Mrs. Arthur Strong, C.B.E

Abstract

MANY visitors to Rome, as well as colleagues and friends in Great Britain, will miss the wide learning, generous disposal of it, and impressive presence of the former assistant director of the British School of Archæology in Rome, Mrs. Arthur Strong, whose death in Rome on September 16 has been reported. Eugénie Sellers was brought up in France, and obtained honours in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge, from Girton College. In the intervals of travel in Germany, Italy and Greece, she gave university extension lectures on Greek sculpture, and conducted classes in the British Museum. In 1892 she published an excellent translation of Schuchhardt's “Schlie-mann's Excavations” brought up to date by an epilogue from Walter Leaf. Coming under the influence of Furtwängler, she translated also his “Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik” (1895), a more ambitious and difficult task ; and with her friend, Miss Jex Blake, she published a translation and useful commentary on Pliny's chapters on ancient art (1896). Her marriage in 1897 to the orientalist, S. Arthur Strong, librarian of the House of Lords, gave her access to the great British sculpture galleries, and on his early death in 1904 she succeeded him as librarian of Chatsworth and made valuable use of the collections there, especially the gems and the archaeological drawings. During these years her tastes and judgment were maturing in a revision of current opinions about the relation of Roman art to Greek. As before, she found congenial utterance first in her translation of Wickhoff's “Roman Art” (1900) but later in her own “Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine” (1908), the main positions in which she restated and illustrated in her chapters on “Roman Art” in the “Cambridge Ancient History”.