Denis Mahon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Denis Mahon is a collector and historian of Italian art born in London, England, on November 8, 1910. Considered to be one of the few art collectors who is also a respected scholar, he is generally credited with bringing Italian Baroque painters to the attention of the public and scholars throughout the English-speaking world.

After attending Eton, Mahon enrolled at Christ Church, Oxford University, where he received an M.A. He spent a year working at the Ashmolean Museum under the supervision of Kenneth Clark, then in 1933 he enrolled at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. It was here that he was introduced to Italian Baroque painting in a series of lectures by Nikolaus Pevsner, who also gave him private tuition. He bought his first artwork, Guercino's Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph in 1934 in Paris for £120. He subsequently met art historian Otto Kurz, whom he frequently used as an Italian translator, in the late 1930s, and together they travelled to Russia to study Italian masters. Mahon's Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, a series of essays promoting Italian art of the 1600s, was published in 1947. In the 1950s, he became a trustee of the National Gallery. In 1999, Mahon, who has received honorary doctorates from Newcastle, Oxford, Rome, and Bologna, donated his entire art collection to public museums throughout the British Isles and Italy.