Lionel Cust

London, 1859 - 1929, Buckinghamshire

BiographyLC name authority n82250978
LC Heading: Cust, Lionel, 1859-1929

Biography:

Cust, Sir Lionel Henry (1859–1929), art historian, was born at 13 Eccleston Square, London, on 25 January 1859, the only son of Sir Reginald John Cust (d. 1913), barrister, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Caroline (d. 1914), elder daughter of Edward Bligh, fifth earl of Darnley. He was a first cousin of Henry John Cockayne Cust, the politician and journalist. He was educated at Eton College, and matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1877. He was elected a scholar of the college in 1880, and obtained a first class in the classical tripos of 1881.

In 1882 Cust entered the civil service, obtaining a post in the War Office, but the work was not congenial to him, and at the suggestion of Sidney Colvin he was transferred in 1884 to the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum, of which Colvin had recently become keeper. Here Cust's real interests were engaged. He had a good eye and an extremely retentive memory; his knowledge of pictures and prints had been enlarged by study on the continent; he was methodical, conscientious, and enjoyed research. His Index to the Dutch, Flemish, and German artists represented in the print room (1893), followed by an Index to the French artists (1896), was of great service to students, and the preparation of it made him familiar not only with major masters but also with innumerable minor artists. Writers on art in Britain had hitherto mostly been attracted to the Italian schools; Cust's predilection was for the schools of northern Europe. Of Van Dyck and also of Dürer he made a special study.

In 1895 Cust was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in succession to Sir George Scharf. His first task was the moving of the collection from its temporary home at Bethnal Green to the new gallery in St Martin's Place, followed by the compilation of catalogues of the holdings (1896, 1901–2). The study of portraiture in Britain appealed to his love of history and genealogy and to his interest in established families, including his own. The obituary notice in The Times described Cust as ‘a walking genealogy’ to the extent that ‘he may be said to have slept with Burke at his bedside’. Cust also had a wide knowledge of the collections in the great country houses. The biographies of artists, notable for their accuracy and painstaking research, contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography made a fresh beginning in the study of British art, as did his exhibition catalogues of portraiture organized for the Oxford Historical Society (1904, 1905, 1906). At the same time Cust maintained his former interests. An authoritative study of Dürer's paintings and prints was published in 1897, followed in 1898 by a monograph on an early German engraver, The Master ‘E.S.’ and the ‘Ars moriendi’. His History of the Society of Dilettanti appeared in 1898, and his History of Eton College in the following year. As a writer Cust lacked the graces of style, but he was always a master of facts. In 1900 he published his most important single book, a large and exhaustive work on Van Dyck. Two small monographs on the same master appeared in 1903 and 1906, and a further study in 1911.

In 1901 Cust was offered the post of surveyor of the king's pictures, and with the consent of the trustees was allowed to combine this with his directorship of the National Portrait Gallery. He resigned the directorship in 1909, but continued to hold the office of surveyor until 1927. In 1901 he was also appointed gentleman usher to the court. Cust's duties as surveyor involved the supervision of all the collections in the various royal palaces; and he was responsible for a good deal of rearrangement and rehanging of the pictures, which had become rather static during the reign of Queen Victoria. His office brought him into close personal contact with Edward VII. He published a work on the collection entitled The Royal Collection of Paintings: Buckingham Palace (1905), Windsor Castle (1906). Notes on the Authentic Portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots and a large illustrated work, The Bridgewater House Gallery, had appeared in 1903.

From 1909 to 1919 Cust was joint editor with Roger Fry of the Burlington Magazine. Among his own numerous contributions to the magazine was a series of notes on pictures in the royal collections, published in book form in 1911. In the long-neglected field of early portraiture in Britain his work was particularly valuable. He set himself the task of clearing away the myths and discovering the facts, his most notable service being the rehabilitation of the sixteenth-century painter H. E. (Hans Eworth), long erroneously identified with Lucas d'Heere. His study of Eworth, which contains a full catalogue of the painter's works, was published in the Walpole Society's Annual (vol. 2, 1913). Studies of other foreign artists working in Britain at a similarly early date were also undertaken. Cust was keenly interested in the movement for introducing good pictures into schools, and for many years, until its dissolution, was chairman of the Art for Schools Association, founded in 1883.

Cust's personal appearance hardly suggested his zest for scholarly research and his capacity for hard and rapid work. Inclined to plumpness, and given to shyness, he none the less gave the impression of one who enjoyed life to the full in the Edwardian style. He had a great love of music as well as of painting, and a gift for simple pleasures. A volume of his poetry, Ludibrium ventia, was published privately in 1904. The extraordinary accuracy of his memory enabled him to dispense with notebooks. He married in 1895 Sybil, sixth daughter of George William Lyttelton, fourth Baron Lyttelton, and half-sister of Bishop Arthur Temple Lyttelton and of the statesman Alfred Lyttelton. They had one son. His wife contributed a memoir of Cust to his posthumously published volume King Edward VII and his Court (1930). Cust was created KCVO in 1927. He also received the degree of LittD at the University of Cambridge, and was made FSA, a chevalier of the Belgian order of Leopold, an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Antwerp, and a knight of grace of the order of St John of Jerusalem. He died on 12 October 1929 at Datchet House, Datchet, Buckinghamshire, where his later married life was spent.

Laurence Binyon, rev. Christopher Lloyd
(Laurence Binyon, ‘Cust, Sir Lionel Henry (1859–1929)’, rev. Christopher Lloyd, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/32684, accessed 9 March 2016]

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Last Updated8/7/24

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