(c) 2017 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Claude Phillips

London, 1846 - 1924, London

BiographyPhillips, Sir Claude (English critic, art historian, and collector, 1846-1924).
Phillips, Sir Claude (1846–1924), art critic and museum curator, was born in London, at Gloucester Villas, Gloucester Road, Regent's Park, on 29 January 1846, the second son of Robert Abraham Phillips, a jeweller, and his wife, Helen, daughter of Moses Lionel Levy and sister of Joseph Moses Levy (1812–1888), founder of the Daily Telegraph. He was educated mainly in France and Germany, and took an MA at London University. He was admitted as a solicitor, but subsequently entered the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1883. Phillips's practice involved visits to Italy, of which he took full advantage for artistic study; during travels in other European countries he made systematic visits to galleries, churches, and private collections. His knowledge and love of music, particularly the work of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Franck, came second only to his passion for art, and his first contributions to the Daily Telegraph in the later 1880s were on musical matters. Articles on painting followed, increasing in number, and in 1897 Phillips was appointed regular art critic to that paper—a post which he both energetically and devotedly filled until the end of his working life. In addition to the Daily Telegraph, Phillips was a frequent contributor to many of the leading journals of the day, especially (until 1919) the Burlington Magazine, on the consultative committee of which he served. A selection of his essays was published posthumously under the title Emotion in Art (1925).

Phillips's authority as an art scholar was recognized in 1897 when he was appointed, on 28 July, the first keeper of the Wallace Collection, which was then being prepared for its opening by the prince of Wales at Hertford House in 1900. In the arrangement of the collection a board of trustees played the controlling part, but the cataloguing fell to Phillips, and in the course of it he identified as an original Titian a Perseus and Andromeda which had been neglected as a school piece and hung in a bathroom on the first floor of the house. Phillips was knighted in 1911 on his retirement from the keepership of the Wallace Collection.
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In addition to his journalistic work, Phillips was the author of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1894) and of five valuable numbers of the Portfolio monographs inaugurated by Philip Gilbert Hamerton: Frederick Walker (1894), Antoine Watteau (1895), The Picture Gallery of Charles I (1896), The Earlier Work of Titian (1897), and The Later Work of Titian (1898); the last two titles were of great significance for the study of that artist. As a writer on art Phillips was wide-ranging: his particular interest was Venetian sixteenth-century painting, but he also admired French art of the eighteenth century and did not ignore contemporary developments in France and Britain. He wrote at a time when the principles of connoisseurship were being developed, and judged each work on its own merits, as opposed to subscribing to any single critical proposition. Phillips ‘did much to establish writing about art as a respectable form of enterprise’ (Sutton, 332), always expressing his insights or attributions in a polished style. His outlook was influenced both by his profound knowledge of the French, German, and Italian languages and by his circle of friends within the art world. Yet he was fastidious in retaining an independence of judgement and opinion. Although he avoided being tainted by contact with the commercial art world, he was public-spirited in his support for the National Art Collections Fund (founded in 1903) and in his concern for the National Gallery during the First World War. Sir Charles Holmes wrote on Phillips's death that with him ‘there died the general appreciation of the Arts in England upon which not only Trafalgar Square and Bloomsbury, but Chelsea and Bond Street, the New English and the Academy, had existed for thirty years’ (C. J. Holmes, Self and Partners (Mostly Self), 1936, 382).

Phillips was unmarried, but found satisfaction in social life and activities. He was fond of his family, living for most of his life at 40 Ashburn Place, Kensington, London, with his sister Eugénie. There was an air of Proust about Phillips: one younger contemporary recalled him as ‘a stout man, immaculately dressed and heavily scented, who talked continuously while he looked at the pictures’ (Oliver Brown, Exhibitions: the Memoirs of Oliver Brown, 1968, 35). Phillips died at his home at 40 Ashburn Place on 9 August 1924 and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery on 13 August. He left a bequest of money and pictures to the National Gallery, London, two pieces of sculpture by Rodin (both given to Phillips) to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and some minor pictures to the National Gallery of Scotland.

D. S. MacColl, rev. Christopher Lloyd

Sources D. Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips: first keeper of the Wallace Collection’, Apollo, 116 (1982), 322–32 · The Times (11 Aug 1924), 12 · R. R. Tatlock, Burlington Magazine, 45 (1924), 105–6 · personal knowledge (1937) · M. Brockwell, ‘Preface’, in C. Phillips, Emotion in art (1925) · M. Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian art scene (1996) · J. Ingamells, ‘Perseus and Andromeda: the provenance’, Burlington Magazine, 124 (1982), 396–400 · H. Lank, ‘Titian's Perseus and Andromeda: restoration and technique’, Burlington Magazine, 124 (1982), 400–06 · d. cert.
Archives Elgar Birthplace Museum, Worcester, letters to Edward Elgar · Harvard University, near Florence, Italy, Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Library, letters to B. Berenson · V&A NAL, corresp. with Walter Ledger
Likenesses A. Legros, drawings, 1890, NPG; repro. in Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips’ · M. Beerbohm, drawing, 1914, Wallace Collection, London; repro. in Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips’ · E. Dulac, gouache, Wallace Collection, London; repro. in Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips’ · E. Dulac, statuette, repro. in Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips’ · photographs, Wallace Collection, London; repro. in Sutton, ‘Sir Claude Phillips’
Wealth at death £60,204 17s. 5d.: probate, 24 Oct 1924, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

(D. S. MacColl, “Phillips, Sir Claude (1846–1924),” rev. Christopher Lloyd, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004, accessed September 2015, www.oxforddnb.com)

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