Full Name: Juynboll, W. R.
Other Names:
- W. R. Juynboll
Gender: male
Date Born: 20 May 1903
Date Died: 1977
Place Born: Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
Place Died: Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
Home Country/ies: Netherlands
Career(s): art historians
Overview
Co-editor of the encyclopedia, Winkler Prins van de Kunst. Juynboll belonged to a family of eminent scholars and university professors, particularly in the field of oriental studies. Juynboll, himself, however, after graduating from the Leiden Gymnasium, chose to study art history at Leiden University. Between 1931 and 1934 he was a research assistant at the Leiden University print room. In 1934 he earned his doctor’s degree with a dissertation on the comic genre in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian painting, Het komische genre in de Italiaanse schilderkunst gedurende de zeventiende en de achttiende eeuw. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de caricatuur. In 1935 he became an art contributor to the daily newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant (NRC). The following year he began teaching the history of Italian art at this Alma Mater. His inaugural lecture was on Baroque and Classicism in Rome, Barok en Classicisme te Rome. In the mid-1930s he was invited to revise and prepare for publication the biographical dictionary of Dutch Engravers that François Gérard Waller had left unfinished. This appeared in 1938 as F. G. Waller. Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. With the closing of Leiden University by the German occupying forces in 1941, Juyboll’s teaching position was eliminated. After the war, he was appointed curator at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in 1947. Another major project followed in the mid-1950s, when he was asked to be the co-editor, along with the Belgian art historian Valentin Denis, of the three-volume encyclopedia Winkler Prins van de Kunst, encyclopedie van de architectuur, beeldende kunst, kunstnijverheid (1958-59). In much of his work on this he was assisted by his wife, Maria Susanna van Eysselsteyn. Juynboll was the author of the first compendium entry on the discipline of art history as well as of a number of longer entries, dealing with famous artists, periods and disciplines. Juynboll also contributed to Oudheidkundig Jaarboek, Oud Holland, Elsevier’s Maandschrift, and Emporium. In the early 1960s he sold his rich library to the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA), stipulating that a number of his books would be shipped to the US only after his death. Juynboll died in 1977 in the vicinity of Leiden, Netherlands. One of his sons is the Islamic studies scholar G.H.A. Juynboll (b. 1935). In his encyclopedia article “Kunstgeschiedenis”, Juynboll argues that iconology should be considered a valuable auxiliary discipline of art history rather than serving as an essential art historical method, as it was done in his view by Erwin Panofsky and the school of the Warburg Institute.
Selected Bibliography
Het komische genre in de Italiaanse schilderkunst gedurende de zeventiende en de achttiende eeuw. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de caricatuur. Leiden: N.V. Leidsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1934; Barok en Classicisme te Rome. Leiden: N.V. Leidsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1936; F. G. Waller. Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938; De reis van Sir Joshua Reynolds in de Nederlanden. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1954; and Denis, Valentin (eds) Winkler Prins van de Kunst, encyclopedie van de architectuur, beeldende kunst, kunstnijverheid. 3 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1958-1959.
Sources
Biografische gegevens van Nederlanders die een vooraanstaande plaats in het maatschappelijk leven innemen, met vermelding van adressen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956, p. 317; personal correspondence, Dr. G.H.A. Juynboll, Leiden, July 2010.