Sidney Colvin

Sir Sidney Colvin, c.1922

Sir Sidney Colvin (18 June 1845 – 11 May 1927) was an English curator and literary and art critic, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family. He is primarily remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson.

Family and early life

He was born on 18 June 1845 in West Norwood, in what is now London, at St. John's Lodge on Knight's Hill, a nine bedroom, twenty-one acre estate, to Bazett David Colvin, an East India merchant, and Mary Steuart, daughter of William Butterworth Bayley, Chairman of the HEICo. Both sides of his family were connected to British India, his father as a partner in the trading company of Crawford, Colvin, and Co., with offices in Calcutta and London. (This connected the family with Robert Wigram Crawford, the Whig politician.) His uncle John Russell Colvin, lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces during the mutiny of 1857, gave him ten cousins, including the lawyer Walter Mytton and Auckland, also lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces (and Oudh).

Colvin's childhood was spent at The Grove, Little Bealings, Suffolk,^[1] as Bazett David inherited the estate in 1847 from his father James. The house and estate had literary and artistic connections: James had purchased it in 1824 from Perry Nursey,^[2] the landscape painter and teacher of Thomas Churchyard; Nursey had often entertained David Wilkie RA at Little Bealings, and was friends with Edward Fitzgerald, translator of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam.^[3]

Education and career

A scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, Colvin became a fellow of his college in 1868.^[4] In 1873 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art, and was appointed in the next year to the directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

In 1878, 114 old master engravings, which Colvin had purchased for the museum from London art dealer A.W. Thibaudeau, were stolen by a hansom cab driver. Although the driver was tracked down and charged, the engravings were never recovered and Colvin was required to cover their cost. Colvin paid the £1,537 10s to Thibaudeau from his own salary in instalments for many years, having initially to borrow £400 from Robert Louis Stevenson; a debt which he was still repaying to his friend in 1884.^[5]

In 1884 he moved to London on his appointment as keeper of prints and drawings in the British Museum. His chief publications are lives of Walter Savage Landor (1881) and Keats (1887), in the English Men of Letters series; editions of the letters of Keats (1887); A Florentine Picture-Chronicle (1898), and Early History of Engraving in England (1905).

In the field both of art and of literature, Colvin's fine taste, wide knowledge and high ideals made his authority and influence extend far beyond his published work.

Colvin was knighted in 1911. The citation reads^[6]

Sidney Colvin, Esq., D.Litt

Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum since 1884 and member of many learned bodies. Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge from 1873 to 1895, author of several publications on literature and the fine arts and contributor to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and "Dictionary of National Biography" &c. Born in 1845.

Marriage and death

His wife Frances Jane Colvin (1839–1924) née Fetherstonhaugh predeceased him on 1 August 1924. The couple had married on 7 July 1903, and were the subject of a 1928 biography by E. V. Lucas.^[7]

Friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson

In late summer 1873, Colvin became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, then a young man and an unpublished author. Colvin was already acquainted with Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell, then a woman of thirty-four with a young son Frances Albert 'Bertie' Sitwell (1862-1881), separated from her husband, the Rev Albert Hurt Sitwell (1834-1894). Both men were attracted to her, and although Stevenson wrote to her for years, Colvin eventually married her in 1903.^[8] Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser, and after his death was the first editor of his letters. Soon after their first meeting he had placed Stevenson's first paid contribution, an essay, "Roads", in The Portfolio.^[9] Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was dedicated to him.

He was also a significant editor of Stevenson's, preparing the Edinburgh edition of his works (1894–97); the Vailima Letters (1899), which Stevenson chiefly addressed to him; and the collected Letters (2 volumes, London, 1900). These publications made Colvin an authority on Stevenson's life and work. He also wrote the sketch of Stevenson for the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. liv.), and was to have written an authoritative Life, intended for publication simultaneously with the Letters, but was obliged to relinquish the task to Graham Balfour.^[10]

Notes

References

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Colvin, Sidney". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Further reading

• New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors brown
• J. C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, London: Faber and Faber, 1952
•  Colvin, Sidney (1898). "Stevenson, Robert Louis". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography 54. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 245–254. 
• Mehew, Ernest (2004). "Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26438.  (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Sidney Colvin

• Archival material relating to Sidney Colvin listed at the UK National Archives
• Works by Sidney Colvin at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Sidney Colvin at Internet Archive