Wilhelm Suida

William Suida, born Wilhelm Emil Suida (April 26, 1877 – October 29, 1959) was an Austrian art historian and art collector and "one of the greatest connoisseurs of Italian art." He published books and essays in multiple languages about numerous artists and schools of art. He and his heirs amassed a large private collection that in 1999 was acquired by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, where many paintings from the Suida-Manning Collection are on permanent display.

In Europe Suicide of Lucretia (c. 1575) by Luca Cambiaso, from the Suida-Manning Collection at the Blanton Museum of Art.Suida was born in Neunkirchen, Austria, the son of Albert Suida and Bertha von Heim, a relative of Richard Wagner. His uncle was the art historian Henry Thode, with whom he studied in Heidelberg and under whom he wrote his dissertation, published in 1900 as Die Genredarstellungen Albrecht Dürer. In 1902 he began a two-year residence in Florence as an assistant at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut. His research there resulted in his 1905 book on Florentine Trecento painting, Florentinische Maler um die Mitte des XIV Jahrhunderts.

On his return to Austria, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Vienna, then obtained the Chair of Art History at the University of Graz, a post he held until 1939. His academic career was interrupted by military service as a captain in the First World War. He became an expert on Raphael, Bramante, da Vinci, and Titian ("his favorite until the end"

In the United States Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Lamentation (c. 1620), National Gallery of Art, a gift by the heirs of William Suida in his memory, in honor of the Gallery's 50th Anniversary.In 1947 Suida became director of the art history department of the Kress Foundation in New York, advising entrepreneur Samuel Henry Kress on art purchases and later helping to disperse the collection to museums across the United States, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

According to The New York Times, major works in the collection include The Conversion of St. Paul, painted by Daniele Crespi about 1621, considered to be the artist's finest painting in the United States; Sebastiano del Piombo's Portrait of a Man from about 1516, a rare example of a High Renaissance portrait; Sebastiano Ricci's mythological Flora, c. 1712–1716; a very early work by Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape, from 1628–1630; and Tiepolo's Storyteller, from the mid-1770s, part of a famous series depicting 18th-century Venice.

Family tree of the creators and owners of the Suida-Manning Collection of art.The Suidas were the foremost experts on the works of the Mannerist painter Luca Cambiaso, and collected seven paintings and several drawings by him, making theirs the most important repository of Cambiaso's work outside his native Genoa.

The collection also includes works by Rubens, François Boucher, Correggio and many other Italian, French, German, Austrian, Dutch, and Flemish artists of the 14th to the 18th centuries.

Blanton Museum wall label about the Suida-Manning collection. Over the years, some works from the Suida-Manning Collection were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and other institutions; these include Jacopo Palma il Giovane's "Lamentation" (c. 1620), given "in memory of William E. Suida" to the National Gallery of Art in 1991.

In 1999 Kurt and Alessandra Manning Dolnier made a partial gift of the Suida-Manning Collection to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Sotheby's valued the collection at $30–35 million. Three anonymous donors contributed $4.75 million toward the acquisition, and the university pledged to raise $15 million to complete it. ) had wanted the collection to go to an institution in his native Texas, and also wanted it to be kept together.

Suida-Manning Collection highlights

David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1620–1623) by Claude Vignon