Anarchy and art dealing in Paris: Robert Dell (1865-1940), first Editor of The Burlington Magazine.

Roger Fry is famously associated with the inception of The Burlington Magazine, but credit must also be given to its first Editor, Robert Dell [photographed here]. A Christian socialist writer in London, then Anarchist art dealer in Paris, and finally exiled political journalist in America, Dell’s life was lived outside a conventional professional path and …

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 …

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 …

From exotic genius to precursor of modernity: El Greco in The Burlington Magazine (1903-1920)

In the first two decades of the twentieth century The Burlington Magazine contributed to a definite shift in the criticism of El Greco in Britain: from a biographic, almost novelistic approach into documentary rigour and formal analysis. The first significant mention of El Greco in the Burlington appeared in February 1908 when the aristocratic writer …

‘Why bother with Joseph Boze?’ Pastels in The Burlington Magazine, a contribution by Neil Jeffares

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the hostility engendered by the vocabulary chosen to discuss the medium of pastel, and how language itself may be used to undermine an art that was so highly prized during the eighteenth century. In this post I will examine the language implicit and explicit in the coverage of pastels made before …

The Sackville Gallery – Old Masters and Avant-Garde in London

The Sackville Gallery was founded in 1908 by critic-dealers Max Rothschild and Robert Rene Meyer-Sée. In 1911 Rothschild and Meyer-Sée were joined by the Parisian critic Gilbert de Rorthays. In the same year, the Sackville Gallery began a business agreement with another critic-dealer based in Paris, Robert Dell. In 1912 Rorthays and Meyer-Sée left to …

A Christmas Attribution

The worlds of connoisseurship, commerce and the interactions between them are recounted in a lively manner in the writings by Robert Ross (1869-1918), friend and literary executor of Oscar Wilde, successful writer on art, co-director of the Carfax Gallery with Arthur Clifton (1863–1932) and More Adey (1858-1945), and remembered by Roger Fry as a rare …