Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

Sebastian Isepp (1884–1954)

The painter and restorer Sebastian Isepp was born on 18 February 1884 at Nötsch in the mountains of Carinthia, the son of the village inn keepers. He studied at the Fine Art Academy in Vienna between 1903 and 1907 and exhibited his paintings at the Vienna Secession from 1905 (becoming an associate in 1909) and the Hagenbund, together with Antonin Kolig and Fritz Wiegele, fellow students at the academy, and Oskar Kokoschka, who would remain a close friend for the rest of his life (fig. 8).¹ Isepp’s landscapes from these years, often snowscapes, usually with a high viewpoint, are characterised by tense, abstracted patterns, recalling Charles Rennie Mackintosh but also Mondrian, and they sometimes also have an almost textile‐like relief, and a haunted atmosphere perhaps derived from Segantini.² He travelled extensively both before and after the first world war (visits to Italy with Hugo von Hofmannsthal date from 1911 and 1924, and in 1924 he also went to Paris with Kokoschka and Adolf Loos).³

Isepp was a keen musician and played the lute. He collected examples of this instrument and by 1918 he had begun to restore them. He also worked as a restorer of Gothic sculpture, having previously turned his own hand to wood‐carving. Around 1920 he began to work as a picture restorer and in 1925 he took up the position of restorer of old masters in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.⁴ His friend Karl Parker speculated that he must have experienced ‘something like a vocation’ which ‘prompted him henceforth to dedicate himself to the Great Masters’.⁵ In fact the professional commitment he made in 1925 and the consequent renunciation of other ambitions must have been connected with his marriage to the singer Helene Hammerschlag in that year. He became a close friend of Johannes (János) Wilde, the brilliant Hungarian art historian who had [page 371]become an assistant keeper at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1923. Wilde was the godfather of Isepp’s son Martin (born 1930).⁶

Wilde and Isepp made systematic use of X‐radiography for studying both the condition of paintings and the techniques of the artists, and they established in 1930 what was probably the first European museum laboratory for this purpose.⁷ In 1936 Wilde was appointed curator of the old master paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and he in turn appointed Isepp head restorer. But after the Anschluss in March 1938 Isepp and his family resolved to emigrate to England, which they did in October. In the following spring Wilde and his wife also fled to England. Kenneth Clark provided official support for the Isepps’ residence application and also found work for him restoring National Gallery paintings then stored at Aberystwyth in Wales. Clark considered that the evacuation of the pictures was an appropriate moment for an extensive campaign of restoration, most of the work being done either by Helmut Ruhemann, or by William Holder, ‘a restorer of the old, pre‐scientific school’.⁸ Clark also provided a refuge for Wilde and arranged for him to catalogue paintings and drawings in Wales.⁹ Wilde was well aware that his escape had been made possible by a wealthy former pupil, Count Antoine Seilern, and he first went to Aberystwyth to look after Seilern’s own collection, which was also in store there. Isepp, however, may not have known that the National Gallery at first employed him with funds provided by Seilern.¹⁰

Isepp’s work was interrupted by internment in Huyton Aliens’ Camp at the end of 1940 (Wilde was deported to a camp in Canada at the same time). After his release he moved to Oxford, where he was much employed by his friend Parker at the Ashmolean Museum but also continued to work for the National Gallery. In 1945 he moved to Hampstead and was engaged, in addition, by the Tate Gallery and the Royal Collection as well as by numerous municipal and private collections, to many of which he was recommended by Clark, who described him as, ‘unlike the average restorer, a man of education and good taste’.¹¹

The attitudes of the Trustees and Director of the National Gallery towards cleaning undertaken in that period can occasionally be deduced from the minutes of their meetings. Isepp’s approach was contrasted with that of Ruhemann when, in March 1946, they both completed work on paintings by Rubens. It is easy to believe that there must have been some rivalry between the two men. Ruhemann (1891–1973) had worked in the Kaiser‐Friedrich Museum in Berlin from 1924 to 1933 and had been employed since 1934 at the National Gallery. His lack of regard for Isepp’s approach may be inferred from the extra cleaning which he gave to the Previtalis acquired by Clark (NG 4884) which Isepp had cleaned when they were in Vienna. Now it was explained to the Trustees that Isepp did not clean as ‘fully’ as Ruhemann, leaving some ‘dirty patches’ in the whites, and the Director (by then, Philip Hendy) preferred Ruhemann’s approach.¹² However, it is unlikely that all the Trustees agreed with him, and in 1949 they recommended that Isepp clean a Veronese, although Hendy had proposed that this task should be assigned to Ruhemann.¹³ Isepp’s friendship with Kokoschka and Ernst Gombrich, who were outspoken critics of the cleaning policy advanced by Ruhemann and Hendy, surely explains why his relationship with the National Gallery ended.

The collection with which Isepp was most closely associated was that of Seilern, established after the war at 56 Princes Gate, London, and now in the Courtauld Institute Gallery in Somerset House. Seilern employed another Viennese refugee, F. A. Pollock, for his frames. But not all of Isepp’s work was done for discerning collectors. ‘Have you seen the Titian bought by so and so?’, he once asked Ernst Gombrich. ‘No.’ ‘Frightful picture, frightful picture [schreckliches Bild], the only part resembling a Titian is the hand holding the glove. And I did that bit.’¹⁴ Something of his genial and humorous character perhaps survives in the minuscule red motorcycle with which he is said to have signed the works he restored.¹⁵ Isepp adopted British citizenship in 1947, but, as Parker observed ‘he never dropped the reticence of a tactful guest’.¹⁶ He died in Hampstead on 3 December 1954.

Isepp must have been one of the last picture restorers of any eminence to have practised with some success as an artist.¹⁷ He owned some old master paintings, for which he is unlikely to have paid a great deal. He may have accepted them in lieu of payment or purchased them in a very dirty state. The most beautiful work that he owned is surely Melone’s Christ carrying the Cross (NG 6546). It is unlikely to be entirely fortuitous that the fluttering contours, dissolving forms and high‐pitched palette appealed to a close friend of Kokoschka.

Notes

Philip Pouncey (1910–1990)

Philip Pouncey was born in Oxford, the son of a clergyman. His mother had a keen love of Italian art and recalled with fondness her visits to Italy. The family home was decorated with the coloured prints of early Italian paintings published by the Arundel Society, and a reproduction of Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Kings hung in his bedroom.

At his public school, Marlborough, Pouncey was impressed by Charles Holmes’s eloquent book on Italian paintings in the National Gallery, which appeared in 1923, and later by the modern editions of Crowe and Cavalcaselle.¹ While reading English at Queen’s College, Cambridge, he was an enthusiastic visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum, where the Marlay Gallery, devoted to the display of Early Italian art, had just opened and after graduating in 1931 he worked in the museum as a volunteer. This was made possible by the fact that, after his father’s death, his mother had moved the family home to Cambridge. In the autumn of 1932 the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Sydney Cockerell, offered Pouncey £30 towards the cost of visiting Italy, provided that his mother made a matching offer. This she did, and Pouncey travelled to Florence and then to Siena, where he was taken up by the reclusive connoisseur and former marchand‐amateur Frederick Mason‐Perkins.²

Cockerell and Perkins provided the references that enabled Pouncey to become an assistant keeper at the National Gallery in January 1934. His meticulous draft catalogue entries on the Italian paintings served as the basis for much work by his successors. In a brilliant article published in the Burlington Magazine in 1937 he applied to the vexed problem of the authorship of the great Strozzi altarpiece (NG 1119) diagnostic skills of an order possessed by no one who had worked for the Gallery before – with the exception of Eastlake – and concluded convincingly that it was the work of Gian Francesco de’ Maineri, modified by Lorenzo Costa.³ Like the articles published by Johannes Wilde in the same years, this was an early example of connoisseurship availing itself of the evidence provided by X‐radiography.⁴ But there was no one with Wilde’s keen powers of visual analysis among Pouncey’s colleagues.

What changed Pouncey’s life was the fact that at the start of the war the Gallery’s smaller paintings were stored in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, together with the drawings, often by the same artists, from the British Museum. Arthur Ewart Popham, the assistant keeper in charge of the drawings at the British Museum, and Wilde, who was also working there, were connoisseurs as well as scholars. After the war, when Popham became keeper of his department, he offered Pouncey an assistant keepership.

Kenneth Clark, who had joined the National Gallery on the same day as Pouncey, observed to Popham that he was ‘much the best member of our staff, and the only one of them with whose point of view I am in sympathy’⁵ – a reminder that Clark’s own scholarly work had been devoted to the drawings of Leonardo. As is explained elsewhere in this catalogue (p. 297), it was Pouncey who realised that Clark’s ‘Giorgiones’ were in fact by Previtali, but it is not clear that Clark ever knew this.

In his autobiography Kenneth Clark gives a comic and condescending account of Martin Davies, the Gallery’s keeper, who was put in charge of the paintings evacuated to North Wales: he lived alone in a ‘small isolated farmhouse’, overshadowed by the Moelwyn mountains, from which he emerged, ‘thin and colourless as a ghost’, to visit the pictures in the slate quarry with ‘a strong torch and several magnifying glasses’. Then he returned to his reference books and detected the ‘convenient fallacies’ of former scholars. But Clark was obliged to concede that Davies’s work ‘raised the standard of cataloguing in every country’, and observed justly that ‘without the solitude [page 385]of Ffestiniog he could never have achieved it’.⁶ One must suppose that Pouncey, while admiring Davies’s meticulous and scrupulous methods, noticed that his catalogue entries hardly ever included visual comparisons or any analysis of style, and they only record tersely the efforts of others in this area. His scholarly approach allowed little room for connoisseurship.

At the end of March 1966 Pouncey left the British Museum to take up a directorship at Sotheby’s. He resigned his directorship there in 1983 but continued work as a consultant on both drawings and paintings until shortly before his death in 1990. In 1973 he was made Honorary Keeper of Italian Drawings in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Exhibitions in his honour were mounted there (on his seventy‐fifth birthday) and, after his death, in the British Museum, and – an extraordinary tribute – in both the Uffizi and the Louvre.⁷

The three catalogues of drawings in the British Museum that Pouncey compiled with Popham and John Gere are classics. But Pouncey’s influence was far more extensive than these catalogues or his other publications (relatively few articles and reviews,⁸ and a short book on Lotto’s drawings⁹) might suggest. It was widely acknowledged that no one had a better memory for the works, a keener eye for their characteristics, or a finer judgement of the ‘personality’ of Italian artists active between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘The experiment was once made of testing him against the obscurist names chosen at random from Thieme‐Becker; in no instance did he fail to give the artist’s origin, approximate date and principal works, and like a kindly shepherd who cherishes the weaklings of his flock he could almost always add some favourable comment.’¹⁰ Not only was his knowledge generously distributed, but his methods were freely demonstrated to anyone who submitted a drawing or a painting for his attention.

Pouncey was unusual among students of old master drawings for his knowledge of paintings, especially those by artists of the second rank to be found in chapels in Italy which had never been photographed and seldom been studied, but which he and his French wife, Myril, had repeatedly visited by rising early, befriending sacristans or pestering local officials.¹¹ Their own collection of Italian art consisted of drawings and paintings which hung together on two floors of their terrace house in West London. It included works by major artists, which had often been discovered by them, and choice examples of lesser and neglected artists. They delighted in showing it to visitors and whereas many private collectors invite the curators of the National Gallery to their homes, Philip and Myril Pouncey were most unusual in welcoming the secretarial and warding staff as well. The earliest major painting to enter the collection was Baldassare Peruzzi’s Nativity, which was bought in 1946, the year Pouncey left the National Gallery. The majority of their acquisitions were made in the 1950s and 1960s. Nineteen old master drawings were sold at Sotheby’s, New York, on 21 January 2003, and six old master paintings were offered there two days later by order of the executors of Myril Pouncey (who died in 2002).¹² One of the paintings, Polidoro da Caravaggio’s Way to Calvary (NG 6594; fig. 11), was acquired for the National Gallery before the sale.

As a connoisseur Pouncey was attracted by distinct ‘personality’ (a word he used often), favouring the uncouth Aspertini over the inoffensive Costa, drawn to the agitated Polidoro da Caravaggio but repelled by the bland Garofalo. It is typical that he owned two paintings by the hand of Altobello Melone, Christ carrying the Cross (NG 6546), catalogued here, and the Virgin and Child with Saint John recently on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum,¹³ for Melone is an exceptionally idiosyncratic and hybrid artist. The Pounceys were students of style and Myril once startled me by asking whether I liked subjects. At first I wondered whether she was referring to an obscure artist, perhaps a German who had worked in Italy (Sogetz). Then she informed me that Philip had loved subjects. He had indeed an expert knowledge of the lives of minor saints. But in addition it may be noted that almost all the paintings in their collection had sacred subjects, and after the sale of the Melone to the National Gallery Myril confided to one of the Gallery’s staff that she had often said her prayers in front of it.

Notes