Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1920. Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort

Abstract

This exceptionally well produced volume appears as a kind of posthumous Festschrift for Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, long-time curator of the Warburg Institute’s photographic collection and for many decades until her death in 2006 Britain’s most admired scholar of Spanish art. The book’s editors and principal authors, who pay handsome tributes to Harris Frankfort as both a researcher and a generous mentor, have themselves been collecting material relating to the knowledge of Spanish art in Britain for a good many years. The extraordinary degree of detail and precision they have achieved in this specialist field is the most remarkable thing about this publication which also valuably reprints three of Harris Frankfort’s own papers relevant to their theme. Of the fifteen new essays published here, Nigel Glendinning has contributed no fewer than eight, and his co-editor Hilary Macartney four. The remaining contributions come from Sarah Symmons (on responses to Spanish art from British women), Jeremy Roe (a number-crunching piece on the importation to Britain of Spanish pictures) and Marjorie Trusted (principally devoted to museum collecting).