to work drawing maps of the damage from bombing raids on the continent. She moved to Eisenhower’s staff engaged in intelligence. After the war she entered the Courtauld Institute where her classmates included Oliver Millar and Peter Murray. She married Murray in 1947. As Linda Murray, she began teaching in London University’s department of extramural studies in 1949. Although she taught a variety of subjects, her medieval architecture classes and tours were especially popular. In 1952 she and her husband, now a lecturer at the Courtauld, channeled their pedagogical energies into two support works of art history, a translation, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, by Heinrich Wölfflin, and the Dictionary of Art and Artists. The Dictionary established their collaborative working method: dividing the research and write up between them and then passing it to the other for revision. The Dictionary was an immediate success and pair became the most famous “art history couple” in the modern age. Another collaborative work, Art of the Renaissance was issued in 1963. She became a regular contributor for the Thames and Hudson series of introductory books on the history of art: The High Renaissance in 1967 and The Late Renaissance and Mannerism in 1967. In 1967, too, her husband took a permanent appointment at Birkbeck College, London, a school for adult and evening learners, as the chair of the new department of art history. She wrote a novel, based on Caravaggio’s life, The Dark Fire, published only in America, in 1977. While writing and revising she also renovated the Dulwich, south London, home where they lived. She retired from the extramural studies program (now part of Birkbeck), in 1979. In 1980 she published a Thames and Hudson primer on Michelangelo. The same year her husband retired from Birkbeck and the couple moved to the village of Farnborough, north of Oxford, near Banbury. There Murray issued her second book on MIchelangelo, Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times in 1984. Her husband died at Farnborough suddenly in 1992 in the midst of a collaborative book on Christian Iconography. Murray moved to Woodstock and saw The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture to completion in 1996. The couple’s dedication to adult-based education led her to established the Murray Bequest to Birkbeck College, donating their large collection of books to the library. Eventually she located to Oaken Holt House at Farmoor. Throughout her life, she suffered numerous illnesses which forced her to undergo 26 operations in her lifetime. Murray’s art history emphasized stylistic analysis, careful attribution and the search for reliable evidence about the authorship and provenance of works of art. She had little sympathy with the theoretical bias of the “new art history” of the 1970’s and 1980’s. She always insisted on the importance of direct experience, especially for architecture. (Draper)
translated, with Murray, Peter. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. The Phaidon Press, 1952; and Murray, Peter. The Art of the Renaissance. New York : Oxford University Press , 1963; and Murray, Peter. The High Renaissance and Mannerism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967; The Dark Fire: a Novel. New York: Morrow, 1977; Michelangelo. New York : Oxford University Press, 1980; Michelangelo, his Life, Work and Times. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.
[obituary:] “Linda Murray, Scholar Who, with her Husband, Made the Art of the Renaissance Accessible in a Series of Bestselling Books.” The Times (London) November 19, 2004, p. 70; Draper, Peter. “Linda Murray: Historian who Popularised Renaissance Art.” The Guardian (London) November 24, 2004, p. 29.
Renaissance scholar. Bramley was the daughter of J. F. Bramley, an exporter, and Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa. She was educated principally by her mother, preferring to travel with them rather than attend boarding school. French and English
Full Name: Murray, Peter
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1920
Date Died: 1992
Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK
Place Died: Farnborough, Warwickshire, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Birkbeck College historian of the Italian Renaissance. Murray was the son of John Knowles Murray and Dorothy Catton (Murray), his father a successful agricultural business person of Scottish heritage. The younger Murray attended King Edward VI School, Birmingham, and Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, Scotland. Intent on becoming a painter, Murray next studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, and, in 1937 entered the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, graduating in 1940. After World War II, his interest moved to art history. He was admitted to the University’s Courtauld Institute of Art where he received a B.A. (with honors) in 1947. The same year he married a fellow Courtauld Institute student Linda née Bramley Murray, who would collaborate on many of his later texts. He taught as a lecturer at the Courtauld and Birkbeck College beginning in 1948, continuing to work on his Ph.D. Murray added the duties of Witt Librarian in 1952 [the Times says 1949], remaining in that position until 1964 [Times reporting 1967]. His fine italic handwriting can still be seen on the spines of many of the photograph boxes for Italian paintings. Murray’s gift for languages–particularly German and Italian–and a strong appreciation for historical literature, led to his first translation of what would be a number of seminal texts of art history, Klassische Kunst, by Heinrich Wölfflin in 1952. He received his Ph.D. from the Courtauld in 1956 with a dissertation on the textual sources of Giotto’s work, including in it an index of pre-Vasari Giotto attributions. Although Murray acknowledge the influence of Courtauld scholars Margaret Whinney and it’s director, Anthony Blunt, Murray did not get along with Blunt, and a professorship at the Courtauld was never a possibility. Murray embarked on a sub-career of reference books in 1959 with his immensely successful Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, co-authored with his wife, which was frequently updated and reissued. He was made Senior research fellow at the Courtauld in 1961. In 1963, two substantial introductory texts appeared, The Art of the Renaissance, co-authored with Linda, and what became a classic primer, The Architecture of the Renaissance. Shut out from a professorship at the Courtauld, he accepted the Chair of Art History at Birkbeck College, London, in 1967, succeeding Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner. The position, a newly-established professorship in History of Art for this adult-learning school, entailed setting up courses leading to the undergraduate degree in History of Art, paired with the disciplines of History, Philosophy, English, French, Italian or German. Murray appointed the medievalists Kit Galbraith, a specialist in English Romanesque Sculpture, and Peter Draper, whose area was English Gothic architecture, and the Renaissance art historian Francis Ames-Lewis. Murray became President Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1969 (through 1972). He delivered the third Walter Neurath memorial lecture on Piranesi in 1971. He acted as Chairman of the Walpole Society from 1978 until 1981. Murray retired as professor emeritus in 1980 from Birkbeck, succeeded by John Steer. In 1985, he brought a second art history translation to light, Die Geschichte der Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt. Murray’s expertise on the architect Bramante and his contention that the architect’s work explained most of 16th-century Italian architecture, led many to believe this would be his magnum opus. He never wrote the book (except for a printed piece, the resulted of a Charlton Lecture), preferring to focus his energies on lectures and translations. The Murrays were working together on a companion book to Christian iconography when he died suddenly. Throughout his life, Murray was a devout Roman Catholic. Murray’s art-history writing is today thought of primarily as introductory texts to art and (scholarly) art histories for the reading public. He did not pander to publicity like many focused on this readership, preferring lecturing and employing a simple, clear and relaxed manner. His editions of other art histories, such as his Burckardt book, made these foreign art historian’s work more accessible to the English reading public. Leopold D. Ettlinger characterized Murray as a fastidious scholar whose contributions to the history of art had always been original, filling gaps in the knowledge of fellow-scholars. As an architectural historian, he held the belief–stronger than most–that classical antiquity was the only way to understand and interpret Renaissance architecture, boldly asserting Bramante as the key to understanding the whole of Italian sixteenth-century architecture. He was one of the principal founder members of the Association of Art Historians. A devoted supporter of Birkbeck College’s particular role in adult (evening) education, it was particularly evident in the pedagogical nature of his writing.
[dissertation, partially reprinted as:] An Index of Attributions made in Tuscan Sources before Vasari. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1959; translated, with Murray, Linda. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. The Phaidon Press, 1952; A History of English Architecture. Part II. New York: Arco Pub. Co. 1963; and Murray, Linda. The Art of the Renaissance. New York : Oxford University Press , 1963; The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. London: Batsford,1963; and Murray, Linda. The High Renaissance and Mannerism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967; revised and edited, Burckhardt, Jacob. The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; “Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, 1902-1983.” Proceedings of the British Academy 70, p. 501-514.
[obituaries:] Wheeler, Michael. “A Diptych of Art Historians.” Guardian (London), May 9, 1992, p. 28; Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Professor Peter Murray.” Independent (London), April 25, 1992, p. 34; “Professor Peter Murray.” The Times (London), May 1, 1992.
Birkbeck College historian of the Italian Renaissance. Murray was the son of John Knowles Murray and Dorothy Catton (Murray), his father a successful agricultural business person of Scottish heritage. The younger Murray attended King Edward VI Sch
Full Name: Murrell, William
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 18 February 1889
Date Died: 07 December 1969
Place Born: England, UK
Place Died: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): American (North American), caricatures, comics (documents), and portraits
Historian of caricature and American artists; wrote an early survey of the graphic caricature art. Fisher was the son of William S. Fisher and Eva Murrell. In 1905, at age 15, Fisher emigrated with his younger brother to New York from Liverpool, his parents having gone before him. Even at this age, Fisher exhibited from some level of paralysis on his body and was throughout his life considered an invalid. The painter Alexander Brooke later described him as spastic. At eighteen he secured a job as a clerk a the Metropolitan Museum of Art where his duties included the administration of student lockers. He became a U.S. citizen the same year. By 1913 he was writing art reviews, including the famous Armory show for the journal Arts & Decoration. Fisher connected with many artists at this time (1915), including Marguerite and William Zorach and Ben and Valida Benn in the artists’ colony in Chappaqua, NY. He settled in Woodstock, NY in 1917, acting as curator of the Woodstock Art Association, though never relinquishing some duties at the Metropolitan Museum, and authoring articles in the socialist literary magazine Plowshares. An article on Georgia O’Keeffe appeared in Stieglitz’ Camera Work of the same year. Though drafted into World War I, he received a deferral due to his disability. Sometime during this time he married Gertrude Jean Deutsch (d. 1961). After the War, Fisher was diagnosed with tuberculosis and advised to live in the fresh air of the countryside. He apparently resided for a period in Greatwoods, NH as well as Woodstock. During this time he self-published books on emerging artists in a series hecalled the Younger Artists, beginning with Ernest Fiene in 1922. He wrote under his mother’s maiden name, Murrell, and his full name as the publishing house, W. M. Fisher. The series eventually included Peggy Bacon and Elie Nadelman (1923). He travelled to Germany the same year, 1923, ostensibly to find a publisher for a book on Benn, but also touring the sights. In the early 1930s Fisher, now wriitng exclusively as Murrell, began issuing books for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York under the series ” American Artists.” The first was a monograph of Charles Demuth (1931). In 1933 he was commission to produce an exhibition on political art proceeds of which would benefit indigent artists of the Depression. Together with Priscilla Greene Hilder and Louise Rehm he organized and published Catalogue of the Salon of American Humorists: a Political and Social Pageant from the Revolution to the Present Day for the College art association. This catalog was later expanded into the book in two volumes, A History of American Graphic Humor, 1933. The book took the most common form of “art” for a public steeped in the Great Depression and translated it into a graphic art form worthy of study and celebration. Fisher lived summers in Milford, CT (from 1935 onwards) and New York City in the Winter. He contracted lymphoblastic lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and died in a New Haven, CT, hospital in 1969. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in Long Island Sound. Murrell’s History of American Graphic Humor remains one of the great treatises on political cartoon art. During a time of tremendous economic difficulty for the United States, Murrell, through the auspices of the Whitney, took the great tradition of graphic humor, central to the American experience of the time through the front page of American newspapers, and treated it in the tradition of important social art in the genre of Daumier and Cruikshank. Murrell himself was a bit of a dandy and raconteur; Peggy Bacon’s estimation that Murrell published less than he could have because he expended his wit and observation on conversation seems apt.
Arts and Decoration no. 3 (1913); “The Georgia O’Keeffe Drawings and Paintings at ‘291.” Camera Work nos. 49-50 (June 1917); Ernest Fiene. Introduction by Harold Ward. Woodstock, NY: W. M. Fisher, 1922; Peggy Bacon. Woodstock, NY:W.M. Fisher, 1922; Alexander Brook. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1922; Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1922; Elie Nadelman. Woodstock, NY: W.M. Fisher, 1923; Charles Demuth. American Artists (series). Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931; and Hilder, Priscilla Greene, and Rehm, Louise. Catalogue of the Salon of American Humorists: a Political and Social Pageant from the Revolution to the Present Day. New York: College Art Association, 1933, reformatted, expanded and published as, A History of American Graphic Humor. 2vols. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933-1938.
Yanul, Thomas. “William Murrell Fisher: The Bones of a Forgotten Scholar.” http://www.thomasyanul.com/fisherpage1 (reliability not determined); “Oral History Interview with Alexander Brook.” 1977 July 7-8, Archives of American Art; Bryson Burroughs papers, 1915-1922 and [undated], Archives of American Art; [administrative records: publications, 1931-1984] Whitney Museum of American Art; Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press/InterCultura, Fort Worth, 1993, p. 214, note 20.
Historian of caricature and American artists; wrote an early survey of the graphic caricature art. Fisher was the son of William S. Fisher and Eva Murrell. In 1905, at age 15, Fisher emigrated with his younger brother to New York from Liverpool, h