Vol. 159 / No. 1374
Vol. 159 / No. 1374
ON 29TH AUGUST 1945 Oliver Millar visited Audley End, Essex,
three years before Lord Braybrooke sold the great Jacobean house to the
Ministry of Works. He made notes on its paintings in the first of forty-nine
journals that over the next sixty years were to record his travels to public
and private collections, exhibitions and auction sales in the United Kingdom and
abroad. Seven volumes are dedicated to Van Dyck, a record of the research that
resulted in two of the highlights of Millar’s career, the exhibition Van Dyck
in England at the National Portrait Gallery in 1982 and his collaboration in
the catalogue raisonné that appeared in 2004.1 The catalogue was published by
the Paul Mellon Centre, London, where those journals can now be found, part of
an archive of Millar’s papers occupying eighty-five boxes. In December last
year, digital copies of the two indexes to the journals (the first by
collection, the second by artist) were placed online, and a full catalogue of the
entire collection was made available in July.2 Researchers into painting in
seventeenth-century Britain have an invaluable new resource, but all sorts of
lines of inquiry are suggested by the catalogue: why, for example, should
Pamela Tudor-Craig, on learning of Millar’s visit to Gorhambury, seat of the
Earl of Verulam, have written to him in January 1957 to ask about ‘blue and
white giraffes and owls’?
Millar’s papers join a collection of archives that in the
past few years has become one of the Paul Mellon Centre’s most impressive achievements.
The Centre began collecting the papers of historians of British art and
architecture by chance. In 1977 the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven
was offered the papers of W.G. Constable (1887–1976), first director of the
Courtauld Institute and subsequently curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Since these mostly related to his work on Richard Wilson, it was thought more
useful for researchers to have access to them in London. There they joined the
substantial archive of notes for the Mellon Foundation’s multi-volume
Dictionary of British Artists, a project initiated in 1963 that never came to
fruition. The collection of archives contains several other skeletons of unpublished
projects – most poignantly, in the papers of Daphne Haldin (1899–1973), notes
for a Dictionary of Women Artists, a project that was perhaps simply too far in
advance of its time.
The archive collections were put onto a more professional footing
during preparations by its then Director, Brian Allen, for the Centre’s
fortieth anniversary in 2010. An archivist, Charlotte Brunskill, was brought
in, at first on secondment from the National Portrait Gallery and then, from
2012, in a full-time position. Under her guidance, and that of the present Director,
Mark Hallett, the collections have taken their present form, divided between
the Centre’s own records (themselves an important resource for the history of
the study of British art) and the archives of art and architectural historians.
Among the scholars represented are Judy Egerton, Brinsley Ford, John Hayes,
Benedict Nicolson (former editor of this Magazine) and Ellis Waterhouse. There
are also unexpected treasures, such as the records of the London office of
Knoedler & Co., part of the archive of Frank Simpson (1911–2002), who had
worked for the firm before he became librarian at the Centre in 1971. The Centre
does not collect only the archives of the dead: among the living who have
donated papers are Malcolm Baker and Roy Strong. The Centre has also embarked
on an oral history project: fittingly, Brian Allen was one of its first
subjects.
Many of the papers will be used by researchers wanting
details of, for example, the provenance or location of works of art recorded by
one of these scholars. As time passes, however, the archives will acquire
ever-greater significance as a record of the practice of art history in the
days before the internet, when a photograph was a precious object. As the
collection grows, it will also become a resource of the highest importance for
understanding how the study and appreciation of British art has developed over
the past century. This has been strengthened by the expansion of the archives
beyond the papers of scholars working on what has traditionally been the
Centre’s core interest of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Recent acquisitions
include, for example, the archives of scholars specialising in Victorian and
twentieth-century architecture and those of critics, most notably Brian Sewell.
His papers embody another development in collecting policy. Until recently,
most acquisitions focused on research material, often relating to a specific
project, but the Centre now aims to acquire the complete archives of its
subjects, and so researchers can study, for example, the records of Sewell’s
school and army career. One of the most recent acquisitions, the papers of
Giles Waterfield, who died last year, encompasses his entire life and not just
his work as an art historian.3
With these developments, the archive collections are
charting the evolution of the study of art history in Britain, from what was
for many years a small, highly interconnected coterie into the academic
community of today. It is striking that so many of the papers relate to
scholars who worked outside institutions of higher education, a characteristic
that is shared by related repositories, such as the Wallace Collection’s
archive of the papers of scholars who worked on French eighteenth-century art
or princely arms and armour. This is in part a result of the slowness with
which art history was professionalised in Britain, but it also reflects the
fact that the archives of scholars in universities tend to be swallowed up by
the institution in which they worked. The growth of the Paul Mellon Centre’s archive
collections should encourage a wider recognition that the records of art
historians’ lives are going to be of interest to the researchers who come after
them.
1 M. Levey: ‘Oliver Millar (1923–2007)’, The Burlington Magazine 149 (2007), pp.554–55.
2 www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
3 T. Harrod: ‘Giles Waterfield (1949–2016)’, The Burlington Magazine 159 (2017), pp.219–20.