John Rowlands
British Museum keeper involved in controversy over the sale of drawings from Chatsworth
JOHN ROWLANDS, who has died aged 84, was keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum from 1981 to 1991; in his twenties he identified a hitherto unknown painting by Simone Martini, a 14th-century artist from Siena, and later he would be caught up in a controversy surrounding the value of a consignment of more than 70 drawings from Chatsworth House.
Rowlands stumbled across the Martini when he was assistant keeper at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. He had been invited to the home of Alfred Stannard, a haulage contractor in the city who over the years had bought a number of works from dealers for a few shillings apiece. Rowlands immediately realised that the work – depicting an unknown saint holding a book and in excellent condition – was of considerable importance. Eventually it was acquired for £4,000 by the Birmingham gallery, where it still hangs.
The Chatsworth controversy in 1984 was a less happy experience. The Duke of Devonshire had sought £5.5 million for the collection, including works by Rubens and Raphael, but Rowlands and the museum offered only £5 million. Negotiations broke down and the works were subsequently sold at auction by Christie’s, largely to overseas buyers, for an astonishing £21 million.
Rowlands, in his capacity as adviser to the Department of Trade and the reviewing committee on the export of works of art, had to propose which of those works should be subjected to a temporary export ban to allow British institutions to match their purchase price. The irony of him having once said they were worth only £5 million, but now saying they were worth saving for £21 million, was not lost on his critics, but he bore the unwelcome publicity with stoicism.
John Kendall Rowlands was born in Liverpool on September 18 1931, the eldest of two children of Arthur, a commercial artist and a fine amateur violinist, and his wife Margaret. The family lived on the Wirral during the war and he recalled watching the German bombers drop their loads over Liverpool.
Young John was a chorister at Chester Cathedral Choir School, where he acquired his great love of all things ecclesiastical. He was educated at King’s School, Chester, and read Music and Composition at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before switching to Medieval History, spending much of his undergraduate career in the Fitzwilliam Museum. He did his National Service with the Royal Engineers in Berkshire, spending many Sundays playing the organ for services at churches around the county.
In 1956 he joined the Birmingham Gallery, where he was responsible for the David Cox centenary exhibition catalogue in 1959, and moved to Clarendon Press in Oxford in 1960 as editor of Oxford University Press’s art books. Five years later he joined the British Museum as assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings.
Among his important works was a monograph on the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (1985), which required wading through the many different copies, attributions and derivative works attributed to the 16th-century artist, but ultimately enabled the reader to form a much clearer idea of his stylistic development than had hitherto been the case. “Holbein still conveys across the centuries the character and
likeness of his sitters with an unrivalled mastery,” he concluded. He also published Drawings by German Artists at the British Museum, in 1993, a magnificent work that was several years in the making, and collaborated on Following the Trail of
a Lost Collection (1995), a Dutch film about how a collection of European art ended up in Russia after the Second World War.
Rowlands loved the countryside, but was not of the country. On one occasion while visiting relations on the Isle of Mull he was invited to join a deer stalking party, but when a suitable quarry came into sight he recoiled at the opportunity to pull the trigger, instead declaring that he preferred to shoot with his camera.
He was a man of great humour, brimming with enthusiasm, whether putting the world to rights with colleagues at the Beefsteak Club or discussing pictures over the kitchen table. After retiring to Lincolnshire in 1991 he enjoyed taking visitors on “church crawls” and once again playing the organ at Sunday services around the county. When that was curtailed by the exigencies of old age, he still had the piano and was playing sonatas by Beethoven in the days before he died.
Rowlands married Else Bachmann in 1957. That marriage was dissolved and in 1982 he married Lorna Lowe, who survives him with their daughter and a son and two daughters from his first marriage.
John Rowlands, born September 18 1931, died May 11 2016