Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
19 October 2024
ISBN:
978-1-7384878-3-7
Dimensions:
176 Pages, 210 x 148 mm 
Illustrations:
2 colour and 29 b/w images

• Overview
• The Author

• Christopher White, the former director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was born in 1930, the son of Gabriel White, an artist and arts administrator, and the nephew of the artist Edward Ardizzone. This delightful account of White’s rise through the ranks of the art world opens with a humorous description of growing up in the midst of an eccentric and creative extended family in London and Kent. He then recounts his experience of graduate-student life at the Courtauld Institute of Art in the early 1950s, during which time he was taught by the likes of Anthony Blunt, Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. The lively narrative subsequently follows his career from its beginnings as an assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and as Director of Old Master Sales the prestigious art dealer Colnaghi in London to his return to the museum world as Curator of Graphic Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He goes on to record his appointment in 1973 as Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London – during which time he spent long periods in the USA, teaching at Yale – and, twelve years later, his transformational directorship at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, from which post he retired in 1997.

  With great charm, wit and not a little propensity towards art-world gossip and indiscreet anecdotes, White’s recollections of many of the experiences he underwent during the course of a long and varied professional life offer a fascinating insight into how British and American museum life, in particular, has fundamentally changed over the decades.

   

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• Christopher White was formerly Director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and is a noted art historian who has written widely on Dutch and Flemish art. His works include Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist (1987), Rembrandt as an Etcher: A Study of the Artist at Work (2nd edn, 1999), The Later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of H.M. The Queen (2007), Anthony Van Dyck and the Art of Portraiture (2021) and The Intimate Rembrandt (2022). He was knighted the 2001 New Year Honours for services to art history.