Sir Joseph Archer Crowe (London October 25, 1825 – Gamburg an der Tauber, today Werbach, Germany September 6, 1896), was an English consular official and art critic, whose volumes of the History of Painting in Italy, co-written with the Italian critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819–1897), stand at the beginning of disciplined modern art history writing in English, being based on chronologies of individual artists' development and the connoisseurship of identifying artist's individual manners or "hands".
He was the son of the expatriate Eyre Evans Crowe, and brother of Eyre Crowe, a painter of historical subjects and genre, the friend and amanuensis of William Makepeace Thackeray. His father was Paris correspondent of the London Morning Chronicle whose home, with a London interlude 1844–1851, was the centre of a liberal and artistic circle that mixed French and expatriates.
At an early age Joseph Archer Crowe showed considerable aptitude for painting and entered the studio of Paul Delaroche in Paris, with his brother. During the Crimean War, he was the correspondent of the Illustrated London News, and during the Austro-Italian War represented The Times in Vienna. [1]
He was British consul-general in Leipzig from 1860 to 1872, and in Düsseldorf from 1872 to 1880, when he was appointed commercial attaché in Berlin, being transferred to Paris in 1882. In 1883 he was secretary to the Danube Conference in London; in 1889 plenipotentiary at the Samoa Conference in Berlin; and in 1890 British envoy at the Telegraph Congress in Paris, in which year he was made K.C.M.G.[1]
During a visit to Italy in 1846-7, he cemented a lifelong friendship with the connoisseur Cavalcaselle, who was forced to flee to London after the Revolutions of 1848 and moved in with Crowe. Together they produced several important historical works on art, notably Early Flemish Painters (1857) and A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (1864–1871, 5 vols.). Together he and Crowe issued biographies Titian: His Life and Times (1877) and Raphael: His Life and Works (1882–85). [1]The division of labour in the partnership was seamless; though Crowe produced most of the final edited text, Cavalcaselle's eye and notes, and, in the age before photographic reproductions, his quick sketches of compositions, were essential.
In 1895 Crowe published Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life. He died at Schloss Gamburg in Franconia on the 6 September 1896.The division of labour in the partnership was seamless; though Crowe produced most of the final edited text, Cavalcaselle's eye and notes, and, in the age before photographic reproductions, his quick sketches of compositions, were essential.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle's History of Painting was under revision by Crowe up to the time of his death, and then by S.A. Strong (d. 1904) and Langton Douglas, who in 1903 brought out first and second volumes of Murray's new six-volume edition; the third volume, edited by Langton Douglas, appeared in 1909. A reprint of the original edition, brought up to date by annotations by Edward Hutton's, was published by Dent in 3 volumes in 1909.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Crowe, Sir Joseph Archer". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.