Francis Haskell

Trinity College, Oxford University

May–May 1999

The late Francis Haskell was a preeminent scholar of art patronage, aesthetic taste, and French academic art of the nineteenth century. A professor of art at Oxford University, he published the groundbreaking Patrons and Painters in 1963, a broad and yet deeply researched book on art patronage of the Baroque era. The effect of this book was to drive the discipline as a whole toward archival research. The book he produced on French art of the post-revolutionary period, Rediscoveries in Art, became another seminal work in an ignored area, namely French Salon study and Parisian art market criticism. He and his wife, Larissa Salmina Haskell, a noted Russian art historian of Venetian art, gave an animated Clark Seminar in 1999 during Francis's last trip to the U.S.