Sidney Colvin

Norwood, 1845 - 1927, Kensington

BiographyLC name authority rec. nn 50031911
LC Heading: Colvin, Sidney, 1845-1927
Biography:
Colvin, Sir Sidney (1845–1927), art and literary scholar and museum administrator, was born at Norwood, Surrey, on 18 June 1845, the youngest of the three children (all sons) who survived infancy of Bazett David Colvin (1805–1871), East India merchant, and his wife, Mary Steuart (1821–1902), eldest daughter of William Butterworth Bayley. Both sides of the family had long been connected with India, as either merchants or administrators. Colvin was privately educated at the family home, The Grove, Little Bealings, near Woodbridge, east Suffolk. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1863 and was third in the first class of the classical tripos in 1867; he became a fellow in 1868.

On leaving university Colvin moved to London and established a reputation as a critic, mainly of the fine arts; he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Fortnightly Review, The Portfolio, and other journals. In 1872 his Portfolio papers appeared in book form under the title Children in Italian and English Design; this was followed in 1873 by A Selection from Occasional Writings on Fine Art (privately printed). In 1873 Colvin was elected Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge and held the appointment until 1885. A special interest was the sculpture and archaeology of ancient Greece and in 1875 he visited the excavations in progress at Olympia.

In 1876 Colvin became director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where he established a gallery of casts from antique sculpture. He left there in 1884 to become keeper of the department of prints and drawings in the British Museum, a post he held until his retirement in 1912. By his thorough scholarship and enthusiasm Colvin made the department more important than it had ever been before; he reorganized the arrangement and mounting of the collection and secured spacious accommodation where exhibitions could be held. A special feature was the excellent guides written by Colvin or under his supervision; the most important was the guide to the exhibition in 1899 of Rembrandt's etchings, arranged for the first time in chronological order. His greatest achievement was to persuade the government to purchase the magnificent John Malcolm of Poltalloch collection of drawings and engravings (1895), which ‘almost doubled the importance of the department’ (Colvin, 207). Thanks to Colvin's influence many private collectors made important bequests to the museum. Among the most notable were William Mitchell's collection of early woodcuts (1895), Henry Vaughan's collection of drawings by John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and others (1900), the second Baron Cheylesmore's collection of mezzotints (1902), and George Salting's drawings and engravings by old masters (1910). An important purchase was James Reeve's collection of drawings by the Norwich school (1902). During the later years of his keepership Colvin took a great interest in Japanese and Chinese art and greatly enriched the museum's holdings by his purchases.

Colvin had a special interest in early Italian art. In A Florentine Picture-Chronicle (1898) he reproduced in facsimile, with detailed commentary, a book of drawings (purchased from John Ruskin) which he attributed to Maso Finiguerra (1424–1464), the reputed inventor of engraving. In the same field was the official Catalogue of Early Italian Engravers (1910), prepared in collaboration with Arthur Hind. Another major work, also in collaboration with Hind, was Early Engraving and Engravers in England (1905). In 1894 Colvin failed in his bid to become director of the National Gallery and in 1909 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the directorship of the British Museum. He was knighted in 1911.

Some time in the late 1860s Colvin met and fell in love with Frances Jane Sitwell, née Fetherstonhaugh (1839–1924), a woman of great beauty, wit, and personality, unhappily married to the Revd Albert Hurt Sitwell. She finally parted from her unsatisfactory husband in 1874 and for the next thirty years she and Colvin lived apart but maintained a close friendship. She acted as visiting hostess at his official residence at the British Museum, and thanks to her influence it became a literary and artistic centre. Although the Revd Sitwell died in 1894 they did not marry until 7 July 1903; apparently Colvin did not feel able to support a wife in addition to his mother (who was financially dependent upon him) and he did not marry until after the latter's death.

In 1869 Colvin joined the New (soon to become the Savile) Club; he was also from 1879 a member of the Athenaeum and from 1893 of the Burlington Fine Arts Club. In 1871 he joined the Society of Dilettanti and was its honorary secretary from 1891 to 1896. He was elected to the Literary Society in 1886 and became in due course treasurer and then president.

Colvin was on friendly terms with most of the great literary figures of his day, from Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning to Meredith and Swinburne. As a boy he had worshipped Ruskin, who was a family friend; his next great admiration was for the work of Edward Burne-Jones, who became a close friend. Burne-Jones introduced him to Rossetti and Colvin was a member of his circle from 1868 to 1872. Basil Champneys the architect was his oldest friend and there were close friendships too with Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Colvin's most celebrated friendship, shared by his future wife, was with Robert Louis Stevenson. Colvin and Mrs Sitwell met the young Scot in the summer of 1873 at Cockfield rectory in Suffolk, the home of Professor Churchill Babington, whose wife, Maud, was Stevenson's cousin. It was a turning point in Stevenson's life; they helped to steady him through the emotional problems caused by disagreements with his father over religion and by uncertainties about his future as a writer. Colvin recognized Stevenson's genius and helped and encouraged him by introducing him to editors and publishers and tirelessly promoting his interests. Stevenson fell in love with Frances Sitwell and for the next two years poured out letters of love and adoration to her; after the intensity of these feelings had passed the friendship remained. For the rest of his life Stevenson regarded Colvin as his literary mentor and his dearest friend. In a letter from the south seas he made it clear that when he thought of ‘home’ it was Colvin and his house in the British Museum (jokingly called ‘The Monument’) that he had in mind. Colvin's own unselfish devotion, both to Stevenson himself and later to his memory, never faltered. To maintain the intimacy of their friendship Stevenson wrote to him the journal-letters from Samoa which Colvin published as Vailima Letters (1895). Colvin edited the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's works (1894–8). After acrimonious rows with Stevenson's widow and stepson he was forced to relinquish the project of writing the official biography, which he called ‘the great hope and interest of my life’ (Mehew, 1.53). Instead, he edited Stevenson's Letters (1899, enlarged 1911, and in final form 1924); the texts are now known to be flawed by bowdlerization and expurgation.

Although art had provided him with his livelihood, Colvin's chief interest was in literature. He had a special regard for Landor and Keats, and wrote short biographies of both for the English Men of Letters series: Landor (1881) and Keats (1887). He edited Selections from Landor (1882), and published editions of the letters of Keats in 1891 (characteristically omitting the letters to Fanny Brawne) and of his poems in 1915. He devoted the early years of his retirement to the completion of his major biography, John Keats, his Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics and after-Fame (1917). It was followed in 1921 by Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, a volume of reminiscences.

In appearance Colvin was tall and thin with a pointed beard; in 1903 he broke a leg in an accident and thereafter walked with a slight limp. Stevenson described him as having ‘the air of a man accustomed to obedience’ (Mehew, 1.49) and Laurence Binyon, a museum colleague, recalled that ‘under a manner that often seemed stiff and shy he concealed an emotional and excitable temperament, capable of occasional explosions’ (Lucas, 182).

Lady Colvin's death, on 1 August 1924, was a great blow to Colvin; his last years were also marred by deafness and loss of memory. He died on 11 May 1927 at his home, 35 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington (to which he had moved on leaving the British Museum). After cremation his ashes were buried in his wife's grave in the cemetery at Church Row, Hampstead.

Ernest Mehew
(“Colvin, Sir Sidney (1845–1927),” Ernest Mehew in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2006, Acccessed August 17, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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