Charles Henry Collins Baker: Biographical and Bibliographical Note

Abstract

C harles Henry Collins Baker (1880-1959), art historian, painter, and art critic, was born on 24 January 1880 at Bay Hill in Ilminster, Somerset, the son of John Collins Baker, a solicitor, and Fanny Henrietta Remmett. In 1903 he married Muriel Isabella (1874/5-1956); they had one daughter, Phyllis. Collins Baker was educated at Berkhampstead and studied art at the Royal Academy Schools, London. He began his career as a landscape painter and exhibited in 1907 at the Royal Academy and from 1909 to 1916 at the New England Art Club, also serving as the club's honorary secretary from 1921 to 1925. His art works, signed C.H.C.B., can be found in the Manchester City Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, and Huddersfield Art Gallery. From 1932 to 1949 he was a senior research associate in British art at the Huntington. In 1911 he began his work as an art critic, contributing articles to The Outlook and Saturday Review; he also accepted an appointment as private assistant to Sir Charles Holroyd (1861-1917), director of the National Gallery, London, and was promoted to keeper in 1914. Early in his career at the National Gallery he wrote his most important book, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters (1912), a pioneering work in the study of British art. He continued as keeper under Holroyd's successor at the National Gallery, Charles John Holmes (1868-1936), who served as director from 1916 to 1928. Holmes later wrote, Baker's unselfish energy relieved me of more than half my labours, his dry, affectionate humour lightened all the rest, instinctive friendship being cemented by our common danger,' the bombardment of London during World War I. Holmes and Collins Baker supervised the movement of nine hundred of the gallery's best pictures to the unused Tube station in the Strand to keep them safe from air raids.2 Holmes