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Charles John Holmes

Preston, England, 1868 - 1936, London

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n84806474
Holmes, Sir Charles John (1868–1936), landscape painter and art critic, was born at Preston on 11 November 1868, the elder son of Charles Rivington Holmes (d. 1873), vicar of St Michael's Church, Bromley by Bow, later vicar of Stratton, Cornwall, and his wife, Mary Susan, eldest daughter of Joseph Briggs Dickson, solicitor, of Preston. He was the grandson of the antiquary John Holmes and nephew of Sir Richard Holmes, librarian at Windsor Castle. After early schooling at St Edmund's School, Canterbury, Holmes went as a scholar to Eton College in 1883, and as an exhibitioner to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1887. From 1889 to 1903 he worked in London as a publisher's and printer's assistant: first with his cousin Francis Rivington and later at the Ballantyne Press; with John Cumming Nimmo; and with Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon at the Vale Press. For some years he had been teaching himself to draw; now direction was given to his efforts by Ricketts, and he was encouraged to etch by William Strang. Laurence Binyon prompted his first essay in art criticism, ‘Hiroshige’, published in The Dome for September 1897. Other early publications, Hokusai (1899), Constable (1901), and art journalism in The Realm and the Athenaeum, culminated in the major book Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting (1902). In 1900, as a landscape painter himself, Holmes began exhibiting with the New English Art Club.

On 21 July 1903 Holmes married his cousin Florence Mary Hill (b. 1872/3), a violinist and composer, only daughter of Charles Robert Rivington, solicitor, of London; they had two sons. That same year Holmes became co-editor, with Robert Dell, of the newly established Burlington Magazine. By the time of his resignation in 1909 he had transformed the fortunes of the journal, which benefited vastly from his experience of publishing and printing. In 1904 he was elected Slade professor of fine art at Oxford and continued in this post until 1910. Some of his Slade lectures are the basis of Notes on the Science of Picture-Making (1909) and Notes on the Art of Rembrandt (1911). His standing as a painter was recognized in 1904, when, on the same day as J. S. Sargent, he was elected a member of the New English Art Club. The only other London art society which he joined was the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, of which he was elected an associate in 1924 and a member in 1929. His paintings of mountain scenes and industrial subjects belong to no school or movement but his own. They were inspired by strong personal emotion, but in execution disciplined by constant analysis of the methods of previous exponents of both Eastern and Western art.

On the retirement of Lionel Cust in 1909 Holmes became director of the National Portrait Gallery. His prime concerns were remodelling and rearranging the exhibition rooms, and starting a national photographic record. In 1916 he was appointed director of the National Gallery, in succession to Sir Charles Holroyd. The constitution of the gallery was then a vexed question. Alternative solutions were to give the director unfettered responsibility for the purchase of pictures, subject to Treasury control; or but one vote on a board of many amateurs. The second policy was in favour, though the new director was hardly supple enough gladly to subordinate what he regarded as a trust of scholarship to the prejudice or taste of less exacting standards. Holmes resigned himself to working within this arrangement, but made clear what he thought was wrong with it in his evidence before the royal commission on national museums and galleries in 1928. Meanwhile his wide experience as critic, administrator, and publisher was focused on familiarizing the public with the contents and significance of the National Gallery. Photograph and publications departments were organized, Holmes personally contributing the admirable Illustrated Guide to the National Gallery (1921) and Old Masters and Modern Art in the National Gallery (3 vols., 1923–7). He was knighted in 1921 and appointed KCVO in 1928, the year in which he retired from the directorship of the National Gallery. He continued to paint and write and his last book was his autobiography, Self and Partners (1936).

Holmes's achievement as a writer, and the distinction of his art, are due to an unusual integration of theory and practice. He learned to draw and paint through unremitting experiment and analysis of the old masters. His painter's insight gave him a special grasp of those masters' problems and their ways of solving them. Other writings of his, notably ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ (PBA, 9, 1919), An Introduction to Italian Painting (1929), and A Grammar of the Arts (1931), offered lucid, concrete explanation of the great artists' thought and practice. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Leeds, and was elected an honorary fellow of Brasenose College in 1931. He died at his home, 19 Pembridge Gardens, Kensington, London, on 7 December 1936. Works by Holmes are in many public collections, including the Tate Collection, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and galleries in Adelaide, Johannesburg, Melbourne, and Sydney.

C. H. C. Baker, rev. Mark Pottle
Sources

Mallalieu, Watercolour artists, vol. 1 · Wood, Vic. painters, 2nd edn · J. Johnson and A. Greutzner, The dictionary of British artists, 1880–1940 (1976), vol. 5 of Dictionary of British art · G. M. Waters, Dictionary of British artists, working 1900–1950 (1975) · F. Spalding, 20th century painters and sculptors (1990), vol. 6 of Dictionary of British art · The water-colours of C. J. Holmes (1920) [with a foreword by M. Sadleir] · X. B. [C. H. Collins Baker], Charles Holmes (1924) · C. J. Holmes, Self & partners (mostly self): being the reminiscences of C. J. Holmes (London, 1936) · The Times (8 Dec 1936) · A. M. Hind, ‘The sketch-books of Sir Charles Holmes’, Burlington Magazine, 77 (1940), 45–52 · A. M. Hind, ‘The etchings of Sir Charles Holmes’, Burlington Magazine, 72 (1938), 176–82 · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1937) · m. cert. · d. cert.
Archives

NPG, diaries and notebooks :: BL, corresp. with Lord D'Abernon, Add. MS 48930 · U. Glas. L., letters to D. S. MacColl

Likenesses

G. H. B. Holland, oils, 1934, NPG · Elliott & Fry, photograph, NPG [see illus.] · P. Evans, caricature, ink, NPG · photograph, repro. in The Times (7 Dec 1936)
Wealth at death

£16,812 6s. 1d.: probate, 17 Feb 1937, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

C. H. C. Baker, ‘Holmes, Sir Charles John (1868–1936)’, rev. Mark Pottle, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/33953, accessed 19 Oct 2017]

Sir Charles John Holmes (1868–1936): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33953

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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