Benedict Nicolson

Lionel Benedict Nicolson MVO (born August 6, 1914 - May 22, 1978 ) was an English art historian and longtime editor of The Burlington Magazine .

He was the older son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson . His brother Nigel was a writer and politician and published works by his parents.

Nicolson studied art history at Eton and Oxford . He was a student of Bernard Berenson , who said of him that Nicolson was "a deep well with crystal clear water and that it is worth the effort to draw it from the depths". Nicolson's main interest was initially in early Italian and contemporary art. With a few friends he founded the “Florentine Club” in Oxford, where famous guest speakers such as Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read appeared. On the advice of Kenneth Clark, he became administrator of the royal painting collections in 1939, but then World War II broke out and he had to go to the Middle East for military service . In 1947, at the age of 32, he became editor of the famous trade journal The Burlington Magazine . In April 1977 his tireless leading work for thirty years for this magazine was recognized with a special article. In the same year he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy .

As an art historian, Nicolson studied the biographies of famous artists and published numerous reviews of art exhibitions . He wrote treatises on the painters Ferraras (1950), on Hendrick ter Brugghen (1558) and Joseph Wright of Derby (1968), on the art collection of the London Foundling Hospital, on Gustave Courbet (1973), Georges de la Tour (1974) and Caravaggio's successors (published posthumously in 1979).

1960 wrote Nicolson a stylistically homogenous group of 39 unsigned and undated pictures, the night scenes in the style of Caravaggio showed an anonymous painter, he "Candlelight Master" ( Master of candlelight called) and he called 1964 Trophime Bigot identified.

literature

• Giles Robertson: Lionel Benedict Nicolson, 1914–1978 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 68 , 1982, pp. 607-616 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Benedict Nicolson in: Dictionary of Art Historians