Francis Haskell

Francis Haskell was a British art historian whose scholarship transformed the study of patronage, collecting and the changing reputation of artists. Educated at Cambridge and later professor of the history of art at Oxford, he was particularly interested in the social institutions surrounding art rather than treating artistic production as an isolated sequence of styles and individual genius.

Haskell’s major books widened art history beyond questions of style and attribution by examining the institutions, patrons and habits of collecting that shaped artistic reputations. Patrons and Painters analysed patronage in Baroque Italy, while later works such as Rediscoveries in Art, Taste and the Antique with Nicholas Penny, and History and its Images explored changes in taste, collecting and historical imagination. Alongside his Oxford chair, he served as a trustee of the Wallace Collection and became an influential voice in debates about museums and exhibitions.

Iain Pears’ Parallel Lives reconstructs the lives of two art historians formed on opposite sides of twentieth-century Europe. Larissa Salmina survives the Siege of Leningrad, is evacuated to the Urals and later becomes curator of Italian drawings at the Hermitage Museum. Francis Haskell grows up in England within a cosmopolitan Jewish family, studies at Cambridge and develops an influential career examining the social history of art.