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(b. Oakland, CA, 1893; d. Shiraz, Iran, 25 Jan. 1977).

American historian of Iranian art. While studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, Ackerman met and eventually married Arthur Upham Pope, with whom she had taken courses in philosophy and aesthetics. In 1926 she and Pope organized the first ever exhibition of Persian art at the Pennsylvania Museum and helped create the First International Congress of Oriental Art. In 1930 Ackerman was stricken with polio but taught herself to walk again. They were instrumental in preparing the 1931 Persian Art Exhibition at Burlington House, London, and the Second International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, as well as the Third Congress in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1935 and the exhibition of Iranian art at the Iranian Institute in New York in 1940. She visited Iran for the first time in 1964, when the shah of Iran invited Pope to revive the Asia Institute; it was associated with Pahlavi University in Shiraz until ...

(b Amsterdam, Aug 13, 1820; d Amsterdam, March 17, 1889).

Dutch writer, critic and collector. He was raised in a cultivated and artistic merchant family but preferred writing to commerce. In addition to serving as an editor of the Volksalmanak voor Nederlandsche Katholieken, he published the Dietsche Warande. His lifelong advocacy of Roman Catholic emancipation is reflected in many of his short stories (written under the pseudonym Pauwels Foreestier) concerning Catholic life in 17th-century Holland. In 1876 he was appointed professor of aesthetics and the history of art at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam. An architectural preservationist and an important critic of the art and architecture of his time, he asserted that art should serve a religious function, as it had during the Middle Ages. It should be social, idealistic and transcendental. In his ideal society the arts would form a harmonious unit under the heading of architecture. His brother-in-law P. J. H. Cuypers was the leading Dutch architect of the day, whose career was assisted by Alberdingk Thijm’s advocacy of Gothic Revivalism in architecture. Alberdingk Thijm was particularly opposed to the painters of the Barbizon and Hague schools, whose work he considered to have no underlying purpose. Rather, he preferred the Düsseldorf school, which displayed a knowledge of history and literature. His large collections reflected his philosophical orientation. His numerous 17th and 18th-century Dutch paintings, mostly by minor masters, represented all the genres. He also owned a large collection of drawings and prints, as well as books, manuscripts and religious art from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which included a Gothic ciborium, a Byzantine crucifix and embroideries on silk, which were dispersed at auction after his death (Amsterdam, Muller, ...

[Pierre Urbain]

(b Paris, 1859; d Paris, 1937).

French writer and collector. He wrote for a number of journals including Le Figaro, Le Voltaire and L’Evénement. He was the first to use the term Neo-Impressionism in a French publication (L’Evénement, 10 Dec 1886) after its use by Félix Féneon in September in Art moderne in Brussels. His attitude to the emerging Neo-Impressionist movement was somewhat equivocal. In Paris (13 Aug 1888) he wrote of Seurat as ‘the man of great achievements who is in some danger of having the paternity of his own theory wrested from him by ill-informed critics or unscrupulous colleagues’. Although he admired Seurat, he had grave doubts about the effect of his theories on other artists, claiming (in the same article) that they had ‘spoilt some great talents, painters like Angrand and Signac’. His comments particularly infuriated Paul Signac and caused tension within the group. He also wrote on the work of the ...

(b Paris, July 21, 1772; d Paris, Nov 12, 1849).

French diplomat, collector and writer . As a diplomat, in Rome, he represented the French royal princes exiled during the Revolution. Later, under the Consulate he was assistant to the diplomat and collector François Cacault in the negotiation of the Concordat with the papacy. From 1804 to 1807 he was chargé d’affaires to Queen Marie-Louise of Etruria, and after the Bourbon restoration he was secretary at the French embassies in Vienna, Madrid and, most importantly, in Rome from 1819 to 1830. His love of Italy found expression in a number of published works on Italian history and a translation of Dante’s Divina commedia. Influenced by the taste and writings of Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt—and constrained by his limited financial means—Artaud assembled a collection of Italian primitives that was quite original in its day. It was chiefly made up of Sienese and Florentine pictures and included works then attributed to Fra Mino Turrita and to the ...

(b Berlin, May 13, 1779; d Rome, July 27, 1825).

German diplomat, patron, and writer. An uncle of the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Bartholdy was a member of a prominent Jewish family in Berlin, who travelled extensively in Europe and Asia Minor through the first years of the 19th century. He converted to Protestantism in 1805 and joined the Austrian campaign of 1809 against Napoleon. By 1814 he was working in association with Karl August von Hardenberg in the Prussian diplomatic service, and his good relations with Cardinal Ercole Consalvi led to his appointment as Prussian consul in Rome in 1815. There he promoted the burgeoning community of German, and especially Prussian, artists. Most notably he commissioned the decoration of a room in the Palazzo Zuccari by Peter Cornelius, Wilhelm Schadow, Philipp Veit, Friedrich Overbeck, and Franz Ludwig Catel. The resulting Casa Bartholdy fresco cycle (1816–17; Berlin, Alte N.G.), which depicts the story of Joseph in Egypt, was the first collective monument of the ...

(b Fenny Compton, Warwicks, Aug 25, 1745; d Cheltenham, Feb 1, 1824).

English writer, collector and clergyman. The son of a clergyman, Bate-Dudley (he added ‘Dudley’ to his name in 1784 in order to inherit a legacy) succeeded his father as rector of the parish of North Farmbridge, Essex; by his mid-twenties, however, he preferred to spend his time in London, where his ebullient behaviour earned him the nickname of ‘the fighting parson’. In 1772 he became editor of the Morning Post; six years later he left to found the rival Morning Herald. The following year he was imprisoned for 12 months for libelling Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond.

Bate-Dudley was a close friend of the actors David Garrick and Sarah Siddons as well as a leading supporter of Thomas Gainsborough. He mounted spirited defences in his newspapers of Gainsborough’s art, often at the expense of Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Academy’s president, whose pretensions towards high art Bate-Dudley felt militated against the interests of his own favourite. ...

(b London, Sept 29, 1760; d Bath, May 2, 1844).

English patron, collector and writer. He was the only son of Alderman William Beckford, MP (1709–70). Orphaned at the age of nine, he inherited a fabulous fortune derived from his family’s Jamaican plantations. He was a precocious child, brought up in a puritanical atmosphere only relieved, after 1775, by the appointment of Alexander Cozens as his drawing-master. An ardent Orientalist, Beckford studied Arabic from 1778 until his departure in June 1780 on the Grand Tour.

In 1781 Beckford returned to England, where he celebrated his majority with a spectacular party; he followed this with scandalous Christmas festivities in a setting devised by the theatrical painter Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and embarked on a princely career of collecting and patronage by commissioning silver from John Schofield and the partnership of Daniel Smith and Robert Sharp. In early 1782 he wrote his celebrated Gothic Orientalist romance, Vathek (pubd 1786). His descriptions in it of tombs and ruins have been thought to reflect his familiarity with the fantastic landscapes of Piranesi’s etchings, such as the ...

(b Paris, Feb 6, 1849; d Paris, 1931).

French writer. In 1866 he entered the Ministry for the Colonies, which he left in 1886 to devote himself to book collecting, building up a remarkable library of French prints. He was guided by the bibliophile Eugene Paillet, a greater part of whose library he purchased in 1887. Beraldi’s talent and well-developed critical sense were obvious, and he quickly established his reputation. He was the author of numerous works on artists and printmakers, such as L’Oeuvre de Moreau le Jeune (Paris, 1874), published under the pseudonym Draibel, the first catalogue of the works of Jean-Michel Moreau, Les Graveurs du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1880–82) in collaboration with R. Portalis, and Mes Estampes (Lille, 1884), a catalogue of the prints, portraits and books belonging to him and to his father. He also compiled a catalogue of Paillet’s library, but his most famous book is the invaluable Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle...

(de)

(b Madrid, Sept 27, 1845; d Madrid, Jan 5, 1912).

Spanish writer, painter and collector. After pursuing a political career and taking a doctorate in civil and canon law, he dedicated himself to writing on art and produced important studies on Diego Velázquez (1898), Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1901) and other artists. He travelled extensively and enthusiastically in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, England and elsewhere), studying especially the different national schools of painting. On his travels he also painted landscapes. After working for some time as a copyist in the Museo del Prado, Beruete decided in 1873 to concentrate his efforts on painting and on learning to perfect his craft. He enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in Madrid and also studied at the studio of Carlos de Haes. Beruete was among the founders of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and with its members, and with Carlos de Haes, he made several study trips abroad. In Paris he came to know the painting of the Barbizon school, and in Belgium he assimilated the teaching of the generation of landscape artists who had adopted a form of Realism. The fundamental constants of the Spanish pictorial tradition, however, especially the sketching style typical of Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, became the starting-point for Beruete’s own style, enabling him to record his response to landscape, impressions of light and rural settings. Beruete’s achievement was acknowledged by various national and international awards....

(b Cleve, Dec 28, 1781; d Berlin, 1853).

Prussian civil servant and collector. He served in Bayreuth and Potsdam and in 1810 joined the office of State Chancellor August von Hardenberg in Berlin, where as chairman of the Committee for the Reform of Taxation and Trade, he was influenced by English economic liberalism. He became director of the Technische Deputation für Gewerbe in 1819, and in 1821 he founded the Gewerbeverein and the Gewerbeinstitut for the advanced training of craftsmen, where he could apply his commitment to improving quality and design in the applied and industrial arts. In 1831 he took charge of the Allgemeine Bauschule. In response to the aesthetic shortcomings of mass-produced goods, Beuth and his friend Karl Friedrich Schinkel directed the publication of the Vorbilder für Fabrikanten und Handwerker (1821–37), first issued as single lithographs before being collected into two volumes with a commentary (1830–37). Schinkel provided about 40 original designs, while the remainder derived mostly from antiquity, the Renaissance and the Islamic world. The interest in historic prototypes led to the revival or adaptation of old techniques of metalworking, glassmaking and ceramic production, as well as to the investigation of the degree to which new technology could make well-designed objects more widely available. During a period of rapid industrialization and the expansion of trade, Beuth was instrumental in reorientating the manufacture of the applied arts from traditional craft methods to industrial technology. His important collection of contemporary craft objects later passed to the ...

(b Hamburg, Feb 26, 1838; d Vaucresson, nr Paris, Sept 6, 1905).

French art dealer, critic and patron, of German birth. Often misnamed Samuel, he was a major promoter of Japanese art and Art Nouveau. From a wealthy, entrepreneurial Hamburg family, he trained as an industrial decorator for ceramics under the guidance of his father and independently in Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70). After the Franco-Prussian War (which he spent in Belgium) Bing established a thriving Oriental trading business, primarily of Japanese arts, the success of which permitted the opening of his Oriental crafts shop in Paris in the late 1870s. Following a trip to Japan, he expanded the business in the 1880s, selling both contemporary and ancient Japanese objects, to meet the demand for Oriental merchandise. At the end of the 1880s, as Japonisme developed, Bing founded a monthly periodical, Le Japon artistique (pubd simultaneously in Eng., Fr. and Ger., 1888–91), and organized a series of exhibitions of rare Japanese art, featuring ceramics and ...

(b Frankfurt am Main, April 7, 1858; d New York, June 26, 1941).

American financier, collector, museum official and philanthropist of German birth. He entered banking in Germany and immigrated to New York as a young man, becoming a partner in 1893 in Lazard Frères. He retired in 1925 to devote his time to art collecting and philanthropy, favouring causes connected with the arts, medicine and Jewish social services. His wife Florence, née Meyer (1872–1930), whose family were noted philanthropists, was his partner in these activities. After World War I they formed a foundation for the support of French artists, a model for 20th-century arts funding. A longtime finance officer of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Blumenthal became its seventh president in 1934, guiding it through the Depression. He and his wife maintained collections in their château near Grasse and in a sizeable home in Paris. Their showplace mansion at 50 E 70th Street (destr. 1943) housed their New York collections. Its central feature was a 16th-century Spanish castle courtyard (now New York, Met., ...

German family of collectors, museum curators and writers. Sulpiz (Melchior Damiticus) Boisserée (b Cologne, 2 Aug 1783; d Bonn, 2 May 1854) and Melchior (Hermann Josef Georg) Boisserée (b Cologne, 23 April 1786; d Bonn, 14 May 1851) were born into a rich, old family of Cologne and spent their youth under the French occupation (1794–1815) of that city. The monasteries had all been closed, and the property of the church sold by auction. This deterioration of the artistic heritage and the ruin of many German and Dutch pictures from the late Middle Ages troubled the two brothers, who were particularly interested in works of the school of Cologne. Their meeting with Johann Baptist Bertram, a passionate student of the aesthetic writings of Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Friedrich von Schlegel, increased their appreciation of a type of art that was then little valued, but which to their eyes symbolized the specific nature of German genius. In ...

(b Busto Arsizio, Nov 11, 1777; d Milan, Dec 15, 1815).

Italian painter, collector and writer. He studied painting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. Between 1785 and 1801 he lived in Rome, where he met such Neo-classical artists as Angelica Kauffman and Marianna Dionigi (1756–1826) as well as writers, scholars and archaeologists, notably Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt, Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi (1754–1827) and Ennio Quirino Visconti. While in Rome he studied Antique and Renaissance works, making copies of the statues in the Museo Pio-Clementino and the frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican, also furthering his studies of the nude in the Accademia di Domenico Conti and making anatomical drawings of corpses in the Ospedale della Consolazione. On his return to Milan in 1801 he became secretary to the Accademia di Brera, a post he held until 1807. During this period he devoted all his efforts to the restructuring of the Brera, providing it with new statutes and a major library and also founding the adjoining art gallery. He prevented numerous works from being smuggled abroad or dispersed and was responsible for their inclusion in the ...

(b Leiden, May 17, 1871; d The Hague, Jan 16, 1956).

Dutch collector and critic. He began his career as an artist, painting pointillist works such as Landscape with a Windmill (1894; Leiden, Stedel. Mus. Lakenhal), but soon turned to theory rather than practice. From 1895 he was an ardent defender of the anti-naturalist view, considering the role of art to be the representation of the inner life of the artist rather than the imitation of the visible world. He wrote widely on this and related topics in the periodicals Modern Kunstwerke (1903–10) and Beeldende Kunst (1913–38), which he edited: he also lectured extensively, and encouraged and supported young artists. Bremmer was extremely influential in the collecting of art in the Netherlands in the first years of this century, most spectacularly in the building up of the Kröller-Muller museum at Otterlo. He met Helene Kröller-Muller in 1906 and inspired her to transfer her allegiance from Delft china to modern art: over the 30 years during which he guided her buying she acquired notable groups of works by ...

(b Paris, Feb 11, 1830; d Parays, Tarn-et-Garonne, June 3, 1890).

French critic, collector and etcher. He studied drawing and painting before becoming art critic of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1859. His extensive articles examined such issues as the etching revival (see Etching, §II, 4), modernization of the industrial arts, the cult of Japonisme and Impressionism. With his notices in the newspaper Le Rappel (1869–71) and the avant-garde journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (1871–2), the periodical of the emerging Symbolist poets, Burty passionately espoused the taste for Japanese art and culture and coined the term Japonisme in 1872. His apartment, which contained a vast collection of Japanese works of art, attracted many collectors also fascinated by Japan, including Edmond de Goncourt, Félix Bracquemond and Edgar Degas. Burty’s meetings and his collection and staunch advocacy of Japonisme influenced many, including his Impressionist friends, in whose compositions the subtle assimilation of Japanese print design is evident. The marriage of Burty’s daughter Madeleine to the entrepreneur ...

(b Modena, Jan 17, 1821; d Modena, July 19, 1887).

Italian historian and collector. He began his publications in 1844 with a guide to the paintings from Modena in the Belvedere, Vienna. In 1846 he began his long association with the journal Archivio storico italiano, where many of his studies of Modena and the Este (i) family were published, the only interruption coming after the unification of Italy, when he was briefly involved in politics, holding public office in 1860 and again in 1864. In the early 1860s the archives of the Este family were opened, and this led Campori to supervise the printing of several collections of documentary material, notably those published in 1866 and 1870. He collaborated on many of the new periodicals in Italy, in particular the Nuova antologia in Florence and the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana in Turin. All this time he was writing, and at his death his publications numbered more than 225 items. He left his numerous works of art to the ...

Italian family of jewelers, collectors and writers. The firm founded in Rome by Fortunato Pio Castellani shortly after 1820 and expanded by his sons Alessandro Castellani and Augusto Castellani was foremost in reviving period style in jewellery design. Their reputation was established in Rome by the mid-19th century, and they were renowned as antiquarians as much as jewellers and were consulted by museums in London, Paris and Vienna. After 1860 the Castellani opened shops in Paris and Naples; from 1862 until 1884 they exhibited regularly at international exhibitions, including the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, and their work remained virtually unaffected by subsequent stylistic developments. Designs were closely inspired by, and in some cases reproduced, antique and medieval pieces, often from their own considerable study collection. They were widely imitated throughout England, France, Italy and the USA. Their jewellery is notable for its use of gold; the family perfected processes for simulating the techniques of filigree and granulation used in antique jewellery. A variety of chainwork and hinged pieces with repoussé decoration are characteristic of the firm. Among their most popular designs were pieces ornamented with fine glass mosaic inspired by Byzantine jewellery (e.g. bracelet with white and gold mosaic, ...

(b Gijón, Asturias, 1749; d Madrid, Dec 3, 1829).

Spanish writer and collector. His early association with Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was clearly of mutual benefit: Jovellanos learnt a great deal about art and collecting from Ceán, who was helped in his career as a minor civil servant by Jovellanos. As an amateur painter, Ceán acquired basic skills from Juan de Espinal (d 1783), director of an art school established in Seville by Ceán and his circle in 1770; he also had some guidance from Anton Raphael Mengs in Madrid, where he settled in 1778 and, presumably through Jovellanos, met Francisco de Goya c. 1778–80. At this time Goya was making his series of etchings after Diego Velázquez, and Ceán later owned most of Goya’s preliminary drawings for these. Goya painted and drew him several times (e.g. c. 1785; Madrid, Conde de Cienfuegos priv. col., see Gassier and Wilson, no. 222) and also painted a portrait of Ceán’s wife, Manuela Camas y Las Heras, normally identified with the ...

[pseud. Falaise, Jean de]

(b Falaise, Calvados, July 23, 1820; d Bellême, Orne, April 1, 1899).

French art administrator, collector and writer. He enrolled at the law faculty at Aix-en-Provence in 1842 and qualified as a lawyer. He travelled to Italy and to Flanders, and showed a lively interest in the many privately owned art collections in Aix at that time: his Recherches sur la vie et les ouvrages de quelques peintres provinciaux de l’ancienne France reflects his keen interest in art. In 1846 he started to work for the royal museums and in 1852, under the patronage of the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Surintendant des Beaux-Arts, he was appointed inspector of the provincial museums. He was mainly responsible for organizing the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris. He held this position, which brought him into contact with all the artists of his age, until 1869. During this period he was appointed Assistant Curator at the Louvre (1857), and Assistant Curator (1863) and Curator (...