Arthur E. Popham

Arthur E. Popham , actually Arthur Ewart Hugh Popham (born March 22, 1889 in Plymouth , † December 8, 1970 in Islington , London ), was a British art historian . He worked in the British Museum for most of his life and was best known as a catalog writer. Popham's main focus was on Italian art.

biography

Education and marriage

Popham first went to Dulwich College and University College in London before finally being sent to King's College , Cambridge , where he graduated in 1911. The Bloomsbury Group was part of his social circle . In 1912 he was employed in the British Museum's prints and drawings department . In the same year he married Brynhild Olivier (1886 / 7-1935). In 1926 he married again, his second wife Rosalind Baynes (1891 / 2–1973) was a cousin of his first.

World War I and Twenties

During World War I , Popham served in the Royal Naval Air Service , later in the Air Force, then known as the Royal Flying Corps . Then Popham resumed his work at the British Museum and wrote the catalog for the collection of Dutch drawings from the 15th and 16th centuries. A manual on the same topic appeared shortly afterwards: "Drawings of the Early Flemish School". With his colleague K [arl] T [heodore] Parker (1895–1992) he founded the magazine "Old Master Drawings", which was published between 1926 and 1940.

Thirties and World War II

In the meantime, other catalogs have appeared, for example for an exhibition of Italian drawings at the Royal Academy of Arts (1930, published 1931), the Fitzroy Fenwick Collection (1935) and the Burlington House Collection. In 1933 he was appointed Deputy Keeper. During the bombing war, he helped relocate the museum's collections to protect them from damage. After the chaos of war he published an inventory of the drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in 1945 .

post war period

In the post-war years, Popham was involved in the selection of prints from the Liechtenstein Collection for the British Museum. Together with Johannes Wilde (1891-1970), he published a catalog of the Italian drawings of Windsor Castle in 1949 . In 1954 Popham retired but began a new career as a cataloger of prints for major auction houses and other clients. For example, he worked as a European advisor for the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa . A catalog of the European (excluding British) drawings in the Ottawa Collection was published in 1965.

Meanwhile, in 1955, he received the title of Honorary Fellow from King's College , Cambridge . He had been a member of the British Academy since 1949 . Shortly before his death, he finished a catalog with the drawings by Parmigianino , for which his monograph “The Drawings of Parmigianino” from 1953 had already laid the foundation. His work on the Holkham Hall drawings was published by Christopher Lloyd in the 1980s.

effect

Popham made a name for himself especially by establishing a canon of the Emilian School. In particular, the names Parmigianino and Correggio were not well known in the English-speaking world before Popham.

literature

• AE Popham: Catalog of the Drawings of Parmigianino (= The Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures. 1969). 3 volumes. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 1971, ISBN 0-300-01300-0 .
• James Byam Shaw: Arthur Ewart Popham, 1889-1970 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 57 , 1972, p. 487-496 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Bio bibliography in "The Dictionary of Art Historians"