Collaboration and Correction: Re-examining the Writings of Lucy Olcott Perkins, ‘a lady resident in Siena’

Abstract

In the first years of the twentieth century, Lucy May Olcott (1877–1922) was an established authority on Sienese art. Her collaboration with historian William Heywood (1857–1919), with whom she authored their Guide to Siena: History and Art (1903), her marriage to Italian art scholar Frederick Mason Perkins (1872–1955), and her residence in Siena placed her, briefly, at the centre of a network of researchers and connoisseurs writing on Sienese art and history, undertaking collaborative research with unparalleled access to historic sites. Following the breakdown of her marriage, however, Olcott lost access to both her research subjects and her networks. Working from the United States, she sought out new platforms to continue her work, and her later writing indicates her continuing dedication to make lesser-known artworks better known to scholars and students alike. This article seeks to re-examine Olcott’s contribution by exploring the two different phases of her writing career. It embraces the networks and collaborations that brought such rigour to her research, while also exploring the tastes, instincts, and circumstances that made her writing valuable for its ‘directness and simplicity’. It thus raises further questions about the nature of husband and wife collaborations, and the privileges and limitations that such partnerships could bring to women writing art history in the early decades of the twentieth century.