Christopher White

Sir Christopher John White CVO FBA (19 September 1930 – 8 January 2026) was a British art historian and curator. He was the son of the artist and art administrator Gabriel White. He has specialized in the study of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age painting and printmaking.

Life and career Educated at Downside School from 1944 to 1948, White received a BA from the University of London, followed by an MA from the University of Oxford and a PhD at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. He then joined the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings in 1954. From 1965 to 1971, he was director of Old Master sales at Colnaghi in London, then moving to be curator of graphic arts for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until 1973.

From 1973, White was director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, an affiliate of Yale in London, and also an associate director of the Yale Center for British Art. In 1985 he left these to become director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, retiring in 1997.

White was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1989. He was an honorary research fellow at the Courtauld Institute.

White died on 8 January 2026, at the age of 95.

Selected works His books include:

Rembrandt as an Etcher: A Study of the Artist at Work, 1969 The Late Etchings of Rembrandt, 1969, British Museum/Lund Humphries, London (exhibition catalogue) Peter Paul Rubens: Man & Artist, Yale University Press, 1987. White, Christopher, Buvelot, Quentin (eds), Rembrandt by Himself, 1999, National Gallery, London/Mauritshuis, The Hague, Anthony Van Dyck: Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Getty Museum Studies on Art), 2006 The Later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, 2007, with Desmond Shawe-Taylor Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 2016 Anthony Van Dyck and the Art of Portraiture, 2021 Rembrandt. World of Art series, 2022. Thames & Hudson