Sir Howard Colvin; Architectural historian whose biographical dictionaries laid a foundation for all other scholars in his field
Hyfler/Rosner
biographical dictionaries laid a foundation for all other
scholars in his field
The Independent
01 January 2008
Richard Hewlings
Howard Colvin was the greatest architectural historian of
his own time, and perhaps ever. He admired his seniors Sir
Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Summerson, but both of them
were indebted to him for the factual basis on which their
judgements were formed; revising Summerson's 1945 Georgian
London in 2001, Colvin wrote "[its] combination of brilliant
thought and writing with factual carelessness is quite
difficult to handle".
The intellectual model whom he regarded as almost faultless
was Robert Willis, whose Architectural History of the
University of Cambridge (1886) pioneered the solution of
archaeological problems by absolute mastery of the
documentation, yet Colvin's six-volume History of the King's
Works (1963-1982) alone was a greater achievement than
Willis's. In addition, Colvin produced what might have
remained the authoritative Biographical Dictionary of
English Architects 1660-1840 in 1954, had he not expanded it
to include Scotland and the years 1600-1660 in 1978 (with
the title A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects
1600-1840), and brought out a revised edition in 1995.
It is possible for the very well-informed and very diligent
to find an error, or even two, in 1,264 double-column pages
of 10-point text, but difficult - and unusual. At the time
of his death, Howard Colvin had nearly completed
proof-reading the fourth version of this astonishing work,
whose versions since 1954 have been the starting point of
all historical research on the architecture of early modern
Britain.
Howard Colvin was the son of Montagu Colvin, a Vickers
executive and stamp dealer of lowland Scots descent. Howard
won scholarships to more than one public school, but his
father chose Trent College, Nottingham, because it seemed to
be the best bargain. An urbane and broad-minded history
master, Mike Morgan, provided succour in an evidently harsh
environment by allowing Howard to visit churches instead of
playing games; thus, aged 19, he published his first
historical paper, the first of eight on Dale Abbey,
Derbyshire, in 1938. He read history at University College
London, and in 1943 he married Christina Butler, daughter of
the professor of Latin there, sister of the psephologist
David Butler, and herself an authority on, inter alia, her
Anglo-Irish ancestress Maria Edgeworth.
In 1940 Howard Colvin joined the RAF "because it seemed less
bad than the army". Fairly quickly, the RAF lost his records
and was unable to do anything with him and a few other
unrecordeds except march them from Garstang to Blackpool for
lunch and march them back again in the afternoon. On one
occasion, lunch was served by a girl whom he had known at
university and whose father was an under-secretary in the
Air Ministry; she just had time to tell him that her father
was looking for archaeologists as photographic interpreters,
so in due course he found himself promoted from Aircraftman
Second Class to Flight Lieutenant and posted to Malta.
He worked in a limestone tunnel which had an opening in the
cliff above the Grand Harbour in Valletta, and during breaks
he could use this grandstand to watch the Stukas screaming
down onto the British ships at anchor. He recalled the
deafening noise of the anti-aircraft barrage and the sight
of spent shell cases tumbling from the gun turrets and
rolling over the ships' decks until the sailors kicked them
overboard.
His unit identified Italian warships from photographs. He
was surprised once when a visiting senior officer said "Well
done, boy" after one of his identifications, and assumed
that this man's evident prior knowledge had come from
espionage; only later did he realise that it came from
Enigma. He was particularly pleased that he interpreted
white lines in dawn photographs as dew on telegraph wires;
he persuaded a daring pilot to test this with a low-level
photo of Taormina, and convinced his superiors that, as
civilian telegraph wires had been dismantled, all the white
lines were leading them to Kesselring's headquarters.
In 1946 Colvin was appointed an assistant lecturer at UCL,
and in 1948 he obtained a fellowship at St John's College,
Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life, as Tutor
(1948-78), Librarian (1950-84), and Emeritus Fellow
(1987-2007). As Tutor, he taught the regular Oxford history
syllabus, but he managed to add a special paper on English
architectural history 1660-1720, then the only form of art
history available to Oxford undergraduates, for which he was
rewarded by a Readership in 1965.
Oxford respected his productivity and meticulous
scholarship, but, for long without art historians of its
own, may not have realised that he was even more respected
outside its walls; he was never given a chair.
Meanwhile he had a public service career in parallel. He was
a commissioner of the Royal Fine Art Commission (1962-72), a
commissioner of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments
for England (1963-76), a member of the Historic Buildings
Council for England (1970-89), its chairman (1988-89) and
chairman of one of its sub-committees (1970-89), a
commissioner of the Royal Commission on Ancient and
Historical Monuments for Scotland (1977-89), president of
the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain
(1979-81), a commissioner of the Royal Commission on
Historical Manuscripts (1981-88), a member of the reviewing
committee on the Export of Works of Art (1982-83) and a
commissioner of English Heritage (1984-89).
He was an indefatigable attender and a valuable and
judicious contributor to discussion until he retired at the
age of 70. It was doubtless this unpaid work which was
rewarded with his knighthood by John Major's government in
1995; his nomination was supported by two cabinet ministers,
the head of the Royal Collection, the chairman of the Royal
Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments for Scotland,
a former vice-chancellor, three former and one current head
of Oxford houses, two Regius Professors of history, a former
director of the V&A and the obiter dicta of the late Sir
John Summerson.
Colvin will be most remembered for his scholarly output,
unstoppable up to the moment of his death. Although chiefly
a historian of architecture, he also wrote two institutional
histories (of a religious order and a government
department), the history of a profession (architecture), and
three histories of localities (Deddington, Holme Lacy and
Irford). Unusually he was both a medievalist and a
post-medievalist. His first book was The White Canons in
England (1951), and the first two volumes of The History of
the King's Works (1963) remain the definitive history of the
castles, palaces and religious foundations of the medieval
kings. He responded to the places to which the war took him
with articles on Victorian Malta, Aberystwyth's architecture
and Georgian Marlow.
Architecture and the After-Life (1991) covers funerary
buildings as far apart as Mesopotamia, Africa, Sweden and
Ireland. Although he wrote little about 20th-century
architecture, he took a critical interest, and, as a Fellow
of St John's, was a patron of Sir Richard MacCormac. He was
one of the first architectural historians to appreciate the
contribution made by amateur architects, especially in the
18th century, and was one himself, designing an extension to
the Senior Common Room at St John's and his own house in
north Oxford.
However, the field in which his greatest achievement lies is
early modern British architectural history. His three (soon
to be four) successive biographical dictionaries both
established the methodology and laid the factual foundation
on which all other scholars have built. The idea was
conceived, he said, in response to the
unscholarly habit of attributing even the most commonplace
buildings to one or two well-known architects of the
appropriate period. Sir Albert Richardson, then head of the
Bartlett School of Architecture, was a prime offender.
Seeing himself as an architectural Berenson, he signed
certificates of authentication which one used to find
hanging in churches and country houses.
Colvin began the first dictionary while still an
undergraduate and, surprisingly, was able to work on though
the war, finding that the garrison officers' library in
Malta had been richly stocked with 18th-century
architectural books by the Royal Engineers responsible for
the island's fortifications.
Reviewing the work at the launch of the 1995 edition, he
claimed that the 1954 edition had no more than 60 stylistic
attributions (to several thousand documented ones). "Of
these," he wrote:
14 had been confirmed (by documentary evidence) by 1978 and
only three proved to be wrong. In the second (1978) edition
there were 128 such attributions, of which 14 have since
been confirmed and 12 abandoned (though not necessarily
shown to be wrong).
Buildings being more abundantly documented than paintings,
architectural historians have an advantage over historians
of painting, who have to depend more on connoisseurship. But
they also have the advantage of Colvin's methodological
establishment, his factual groundwork and his example.
In default mode, Howard Colvin's face expressed his
formidable powers of concentration, important moments being
indicated by balletic eyebrow movements; but this was often
replaced by the most engaging smile and occasionally by
spasms of abandoned laughter. He and I shared a taste for
Georgian grandees with evocative names (Sir Rushout Cullen,
Sir Carnaby Haggerston and Hurt Hurt).
He was a tiny man, who loved alpines and had microscopic
handwriting. His work was both helped and hindered by
innumerable correspondents, either reporting discoveries or
seeking endorsements. To keep to his formidable programme,
he had no choice but to reply by return, sometimes advising
in surprising detail, but always aware of the difference
between the significant and the trivial, and particularly
alert to "arid art-historical debate". Correspondents
reporting what they believed to be a discovery had to be
inured to reading "When I saw this drawing in an attic at
Blandings Castle in 1950. . ." in reply. His letters are as
rich a source of British architectural history as his 132
publications.
Howard Montagu Colvin, historian: born Sidcup, Kent 15
October 1919; Assistant Lecturer in History, University
College London 1946-48; Fellow, St John's College, Oxford
1948-87 (Emeritus), Tutor in History 1948-78, Librarian
1950-84; CBE 1964; Reader in Architectural History, Oxford
University 1965-87; President, Society of Architectural
Historians of Great Britain 1979-81; CVO 1983; Kt 1995;
married 1943 Christina Butler (died 2003; two sons); died
Oxford 28 December 2007.
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