Edward Hutton

Ealing, Middlesex, 1875 - 1969, London

BiographyLC name authority rec. non50030350
LC Heading: Hutton, Edward, 1875-1969

Biography:
Hutton, Edward (1875–1969), Italophile and travel writer, was born at Cambridge Villa, Ealing, Middlesex, on 12 April 1875, the eldest child in the family of five sons and one daughter of James Edward Hutton (1838–1890) and his wife, Sarah Abraham, née Salmon (b. 1850). His father was a partner in William Hutton & Sons, silversmiths, platers, and cutlers of London, Sheffield, and Birmingham, originally founded by Edward's great-grandfather William Hutton in the eighteenth century. Robert Salmon Hutton (1876–1970), who became professor of metallurgy at Cambridge University, was one of Edward Hutton's younger brothers.

After home schooling, and while living at 13 Cannon Place in Heathfield Gardens, Hutton first went to school aged seven at Mrs Coghlan's, Thurloe Road, Rosslyn Hill; then, on moving to Elm Lodge in Hampstead, he attended Highgate School, where he and his brother Robert were ‘mercilessly bullied’ (autobiography, fol. 18). After the death of his father in December 1890, and with the family's transfer to his mother's native Devon, he attended Blundell's School, Tiverton, settling down to happier days and serious study. He became interested in both Italy and Roman Catholicism, largely through the study of Virgil and the reading of the Italian novels of Marion Crawford and J. H. Shorthouse's Anglo-Catholic novel John Inglesant (1881).

On leaving Blundell's Hutton took private tuition for Oxford entrance in rooms at Hampstead; however, after a year's idling, this ambition came to an end. Instead he was placed, at a cost of £100 to his family, with a ‘publisher’, a Mr Rideal of 6 Victoria Street. The job entailed correcting proofs (of mostly communist propaganda) and delivering letters, a job he was all too pleased to give up on being offered a trainee position by John Lane at Bodley Head in Vigo Street. It was while working at Bodley Head, the headquarters of the ‘decadent movement’ in England, that Hutton learned the writing trade and came into contact with a number of literary stars, notable ‘sexual heretics’, Catholics, and Catholics-to-be of the day, including Aubrey Beardsley (a ‘genius’), Ernest Dowson (a ‘miserable creature’), Frederick Rolfe (also known as Baron Corvo, an ‘unhappy apparition’), Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, George Moore (whom Hutton considered both ignorant and boorish), Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde (whose poetry he deemed inferior to that of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas). His connection with this group of writers and aesthetes gave Hutton a great deal of satisfaction throughout his life (autobiography, fols. 77–91).

Having attended a school of languages in London to learn Italian during his writing apprenticeship, Hutton first left for Italy in 1896, apparently ‘disgusted’ at the sacking of Aubrey Beardsley as art editor at Bodley Head, which had capitulated in the face of the celebrated poet William Watson's ultimatum of 1895 (autobiography, fol. 94). It was then that he began writing a steady stream of articles and reviews on Italian art history subjects: there were, for example, ‘appreciations’ of Luca della Robbia and Fra Filippo Lippi, published in The Idler (1898), a piece on his hero-in-absolute, Walter Pater, in the Monthly Review (1903), and an article, ‘Benedetto Bonfigli (c.1420–1496): the father of Perugian painting’, in the Burlington Magazine (1905). Well-informed though the pieces were, they owed far more to the intimate knowledge and enthusiasm of the gentleman-amateur than they did to the hard-won training and expertise of the professional academic.

On 18 June 1898 Hutton married Charlotte (1875/6–1960), the sister of a close friend, Horace Miles, and daughter of George Russel Miles, of Hampstead, tea dealer. They had one son, Peter Hutton (1911–2000), and lived (from 1901) at Casa di Boccaccio (a house once owned by the father of Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron) at Ponte a Mensola, east of Florence. They mixed with the great and the good of the Anglo-Florentine literary set. Bernard and Mary Berenson were close neighbours and cordial acquaintances; many of Bernard Berenson's vatic judgements and attributions found their way into Hutton's published work, for example a popular study of Perugino (1907) and a three-volume reprint of J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle's A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (1909), with annotations by Hutton. He also began writing a successful run of travel books, the first being The Cities of Umbria (1905), The Cities of Spain (1906), and Florence and Northern Tuscany (1907). However, his most important work from this period was a very worthy critical biography of Boccaccio (1910), which established his name in the field of Italian studies.

It was with Norman Douglas (1868–1952), whom he first met in February 1917, that Hutton struck up his warmest—and most unlikely—friendship. They were fellow travel writers, and later collaborated on A Glimpse of Greece (1928), although their writing styles and approaches were anything but compatible. With the journalist and author Lina Waterfield, Hutton helped set up the British Institute in Florence in 1917. The permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe, had originally sent Hutton (it would appear, at his own request) to Italy in 1916 on a special mission as a sort of spy and propagandist. Hutton remained for nearly two years, sending a report back to England every month. In 1918 Hutton founded and edited the short-lived Anglo-Italian Review (from May 1918 to May 1921). It was on reading the periodical that the shipping broker Arthur Serena first approached Hutton for advice on how he might further the cause of Italian studies in England. This consultation resulted in the founding of chairs in Italian at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and later at Manchester and Birmingham.

In the 1920s Hutton combined his Anglo-Italian cultural and professional writing activities with dealing in early Sienese art. He was, on the level of the dilettante, something of a connoisseur of this subject. A number of works by Simone Martini (or his workshop) that passed through his hands can now be found in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. He wrote The Sienese School in the National Gallery (1925), a ‘souvenir study’ that relied heavily on the work and experience of his friends and associates Robert Langton Douglas and Frederick Mason Perkins.

Hutton's literary output continued unabated throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He issued A Short History of Italian Art (1926), a translation of Adolfo Venturi, and wrote The Franciscans in England, 1224–1538 (1926). This second work points to his ever-growing affinity to the Catholic church; and in 1928, along with his friend Mason Perkins, Hutton was received into the Roman Catholic church at Porziuncola, the birthplace of the Franciscan movement close to Assisi. His most profitable line, however, remained highbrow—and, it should be said, overripe—travel books like Cities of Spain and Rome (1909, 1912, 1922, 1926, and 1950), which he was frequently revising for new editions in this period. (His last major travel book would be Florence, 1952.)

A combination of his Catholicism, public spiritedness, and acute artistic sensibility led to one of Hutton's proudest accomplishments: he was the prime mover in the Westminster Cathedral campaign which in 1935 helped to stop the amateurish work of Gilbert Pownall and his workshop of mosaicists, and established a committee of experts, on which Hutton sat himself, that saw through more appropriate designs in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. He achieved this by assembling staunch public support from, among others, Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, Eric Gill, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and Sir William Llewellyn, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. As a testament to his aesthetic victory two of his own cosmatesque mosaic designs are to be found in St Paul's chapel at Westminster Cathedral; and one of his final books was The Cosmati: the Roman Marble Workers of the XIIth and XIIIth Centuries (1950).

The Second World War inevitably hit the production of travel books. Hutton, though, continued with his journalism, writing regular reviews of historical and art history books for The Guardian and The Tablet. He offered his services yet again to the British Foreign Office in 1939 and, though too old to be of any use in the field this time, his topographical knowledge of Italy was an invaluable asset, unrivalled by any other English person alive at the time. Therefore, in 1943, the political department of the Foreign Office asked him to write detailed descriptions of the Italian provinces. He produced nineteen volumes, the Italian Zone Handbooks—complete with a handwritten list of works of art and monuments to be safeguarded—which were used by the allied intelligence corps.

Edward Hutton was a fantastically energetic and eclectic worker in the area of Italian studies and Anglo-Italian cultural relations, and achieved much. A prolific, authoritative, erudite, if unmemorable and, for the most part, quintessentially Victorian writer (the academic professionalism of the twentieth century having largely passed him by), he wrote on a remarkable range of subjects. He was made cavaliere of the order of the Crown of Italy in 1917; he was awarded the Serena gold medal for his work in Italian studies by the British Academy in 1924; he received the title of commendatore of the order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1959, and the gold medal for culture in 1965; and he was made a patron of the British Institute in 1969. His final decades were marred by financial instability and a deep-seated insecurity that his literary and wider cultural contribution had not been publicly acknowledged in his nation of birth. Despite a rather pathetic period of doorstepping (an offer of a word in the right ear came from the historian G. M. Trevelyan), his great wish to be officially honoured by his queen was never to be fulfilled. Resident in his latter years at 114 Clifton Hill, St John's Wood (once W. P. Frith's house), he died on 20 August 1969 at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London.

Michael John Partington
(“Hutton, Edward (1875–1969),” Michael John Partington in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, October 2007; online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2015, Accessed September 2015, www.oxforddnb.com).

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