Sir Denis Mahon, British art historian and philanthropist died he was 100

Sir John Denis Mahon, CH, CBE  was a British collector and historian of Italian art died he was 100. Considered to be one of the few art collectors who is also a respected scholar, he is generally credited, alongside Sacheverell Sitwell and Tancred Borenius,^[2] with bringing Italian Baroque painters to the attention of English-speaking audiences, reversing the critical aversion to their work which had prevailed from the time of John Ruskin.

(8 November 1910 – 24 April 2011)

Biography

Mahon was born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family^[3] and was heir to the Guinness Mahon banking fortune. After attending Eton, he 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 17th century, was published in 1947. In the 1950s, he became a trustee of the National Gallery. In the 1960s, Mahon and Sir Anthony Blunt became embroiled in a public feud over the iconography of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, a subject where both were recognized experts who had published extensively on Poussin.^[3]
In the 1990s, Mahon donated his entire art collection to various museums in the United Kingdom, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.^[2]
In a complex legal arrangement, a number of these paintings (such as The Rape of Europa) are on permanent loan from The Art Fund, which owns them. There are two conditions to the loans: that the museums in question never deaccession any of their works, or charge for admission; if either condition is broken the paintings are withdrawn from the museums.^[4]
Mahon was appointed CBE in 1967, and knighted in 1986. He was made a Companion of Honour in 2002 for his services to art, and received honourary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Oxford, Rome, and Bologna.
In December 2007, a painting Mahon bought for £50,400 the previous year (and which was considered to be the work of an anonymous follower of Caravaggio) was authenticated by him as a true Caravaggio. It is an early version of the painting The Cardsharps. Mahon turned 100 in November 2010.^[5]
He died on 28 April 2011, aged 100.

 

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