‘Art Celebrities’, an exhibition by Cicely Hey advertised in The Burlington Magazine

Starting from an apparently innocuous 1933 advertisement in The Burlington Magazine, Index Assistant Alison Bennett has uncovered much new material about Cicely Hey, a little-known British artist of the early 20th century. Here is where her research has been taking Alison so far. In March 1933 The Burlington Magazine published an advertisement for an exhibition …

Gwen John remembered by her brother, Augustus John, in the pages of The Burlington Magazine (1942).

‘Few on meeting this retiring person in black, with her tiny hands and feet, a soft, almost inaudible voice, and delicate Pembrokeshire accent, would have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other.’ Gwen John (1876-1939) is today a much acclaimed British painter associated with …

A lithograph by Charles Shannon for The Burlington Magazine (1906)

Every now and then, The Burlington Magazine reproduced works of art of which the originals were for sale to the subscribers. In December 1906 Charles Shannon contributed an original lithograph, called 'The Morning Visit'. The Lithographs of Charles Shannon, a catalogue compiled by Paul Delaney in 1978, lists this lithograph, which was issued separately, as …

The soul thief: John Singer Sargent and the Burlington Magazine

This year is the 90th anniversary of John Singer Sargent’s death and the National Portrait Gallery of London commemorated him with an exhibition, Sargent. Portraits of artists and friends, curated by Richard Ormond. This show is a journey across Sargent’s personal and artistic life, through which the intense rapport between the painter and his sitters …

The Burlington Magazine as tool for the study of the art market

In the Burlington Magazine (especially in the first 50 years of its existence) there is a wealth of material to aid the study of the art market. Not only, as expected, the Old Masters paintings market, but also the trade for contemporary art, especially British. This blog post wants to show how our current digital …

‘Things of beauty, Joys for ever’: The Connoisseur Magazine 1901-1951

The Connoisseur (originally subtitled ‘An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors’) was born in September 1901. It survived nearly the entire course of the twentieth century, before passing away in February 1992. It was a British magazine, but it was also published in America. As the first editor acknowledged in the first edition, a magazine ‘devoted to …

Pre-Raphaelite drawings and unpaid articles: William Michael Rossetti and The Burlington Magazine

William Michael Rossetti[1] is best known to posterity for his methodical cataloguing and publication of works related to his famous siblings, Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. However, Rossetti was a writer and critic in his own right: he produced over 372 pieces of art criticism between 1850 and 1878.[2] Ruskin praised him as ‘one …

Charles Ricketts as art critic for The Burlington Magazine

Between 1904 and 1909 Charles Ricketts wrote twenty articles for The Burlington Magazine. He began in June 1904 with a brief, dismissive review of a book on Velazquez by W. Wilberforce and A.R. Gilbert, to conclude in 1909 with a long eulogy in memory of his recently deceased friend, the painter Charles Conder. These two …

Francis Howard (1874-1954) and the ‘other’ Grosvenor Gallery (founded 1912)

Given names of art galleries are very important. They may refer to their holdings (the Spanish Gallery, that dealt in old masters from this country), their geographical location (the Sackville Gallery, in Sackville Street), or hint to some culturally shared concept (the Carfax Gallery, founded by Oxford university students, who referred to a monument in …

The Burlington Magazine and modern British art (1903-1910)

The foundation of the Burlington in the very early years of the twentieth century is the intersecting point of many cultural networks. Several of the many questions that underlie its inception have been investigated: the significance that the Burlington had for the development of art history as an academic discipline in Britain, the impact it …