Sir Denis Mahon, who died on April 24 aged 100 , was a scholar, connoisseur and astute collector whose individual contribution to the understanding and appreciation of 17th-century Italian painting and drawing is without parallel.
Sir Denis Mahon at the National Gallery in London. On the left is Guido Reni's 'Rape of Europa', which he had bought in 1945 for 85 guineas Photo: IAN JONES
The focus of Mahon’s scholarship was always the seicento and he was, as James Byam-Shaw once observed, “an exceptionally careful and completely reliable scholar”. His catalogue entries, essays and books — particularly Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947), a superbly argued thesis on the connection between artistic theory and practice in 17th-century Italy — have for years provided important points of reference in art historical studies and have consistently influenced opinion and taste.
He wrote or made detailed contributions to numerous exhibition catalogues, notably those dedicated to Guercino held at Bologna and Cento in the late 1960s. In 1962 he published essays in The Burlington Magazine and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts entitled “Poussiniana”, encapsulating his afterthoughts on the great Poussin exhibition mounted at the Louvre in 1960. With Nicholas Turner, he produced in 1989 the magisterial catalogue of the Guercino drawings at Windsor Castle.
A small determined man of private means, Mahon combined incisive intellect with a fiercely independent outlook. This equipped him well to engage in any debate, at any level, to which he felt drawn; and he would be relentless and unsparing in his pursuit of a line of argument. The ability to marshal and analyse a mass of complex evidence — documentary or visual — down to the tiniest detail, and then to make use of it, made him a forbidding adversary.
Perhaps his most memorable clash was with Anthony Blunt, when he took issue with the chronology of Poussin’s work that Blunt — an expert on the artist — put forward in the catalogue of the Poussin exhibition of 1960. Mahon emerged triumphant; informed opinion found his analysis the more convincing, and when, in 1964, John Pope-Hennessy proposed Mahon’s election to the British Academy, Blunt, feeling his connoisseurship to have been impugned, asked Pope-Hennessy to withdraw the nomination. Pope-Hennessy refused and Mahon was duly elected.
Mahon delivered a further blow to Blunt’s reputation by demonstrating that a Poussin which Blunt doubted — and which Mahon was therefore able to buy cheaply — had been commissioned from the artist by his patron Cassiano dal Pozzo.
Through his tireless campaigning in the cause of the National Heritage — above all for fiscal incentives for individuals to offer important works of art to the nation in lieu of tax — Mahon’s invariably dark-suited figure became a familiar sight in Whitehall and at Westminster.
Dogged persistence and scrupulous attention to detail enabled Mahon to make some remarkable discoveries. He identified several lost paintings by Caravaggio, among them two versions of The Card Sharps (one of them now in the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth, Texas) and The Lute Player, previously attributed to Carlo Saraceni but in fact an autograph variant of the picture by Caravaggio in the Hermitage.
Following up a reference to an important commission in Guercino’s account book, Mahon succeeded in tracing the picture — The Capture of Samson — to a palace in Beirut, where it remained in the possession of a descendant of the original Italian owner. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In 1995 Mahon recognised a thickly varnished painting that came up for auction in London, described as The Sack of Carthage by Pietro Testa, as Poussin’s long-lost work The Sack of Jerusalem. In 2006 he bought at auction, for rather more than £50,000, what he considered to be an early autograph version of Caravaggio’s Card Sharps, and thus a picture that was worth millions of pounds.
Such was the respect he commanded as an expert on Poussin that when, in the 1980s, he attended an exhibition of the artist’s work at Fort Worth and, having viewed it, explained to the museum curators that in his opinion the pictures were hung in the wrong chronological sequence, the exhibition was there and then rehung on his advice.
Generous in sharing his knowledge with fellow enthusiasts — students, academics and dealers alike — Mahon was also generous in contributing pictures to loan exhibitions. Guercino Drawings from the collections of Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum (1986) and Guercino in Britain, Paintings from British Collections (1991) were notable examples.
In 1997 an exhibition of all 76 paintings from the Mahon collection was staged at the National Gallery; in 1999, 58 of the paintings went on display at six different galleries in Britain. Moreover, it was long Mahon’s intention that the nation should be able to continue to enjoy his superb collection, under arrangements with the National Art-Collections Fund (NA-CF), after his death.
A trustee of the National Gallery for 14 years (he was first appointed by Anthony Eden in 1957), Mahon was fiercely opposed to the sale of pictures from public collections and to the introduction of museum entry charges. He made it plain that, were any museum to which he had lent a picture to transgress in either respect, the picture would be removed. He strongly favoured the setting up of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and his closely argued submissions to the Parliamentary Select Committee, set up in the wake of the Mentmore sale, helped to bring about the Fund’s formation in 1980.
Mahon was also influential in securing for the National Gallery, at low cost, several important pictures, including works by Guido Reni and Caravaggio. These he would proudly point out to a guest when exercising his privilege to visit the Gallery after closing time.
John Denis Mahon was born on November 8 1910, the only son of John Fitzgerald Mahon (fourth son of Sir William Mahon, 4th Bt) and Lady Alice (née Browne), a daughter of the 5th Marquess of Sligo. Guinness Mahon, the merchant bank, was a family concern. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and it was as an undergraduate at Christ Church, where he read History, that his passion for the pictorial art of 17th-century Italy began to take shape. He lived in a house opposite the Ashmolean, where Kenneth Clark was at that time Keeper of Western Art. He arranged to have tutorials with Clark, who encouraged him to take up the study of seicento painting.
Down from Oxford, in 1933 Mahon obtained permission from the Director of the recently founded Courtauld Institute in London to attend lectures there. The programme included a series by Nikolaus Pevsner, newly arrived from Germany, on baroque painting in Italy. Pevsner suggested to Mahon that he might like to make a special study of Guercino.
Appointed, along with John Pope-Hennessy, an honorary attaché of the National Gallery when Kenneth Clark became Director, in the mid-1930s Mahon also found time to undertake a series of journeys in Europe with Otto Kurz. While Mahon sought out works by Guercino, Kurz’s chief interest was in the works of another 17th-century Bolognese artist, Guido Reni, on whom Mahon himself would subsequently become an authority.
In 1934, on a trip to France, Mahon bought — for £120 — his first seicento picture, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. He spotted it in a dealer’s window in Paris and recognised it as a picture that Herman Voss had recently described as an important lost work by Guercino.
Two years later, during a stay in Rome, he acquired a second Guercino, Elijah Fed by Ravens, direct from the collezione fidecommissaria of the Barberini family. Mahon then offered this picture, an early masterpiece of the artist’s, at cost (£200) to the National Gallery; but such was the then general lack of interest in Italian baroque art that Kenneth Clark, who admired the picture, did not judge it worth even mentioning to the trustees. In the late 1990s the picture was estimated to be worth £4 million.
Continued dependence on an allowance from his father, until the latter’s death in 1942, did not prevent Mahon from purchasing, in 1939, Annibale Carracci’s Coronation of the Virgin (later sold to the Metropolitan to fund payment of taxes on the death of Lady Alice in 1970), and, in 1941, an important Guercino altarpiece.
Then, in the postwar years when prices were not high, Mahon made a series of shrewd acquisitions. In 1945 he bought Guido Reni’s beautiful Rape of Europa for 85 guineas. In addition to further works by Guercino, Reni and the Carracci, he bought fine examples of Domenichino, Luca Giordano, Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Matthias Stomer, Johann Liss and others.
The most Mahon ever paid for a painting in the 20th century was £2,000, for Guercino’s painting on copper, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, in a sale at Sotheby’s in 1953. For some of his Guercino drawings he paid as little as £10. Overall, he estimated that in assembling his collection in the last century he had spent about £50,000; in 1998 it was valued at approximately £50 million.
If Denis Mahon had a weakness, it was perhaps his reluctance to revise an opinion — attributable, in part at least, to the tensions and conflicts to which being a collector as well as a great expert can give rise. Having always considered his own version of Guercino’s St John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Salome to be the artist’s prime version, some found Mahon too quick to dismiss the arguably superior qualities of another version that came up for sale.
Probably Mahon’s outstanding talent as an art historian lay in his rare ability to sort out the chronology of an artist’s work through meticulous visual analysis. When Poussin’s pictures came down from the walls of the Louvre at the end of the 1960 exhibition, Mahon placed them all on the ground in the chronological sequence he considered to be visually correct. But for a few minor adjustments, it is Mahon’s chronology, not Blunt’s, that has withstood the test of time.
In celebration of the fourth centenary of Guercino’s birth in 1991, museums all over the world — in Italy, Britain, the United States and elsewhere — staged exhibitions in the artist’s honour on an unprecedented scale. It was a fitting tribute to the achievement of Denis Mahon, one of the world’s last great private scholars.
For services to art history and criticism, Mahon was awarded the Italian Medal for Benemeriti della Cultura in 1957. The British Academy, of which Mahon became a fellow in 1964, awarded him its Serena Medal for Italian Studies in 1972. He was made an honorary citizen of Cento, Guercino’s birthplace, in 1982, and an honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1996.
He was appointed CBE in 1967 and knighted in 1986. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 2003.
All his life Denis Mahon had a passion for newspapers. On trips abroad, he was always up early heading off first thing for the nearest vendor of English papers. He confessed, though, to one vice only — the vice of collecting.
He never married.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/8481701/Sir-Denis-Mahon.html
Through his tireless campaigning in the cause of the National Heritage — above all for fiscal incentives for individuals to offer important works of art to the nation in lieu of tax — Mahon’s invariably dark-suited figure became a familiar sight in Whitehall and at Westminster.
Dogged persistence and scrupulous attention to detail enabled Mahon to make some remarkable discoveries. He identified several lost paintings by Caravaggio, among them two versions of The Card Sharps (one of them now in the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth, Texas) and The Lute Player, previously attributed to Carlo Saraceni but in fact an autograph variant of the picture by Caravaggio in the Hermitage.
Following up a reference to an important commission in Guercino’s account book, Mahon succeeded in tracing the picture — The Capture of Samson — to a palace in Beirut, where it remained in the possession of a descendant of the original Italian owner. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In 1995 Mahon recognised a thickly varnished painting that came up for auction in London, described as The Sack of Carthage by Pietro Testa, as Poussin’s long-lost work The Sack of Jerusalem. In 2006 he bought at auction, for rather more than £50,000, what he considered to be an early autograph version of Caravaggio’s Card Sharps, and thus a picture that was worth millions of pounds.
Such was the respect he commanded as an expert on Poussin that when, in the 1980s, he attended an exhibition of the artist’s work at Fort Worth and, having viewed it, explained to the museum curators that in his opinion the pictures were hung in the wrong chronological sequence, the exhibition was there and then rehung on his advice.
Generous in sharing his knowledge with fellow enthusiasts — students, academics and dealers alike — Mahon was also generous in contributing pictures to loan exhibitions. Guercino Drawings from the collections of Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum (1986) and Guercino in Britain, Paintings from British Collections (1991) were notable examples.
In 1997 an exhibition of all 76 paintings from the Mahon collection was staged at the National Gallery; in 1999, 58 of the paintings went on display at six different galleries in Britain. Moreover, it was long Mahon’s intention that the nation should be able to continue to enjoy his superb collection, under arrangements with the National Art-Collections Fund (NA-CF), after his death.
A trustee of the National Gallery for 14 years (he was first appointed by Anthony Eden in 1957), Mahon was fiercely opposed to the sale of pictures from public collections and to the introduction of museum entry charges. He made it plain that, were any museum to which he had lent a picture to transgress in either respect, the picture would be removed. He strongly favoured the setting up of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and his closely argued submissions to the Parliamentary Select Committee, set up in the wake of the Mentmore sale, helped to bring about the Fund’s formation in 1980.
Mahon was also influential in securing for the National Gallery, at low cost, several important pictures, including works by Guido Reni and Caravaggio. These he would proudly point out to a guest when exercising his privilege to visit the Gallery after closing time.
John Denis Mahon was born on November 8 1910, the only son of John Fitzgerald Mahon (fourth son of Sir William Mahon, 4th Bt) and Lady Alice (née Browne), a daughter of the 5th Marquess of Sligo. Guinness Mahon, the merchant bank, was a family concern. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and it was as an undergraduate at Christ Church, where he read History, that his passion for the pictorial art of 17th-century Italy began to take shape. He lived in a house opposite the Ashmolean, where Kenneth Clark was at that time Keeper of Western Art. He arranged to have tutorials with Clark, who encouraged him to take up the study of seicento painting.
Down from Oxford, in 1933 Mahon obtained permission from the Director of the recently founded Courtauld Institute in London to attend lectures there. The programme included a series by Nikolaus Pevsner, newly arrived from Germany, on baroque painting in Italy. Pevsner suggested to Mahon that he might like to make a special study of Guercino.
Appointed, along with John Pope-Hennessy, an honorary attaché of the National Gallery when Kenneth Clark became Director, in the mid-1930s Mahon also found time to undertake a series of journeys in Europe with Otto Kurz. While Mahon sought out works by Guercino, Kurz’s chief interest was in the works of another 17th-century Bolognese artist, Guido Reni, on whom Mahon himself would subsequently become an authority.
In 1934, on a trip to France, Mahon bought — for £120 — his first seicento picture, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. He spotted it in a dealer’s window in Paris and recognised it as a picture that Herman Voss had recently described as an important lost work by Guercino.
Two years later, during a stay in Rome, he acquired a second Guercino, Elijah Fed by Ravens, direct from the collezione fidecommissaria of the Barberini family. Mahon then offered this picture, an early masterpiece of the artist’s, at cost (£200) to the National Gallery; but such was the then general lack of interest in Italian baroque art that Kenneth Clark, who admired the picture, did not judge it worth even mentioning to the trustees. In the late 1990s the picture was estimated to be worth £4 million.
Continued dependence on an allowance from his father, until the latter’s death in 1942, did not prevent Mahon from purchasing, in 1939, Annibale Carracci’s Coronation of the Virgin (later sold to the Metropolitan to fund payment of taxes on the death of Lady Alice in 1970), and, in 1941, an important Guercino altarpiece.
Then, in the postwar years when prices were not high, Mahon made a series of shrewd acquisitions. In 1945 he bought Guido Reni’s beautiful Rape of Europa for 85 guineas. In addition to further works by Guercino, Reni and the Carracci, he bought fine examples of Domenichino, Luca Giordano, Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Matthias Stomer, Johann Liss and others.
The most Mahon ever paid for a painting in the 20th century was £2,000, for Guercino’s painting on copper, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, in a sale at Sotheby’s in 1953. For some of his Guercino drawings he paid as little as £10. Overall, he estimated that in assembling his collection in the last century he had spent about £50,000; in 1998 it was valued at approximately £50 million.
If Denis Mahon had a weakness, it was perhaps his reluctance to revise an opinion — attributable, in part at least, to the tensions and conflicts to which being a collector as well as a great expert can give rise. Having always considered his own version of Guercino’s St John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Salome to be the artist’s prime version, some found Mahon too quick to dismiss the arguably superior qualities of another version that came up for sale.
Probably Mahon’s outstanding talent as an art historian lay in his rare ability to sort out the chronology of an artist’s work through meticulous visual analysis. When Poussin’s pictures came down from the walls of the Louvre at the end of the 1960 exhibition, Mahon placed them all on the ground in the chronological sequence he considered to be visually correct. But for a few minor adjustments, it is Mahon’s chronology, not Blunt’s, that has withstood the test of time.
In celebration of the fourth centenary of Guercino’s birth in 1991, museums all over the world — in Italy, Britain, the United States and elsewhere — staged exhibitions in the artist’s honour on an unprecedented scale. It was a fitting tribute to the achievement of Denis Mahon, one of the world’s last great private scholars.
For services to art history and criticism, Mahon was awarded the Italian Medal for Benemeriti della Cultura in 1957. The British Academy, of which Mahon became a fellow in 1964, awarded him its Serena Medal for Italian Studies in 1972. He was made an honorary citizen of Cento, Guercino’s birthplace, in 1982, and an honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1996.
He was appointed CBE in 1967 and knighted in 1986. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 2003.
All his life Denis Mahon had a passion for newspapers. On trips abroad, he was always up early heading off first thing for the nearest vendor of English papers. He confessed, though, to one vice only — the vice of collecting.
He never married.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/8481701/Sir-Denis-Mahon.html
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