Sidney Colvin
Encyclopedia
Sidney Colvin was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 curator and literary and art critic, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indians are people who have mixed Indian and British ancestry, or people of British descent born or living in India, now mainly historical in the latter sense. British residents in India used the term "Eurasians" for people of mixed European and Indian descent...

 Colvin family
Colvin family
The Colvin family, for the purposes of this article, are that group of people descended from James Colvin , a merchant trading between London and Calcutta during the East India Company. This Anglo-Indian family was intimately involved with the British Raj, first as traders and then as...

. He is primarily remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....

.

Biography

He was born on 18 June 1845 in West Norwood
West Norwood
West Norwood is a place in the London Borough of Lambeth.It is primarily a residential suburb of south London but with some light industry near Knights Hill in the south....

, London, at St. John's Lodge on Knight's Hill, a nine bedroom, twenty-one acre estate, to Bazett David Colvin, an East India
East India
East India is a region of India consisting of the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Orissa. The states of Orissa and West Bengal share some cultural and linguistic characteristics with Bangladesh and with the state of Assam. Together with Bangladesh, West Bengal formed the...

 merchant, and Mary Steuart, daughter of William Butterworth Bayley. Both sides of his family were connected to British India, his father as a partner in the trading company of Crawford, Colvin, and Co., with offices in Calcutta and London. His uncle John Russell Colvin
John Russell Colvin
John Russell Colvin, Esq. was a British civil servant in India, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family. He was lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces of British India during the mutiny of 1857, at the height of which he died.-Life:Colvin's was an Anglo-Indian family of...

, lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces during the mutiny of 1857, gave him ten cousins, including the lawyer Walter Mytton
Walter Mytton Colvin
Sir Walter Mytton Colvin was a British lawyer and colonial administrator, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family....

 and Auckland, also lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces (and Oudh).

Colvin's childhood was spent at The Grove, Little Bealings
Little Bealings
Little Bealings is a village in Suffolk, England. It has a population of approximately 470 people living in around 185 households. Its nearest towns are Ipswich and Woodbridge...

, Suffolk, as Bazett David inherited the estate in 1847 from his father James. The house and estate had literary and artistic connections: James had purchased it in 1824 from Perry Nursey, the landscape painter and teacher of Thomas Churchyard
Thomas Churchyard (painter)
Thomas Churchyard was an English lawyer and painter of Woodbridge, Suffolk. He was trained as a solicitor, and worked in the law for many years, but his real interest was landscape painting...

; Nursey had often entertained David Wilkie
David Wilkie (artist)
Sir David Wilkie was a Scottish painter.- Early life :Wilkie was the son of the parish minister of Cults in Fife. He developed a love for art at an early age. In 1799, after he had attended school at Pitlessie, Kettle and Cupar, his father reluctantly agreed to his becoming a painter...

 RA
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...

 at Little Bealings, and was friends with Edward Fitzgerald
Edward Fitzgerald
Edward Fitzgerald may refer to:* Lord Edward FitzGerald , Irish revolutionary*Edward Fitzgerald , Irish* Edward FitzGerald, 7th Duke of Leinster * Edward Fitzgerald...

, translator of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam.

A scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

, Colvin became a fellow of his college in 1868. In 1873 he was Slade professor of fine art
Slade Professor of Fine Art
The Slade Professorship of Fine Art is the oldest professorship of art at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London.-History:The chairs were founded concurrently in 1869 by a bequest from the art collector and philanthropist Felix Slade, with studentships also created in the University of...

, and was appointed in the next year to the directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum
Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge, located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge, England. It receives around 300,000 visitors annually. Admission is free....

.

In late summer 1873, Colvin became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....

, then a young and unpublished man. Colvin was already acquainted with Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell, a woman of thirty four, with a young son, separated from her husband. Both men were attracted to her, and although Stevenson wrote to her for years, Colvin eventually married her in 1901. Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser, and after his death was the first editor of his letters. Soon after their first meeting he had placed Stevenson's first paid contribution, an essay, "Roads", in The Portfolio. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is one of Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature.-Background:...

was dedicated to him.

In 1884 he moved to London on his appointment as keeper of prints and drawings in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

. His chief publications are lives of Walter Savage Landor
Walter Savage Landor
Walter Savage Landor was an English writer and poet. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem Rose Aylmer, but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity...

 (1881) and Keats (1887), in the English Men of Letters
English Men of Letters
English Men of Letters was a series of literary biographies written by leading literary figures of the day and published by Macmillan, under the general editorship of John Morley. The original series was launched in 1878, with Leslie Stephen's biography of Samuel Johnson, and ran until 1892...

series; the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's works (1894–1897); editions of the letters of Keats (1887), and of the Vailima Letters (1899), which Stevenson chiefly addressed to him; A Florentine Picture-Chronicle (1898), an edition of Stevenson's collected Letters (2 volumes, London, 1900), and Early History of Engraving in England (1905).

Colvin's publications made him an authority on Stevenson's life and work. In addition to the publications listed, he also wrote the sketch of Stevenson for the Dictionary of National Biography
Dictionary of National Biography
The Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published from 1885...

(vol. liv.). He was to have written an authoritative Life of Stevenson, intended for publication simultaneously with the Letters, but was obliged to relinquish the task to Graham Balfour.

In the field both of art and of literature, Colvin's fine taste, wide knowledge and high ideals made his authority and influence extend far beyond his published work.

Colvin was knighted in 1911. The citation reads
Sidney Colvin, Esq., D.Litt
Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum since 1884 and member of many learned bodies. Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge from 1873 to 1895, author of several publications on literature and the fine arts and contributor to the "Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

" and "Dictionary of National Biography
Dictionary of National Biography
The Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published from 1885...

" &c. Born in 1845.


His wife predeceased him in August 1924. The couple were the subject of a 1928 biography by E. V. Lucas
E. V. Lucas
Edward Verrall Lucas was a versatile and popular English writer. His nearly 100 books demonstrate great facility with style, and are generally acknowledged as humorous by contemporary readers and critics. Some of his essays about the sport cricket are still considered among the best instructional...

.

Sources


Further reading

  • J. C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, London: Faber and Faber, 1952
  • Ernest Mehew, "Robert Louis Stevenson", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: OUP, 2004. Retrieved on 29 September 2008

External links

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