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October 1983

Vol. 125 | No. 967

The Burlington Magazine

Editorial

The Housing of the Courtauld Institute

'The environment at 20 Portman Square that masterpiece of Robert Adam and the present headquarters of the Institute, should be inspiring, indeed ideal. On the completion of Mr. Holden's magnificent design for the London University new buildings in Bloomsbury, of which the Institute will be part, the house, thanks to Mr. Courtauld's generosity, will remain available as an annexe for social and other purposes connected with the Institute and will be on view to the public.' Thus Sir Robert Witt, writing in the Magazine in 1932. As we all know, things turned out very differently.

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  • Front Matter

  • The Future of the Courtauld Institute

    By Peter Lasko

    WHEN the three founding fathers of the Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld, Lord Lee of Fareham and Sir Robert Witt, set up and endowed the Institute in 1932, they were certain of one thing: students of the History of Art should have the closest possible contact with works of art; indeed, they should live with them. All three were passionate collectors, and wisely believed that learned books, slides and photographs, essential though they are as tools of study - and Sir Robert Witt's vast collection of photographs and reproductions are proof of the importance he attached to them - must in the end be secondary to original pictures, drawings, sculptures or buildings. Hence each of them gave the major part of his collection to the Institute to be established as a Senate Institute of the University of London.

  • Fruits of a Connoisseur's Friendship: Sir Thomas Fairbairn and William Holman Hunt

    By Judith Bronkhurst

    SIR Thomas Fairbairn was well know in Victorian England as a collector, patron and exhibition organiser. His friendship with Holman Hunt not only led him to commission such masterpieces as Woolner's Constance and Arthur (Fig.5) and Hunt's The Children's Holiday (Fig.2) but also influences his taste and the nature of his collection.

  • Frederic Lord Leighton and Greek Vases

    By Ian Jenkins

    THE British Museum provided a unique source of reference for the nineteenth-century painter of classical subjects. Above all, it housed the Elgin Marbles, thought by many then, as now, to be the sublime manifestation of Greek artistic genius. They were, however, other objects to attract the painter's eye in the classical repository of Victorian Bloomsbury: since the eighteenth century, the vase-paintings had been used by artists as sources of information about dress, armour, furniture and many other details of ancient life, and in the next century vases came to be featured increasingly in historical painting, as objects in their own right.

  • Back Matter