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Sir Joseph Archer Crowe

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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SIR JOSEPH ARCHER CROWE (1828-1896), English consular official and art critic, son of Eyre Crowe, was born in London on the 25th of October 1828. At an early age he showed considerable aptitude for painting and entered the studio of Delaroche in Paris, where his father was correspondent of the Morning Chronicle. During the Crimean War he was the correspondent of the Illustrated London News, and during the Austro-Italian War represented The Times in Vienna. He was British consulgeneral in Leipzig from 1860 to 1872, and in Dusseldorf from 1872 to 1880, when he was appointed commercial attaché in Berlin, being transferred in a like capacity 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. During a sojourn in Italy, 1846-1847, he cemented a lifelong friendship with the Italian critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1820-1897), and together they produced several historical works on art of classic importance, notably Early Flemish Painters (London, 1857); A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London, 1864-1871,5 vols.). In 1895 Crowe published Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life. He died at Schloss Gamburg in Bavaria on the 6th of September 1896.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle's great 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 vols. i. and ii. of Murray's new six-volume edition, the 3rd vol., edited by Langton Douglas, appearing in 1909. A reprint of the original edition, brought up to date by annotations by Edward I-Iuttons, was published by Dent in 3 vols. in 1909.