Louis Fagan

Naples, 1845 - 1903, Florence

BiographyLC name authority rec. n83227237.
Biography:
Fagan, Louis Alexander (1845–1903), etcher and writer, was born on 7 February 1845 in Naples, Italy, the second son in a family of three sons and four daughters of George Fagan (d. 1869), a diplomatist, and his wife, Maria, the daughter of Louis Carbone, an officer in the Italian army. Robert Fagan (1761–1816), diplomat and amateur portrait painter, was his grandfather. His elder brother, Joseph George (d. 1908), served in India as a major-general; the younger, Charles Edward, became secretary of the British Museum (Natural History). His father became attaché to the British legation at Naples in 1837 and in this capacity assisted the efforts of Anthony Panizzi to free political prisoners in 1851; then, after several postings in South and Central America, served as minister and consul-general to Venezuela (1865–9).

Fagan was brought up in Naples until 1860, when he was sent to Leytonstone School in Essex. In England, Anthony Panizzi became his guardian and lifelong friend. As a youth, Fagan carried letters from Panizzi to the revolutionary leaders in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On leaving school he entered the Foreign Office, and soon served as attaché, first with Sir James Hudson in Turin, and then in Paris. From 1866 to 1868 he worked under his father as assistant clerk to the British legation in Venezuela, and in 1868 became clerk to the commission for the settlement of British claims against Venezuela.

When his father died of yellow fever at Caracas in 1869 Fagan returned to England, and in October of that year, on Panizzi's recommendation, he obtained a post of assistant in the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum. His sociability and activities as a writer seem to have led to friction with the keeper, George W. Reid, who reported to the trustees in 1882 that ‘Mr Fagan's frequent consultations in the print-room with artists, writers, publishers, and printers, whom he employs, caused complete neglect of his duties of supervision’ (Reid MSS, British Museum archives). He rose to the position of senior assistant in 1887 but resigned on account of ill health in July 1892. On 8 November 1887 he married Caroline Frances, the daughter of James Purves of Melbourne, Australia.

Fagan published a number of works on art, mostly relating to the collections at the museum, including an introduction to The Works of Correggio (1873); Catalogo dei disegni ... di Michelangelo Buonarroti esistenti in Inghilterra, in volume 2 of Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. A. Gotti (1875); the almost completely obsolete Handbook to the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (1876); a translation of M. Minghetti's The Masters of Raffaello (1882); Collectors' Marks (1883); The Art of Michel'Angelo Buonarroti ... in the British Museum (1883); Raffaello Sanzio, his Sonnet in the British Museum (1884); Engravings by F. Bartolozzi ... in the British Museum (1885); The Engraved Works of William Woolett (1885); The Engraved Works of William Faithorne (1888); Mezzotint Engravings Relating to Ireland or to Irish Artists (1888); An Easy Walk through the British Museum (1891); and a History of Engraving in England (1893). Many of the ninety-two entries that Fagan wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography were also on artists.

Fagan was an artist in his own right and illustrated many of his own books. Most of his etchings depict Italian scenes and peasants and include Views and Costumes of Naples (exh. RA, 1877), Macaroni Eaters, and Salerno (exh. RA, 1887), which appeared in a volume of twelve etchings called Souvenirs of Southern Italy (1873); impressions of each may be found in the British Museum and in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Fagan was made an honorary member of the Société des Artistes Graveurs au Burin de France (before 1884). His known drawings include Guards' Sergeant (c.1879, British Museum), Corporal (1879, British Museum), Anne Marie Fagan, and Self-Portrait (ex Lieutenant William Lewis Clinton Baker, 1 June 1945). His works are signed ‘L. Fagan’ or ‘Louis Fagan’.

Panizzi died in Fagan's arms in April 1879, having been nursed by his younger companion since an illness of 1868. Fagan received Gladstone's commendation for his Life of Sir Anthony Panizzi (1880), which included his etching of Panizzi, after G. F. Watts, as the frontispiece (exh. RA, 1878; impressions in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum). As literary executor, he edited the Lettere ad Antonio Panizzi di uomini illustri e di amici italiani, 1823–1870 (1880) and Prosper Mérimée's Lettres à M. Panizzi (1881), which he translated into English and Italian.

Always sociable, Fagan was a member of the Arts Club and the Reform Club, and wrote a history of the latter: 1836–1886 the Reform Club: its Founders and Architect (1887). He travelled widely giving popular lectures on art, including the Lowell lectures at Boston in 1891. While visiting Australia in 1891 he advised the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, on the purchasing and arrangement of their collection, his opinions being recorded in a printed report. He was justice of the peace of the county of Middlesex. Panizzi's friend Prosper Mérimée, with whom Fagan stayed in Paris in September 1869, summed up his cosmopolitan nature in this way: ‘conservant malgré toutes les nationalités par où il a passé l'air de l'English boy’ (Fagan, Panizzi, 2.275). On his retirement from the museum he returned to live in Italy and built his home, the Villino Francesca, on the viale Principe Eugenio in Florence, where he died suddenly on 5 January 1903.

Daniel Parker
(“Fagan, Louis Alexander (1845–1903),” Daniel Parker in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, Accessed August 26, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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