Francis Haskell

Francis James Herbert Haskell, (7 April 1928 – 18 January 2000) was an English art historian, whose writings placed emphasis on the social history of art. He wrote one of the first and most influential patronage studies, Patrons and Painters.

Early life and education Haskell was born on 7 April 1928. He was the son of Arnold Haskell, an influential ballet critic and writer daughter of a Russian industrialist and sister of writer Boris Zaytsev. His first language was French, the language shared by his parents, and he was fluent in English, French and Italian. He read history before switching to English, and among his tutors were Eric Hobsbawm and Dadie Rylands. He retired from Oxford in 1995, and was made an honorary fellow of his college.

Personal life His wife, Larissa, née Salmina (1931–2024), had been a curator at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. They met in Venice in 1962, married in 1965, and lived in Walton Street, Oxford. They did not have any children.

Honours In 1971, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. In 1979, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Serena medal for Italian studies by the British Academy in 1985. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1994. His book Rediscoveries in Art won the first Jan Mitchell Prize in 1977.

Haskell had been made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by the President of France in recognition of his work.

Selected bibliography The Age of the Grand Tour. Crown Publishers, 1967, with Anthony Burgess. Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy. Chatto & Windus, 1962. 2nd edition, 1980. Haskell was working on a further revised edition when he died. Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France. Cornell University Press, 1976. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Antique Sculpture 1500–1900. Yale University Press, 1981, with Nicholas Penny. Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays. Yale University Press, 1987. The Painful Birth of the Art Book. (Walther Neurath Memorial Lecture 19). Thames & Hudson, 1987. History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. Yale University Press, 1993. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. Yale University Press, 2000. The King's Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers. Yale University Press, 2013.